At the Auckland Zoo

Today we spent a nice day at the zoo with the folks from the Bioinformatics Student Symposium (July 11 -14th). The seminar has ben going for a day and the catering at uni is exceptional. In the mornings there is a tea break with cookies, muffins or brownies. At night food is decked out at campus, vegetarian, chicken with satay sauce, and lots of desserts. There are some talks about bioinformatics in between, but that is bearable. As part of our program a zoo visit was mercifully scheduled on the second day. In the Auckland zoo we crawled through the „meerkat tunnels“ built for an authentic meerkat feeling for the visitor, getting dirty knees and seeing exactly zero meerkats. They were all out in the open by the exit laughing at us…

A meerkat secretly laughing his tail off.

The zoo is nice and the enclosures are spacious, a lot of effort goes into behavioral enrichment (keeping the animal inmates amused and confused) which is good to see. We also saw our very first Kiwis here, they are kept in a dimly lit Kiwi house, having very much the same day and night rhythm as our friends back home in dimly lit Hamburg. We also watched some tortoises in the process of creating more tortoises, causing alarmed parents to shield the eyes of their children, thereby wasting a great educational opportunity. Melli took some very nice primate pictures. The zoo is also the subject of New Zealand’s only fun to watch TV show, a weekly reality installment, that in a stroke of imagination is called „the zoo“.