Cute baby animals bring visitors to zoos and aquariums. What happens when they grow up?
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One of the best things that can happen to a zoo or aquarium is for one of their resident animals to go viral.
Just look at the multi-hour-long lines to see Moo Deng, a pygmy hippo in Thailand who has become an internet sensation following her July 2024 birth. The sassy animal is now a full-on brand, with Khao Kheow Open Zoo selling Moo Deng merchandise and even releasing a single “by” the hippo in multiple languages.
Meanwhile, Pesto — a baby king penguin who was eating more fish than his parents by the time he was a few weeks old — is also an online celebrity, with human stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Katy Perry stopping by to meet him.
But what happens when these cute animals become, well, less cute? The Sea Life Melbourne aquarium has already been planning for the next phase of Pesto’s life — and answering questions from the public about his changing appearance.
It’s normal for king penguins to lose their feathers by the time they’re about a year old and become confident swimmers. As a result, a spokesperson for the aquarium says, guests have started asking why Pesto looks different — or why they can’t find him at all.
“We are getting a few guests thinking we have moved him off display completely,” says the spokesperson. “Most of the team’s time is spent pointing him out to guests because he looks so different now.”
The bottom line is that cute baby animals make money.
Admission tickets are only the beginning. Many zoos and aquariums offer special “behind the scenes” or “zookeeper for a day” packages at much higher prices. At Sea Life Melbourne, standard entry tickets for adults start at $51, while the Penguin Passport — which include a 45-minute tour of the birds’ area and a look at how their food is prepared — is $199.
The real jackpot, though, is merchandise. Stuffed animals, T-shirts, fridge magnets, keychains, kids’ books and other branded products are a major way for zoos and aquariums to make money.
‘You get one split second’: The story behind a viral bird photo
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By his own admission, James Crombie knew “very, very little” about starlings before Covid-19 struck. An award-winning sports photographer by trade, his only previous encounter with the short-tailed birds occurred when one fell into his fireplace after attempting to nest in the chimney of his home in the Irish Midlands.
“I always had too much going on with sport to think about wildlife,” said Crombie, who has covered three Olympic Games and usually shoots rugby and the Irish game of hurling, in a Zoom interview.
With the pandemic bringing major events to a halt, however, the photographer found himself at a loose end. So, when a recently bereaved friend proposed visiting a nearby lake to see flocks of starlings in flight (known as murmurations), Crombie brought along his camera — one that was conveniently well-suited to the job.
“You get one split second,” he said of the similarities between sport and nature photography. “They’re both shot at relatively high speeds and they’re both shot with equipment that can handle that.”
On that first evening, in late 2020, they saw around 100 starlings take to the sky before roosting at dusk. The pair returned to the lake — Lough Ennell in Ireland’s County Westmeath — over successive nights, choosing different vantage points from which to view the birds. The routine became a form of therapy for his grieving friend and a source of fascination for Crombie.
“It started to become a bit of an obsession,” recalled the photographer, who recently published a book of his starling images. “And every night that we went down, we learned a little bit more. We realized where we had to be and where (the starlings) were going to be. It just started to snowball from there.”
‘I’ve got something special here’
Scientists do not know exactly why starlings form murmurations, though they are thought to offer collective protection against predators, such as falcons. The phenomenon can last from just a few seconds to 45 minutes, sometimes involving tens of thousands of individual birds. In Ireland, starlings’ numbers are boosted during winter, as migrating flocks arrive from breeding grounds around Western Europe and Scandinavia.
Crombie often saw the birds form patterns and abstract shapes, their varying densities appearing like the subtle gradations of paint strokes. The photographer became convinced that, with enough patience, he could capture a recognizable shape.
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Cute baby animals bring visitors to zoos and aquariums. What happens when they grow up?
[url=https://t.me/traffictemnik]арбитраж с нуля[/url]
One of the best things that can happen to a zoo or aquarium is for one of their resident animals to go viral.
Just look at the multi-hour-long lines to see Moo Deng, a pygmy hippo in Thailand who has become an internet sensation following her July 2024 birth. The sassy animal is now a full-on brand, with Khao Kheow Open Zoo selling Moo Deng merchandise and even releasing a single “by” the hippo in multiple languages.
Meanwhile, Pesto — a baby king penguin who was eating more fish than his parents by the time he was a few weeks old — is also an online celebrity, with human stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Katy Perry stopping by to meet him.
But what happens when these cute animals become, well, less cute? The Sea Life Melbourne aquarium has already been planning for the next phase of Pesto’s life — and answering questions from the public about his changing appearance.
It’s normal for king penguins to lose their feathers by the time they’re about a year old and become confident swimmers. As a result, a spokesperson for the aquarium says, guests have started asking why Pesto looks different — or why they can’t find him at all.
“We are getting a few guests thinking we have moved him off display completely,” says the spokesperson. “Most of the team’s time is spent pointing him out to guests because he looks so different now.”
The bottom line is that cute baby animals make money.
Admission tickets are only the beginning. Many zoos and aquariums offer special “behind the scenes” or “zookeeper for a day” packages at much higher prices. At Sea Life Melbourne, standard entry tickets for adults start at $51, while the Penguin Passport — which include a 45-minute tour of the birds’ area and a look at how their food is prepared — is $199.
The real jackpot, though, is merchandise. Stuffed animals, T-shirts, fridge magnets, keychains, kids’ books and other branded products are a major way for zoos and aquariums to make money.
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‘You get one split second’: The story behind a viral bird photo
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By his own admission, James Crombie knew “very, very little” about starlings before Covid-19 struck. An award-winning sports photographer by trade, his only previous encounter with the short-tailed birds occurred when one fell into his fireplace after attempting to nest in the chimney of his home in the Irish Midlands.
“I always had too much going on with sport to think about wildlife,” said Crombie, who has covered three Olympic Games and usually shoots rugby and the Irish game of hurling, in a Zoom interview.
With the pandemic bringing major events to a halt, however, the photographer found himself at a loose end. So, when a recently bereaved friend proposed visiting a nearby lake to see flocks of starlings in flight (known as murmurations), Crombie brought along his camera — one that was conveniently well-suited to the job.
“You get one split second,” he said of the similarities between sport and nature photography. “They’re both shot at relatively high speeds and they’re both shot with equipment that can handle that.”
On that first evening, in late 2020, they saw around 100 starlings take to the sky before roosting at dusk. The pair returned to the lake — Lough Ennell in Ireland’s County Westmeath — over successive nights, choosing different vantage points from which to view the birds. The routine became a form of therapy for his grieving friend and a source of fascination for Crombie.
“It started to become a bit of an obsession,” recalled the photographer, who recently published a book of his starling images. “And every night that we went down, we learned a little bit more. We realized where we had to be and where (the starlings) were going to be. It just started to snowball from there.”
‘I’ve got something special here’
Scientists do not know exactly why starlings form murmurations, though they are thought to offer collective protection against predators, such as falcons. The phenomenon can last from just a few seconds to 45 minutes, sometimes involving tens of thousands of individual birds. In Ireland, starlings’ numbers are boosted during winter, as migrating flocks arrive from breeding grounds around Western Europe and Scandinavia.
Crombie often saw the birds form patterns and abstract shapes, their varying densities appearing like the subtle gradations of paint strokes. The photographer became convinced that, with enough patience, he could capture a recognizable shape.
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