When the elephants are inside the house its fine for the visitors but when they are out, which is most of the summer, there is nothing for them to see. Hence the Leaf Cutters.
The building is massive but the public access area is raised high above the elephant area and has lots of viewing windows.
The end wall is where we will put the nest.
The nest area has been designed a little differently from our usual set ups. The ants will live in a series of smaller chambers housed inside a larger environmentally controlled tank as shown below.....
The windows (I think there are 16 of them!!) will have a 30m rope walk way suspended on the opposite side to where the public are. This will loop down at each window ......
And at the other end there will be a feeding table....
This display will prove, I think, that Leaf Cutters can stand up against any other exhibit, even one as large as elephants. I feel confident that peoples time will be spent more watching the ants that the elephants, even if the elephants are indoors. This is important because, in terms of spend, the zoo has only paid a fraction of the cost that the elephant exhibit cost, both to set up and run, but they are gaining much more benefit from having the ants.
I will update here as the job progresses.
