The Science of Animal Care - The Lowlands (Asian small-clawed otters)

It's really, really exciting to finally have this habitat finished. It has been years in the making from conception all the way through to the final product with lots of ideas and different concepts coming along the way to provide this fabulous, fabulous facility and habitat we have for our wonderful otter family. This is the new otter habitat. So the habitat starts just as you come out of the tiger viewing shelter. There'll be a waterfall at the back to create the start of the stream and then the water will cascade all the way down to the bottom. I'm Gareth Jones. I'm the project manager for Enzid Strong Construction. We've been looking after the South East Asia project and all its habitats. When we first started, there was an old causeway. So we had to excavate the old causeway. In doing that, we exposed a lot of unsuitable ground, which is really soft ground. So all that had to be built up with hardfill to create a nice, solid platform for us to work on. Then to create the otter habitat, we built a series of small retaining walls and they're hidden behind all the shotcrete. It takes a couple of goes to create an unclimbable wall. So the team put up what they think is best and create a wall that looks natural. And then there's a series of inspections with the animal care conservation team. And they'll say, hey, this is an area that the otters could potentially use to get purchase and climb up and climb out. They mark up a series of things. You can see the orange lines on the walls. And then we come back through. That takes quite a few goes to get that right. This is only the start of the otter habitat. The waterfall makes its way all the way down to the bottom of the stream. So the otters can play and swim all the way down to this bottom pool. This is the largest part of the otter habitat, which the guys are still working on at the moment. This is the last part of the construction work for us. Coming in from the gate here into the habitat, this is one of my favorite elements here where we have layerings of the erosion that occurs near a waterway. These are natural stones with some artificial and we've themed them in to the shotcrete shell. But interestingly enough, you'll get plant life coming in just the way we imagined it. My name is Darren. I'm with Aqua Environments Construction, our company. We're a theming landscape specialist that sometimes gets to do zoo habitats. This larger piece here is all essentially driftwood. There's heaps of activity for the otters to investigate on this. It's even got plants living on it, which is quite a nice kind of biophilic kind of look to this. Then you have an artificial one here. We've used it as a travel corridor. They might feed on it. This one is made of a special artisan epoxy. Coming out from under the causeway, there's sort of the bottleneck of streams you can see up here. These are slow-mover meandering streams with little deeper areas for them to go dive in. And then another one of these dens. So there's pieces of rock, leftover little roots, and it's sort of like timeless. There's a cavity here and they'll go right through the whole thing, and they will be able to create their dens or nests. And if they want to rear young in there or take shelter from weather elements in the winter and so on, they can do that. This will continue to grow up and you'll see the otters roam through all these areas. This is the life support room for the tiger and otter habitats. So this is the room that runs the streams and waterfalls for the two habitats. The water comes from our rainwater system. So the water is collected on the roof of Te Puna Cafe and the roof of Orangutangs. It gets pumped out to the waterfall through a series of pipes and it gets recirculated around the waterfall and streams. Once it reaches the bottom of the stream, it comes back into here. It runs through a series of sand filters and then it circulates around again. Definitely ensures they have a clean, healthy environment. This morning here at our otter habitat in our Southeast Asia area of the zoo, we've actually popped our otters out. This is the first morning they've actually been out and had a really good look around. It's been really great to see them be a lot more comfortable, really investigating all the different areas. They're just having the best time. The habitat itself is a really, really dynamic environment for them. It's got some great moving water of various depths with lots of cracks and crevices for them to explore, which is perfect. They love using their little hands. They've also got some great hidey holes in the form of some naturalistic looking rock dens and trees. Some of the aspects of the design that were really, really important to me were all based on otter behaviour. What is interesting about Asian small-caught otters compared to some of other otter species out there is that they're actually more terrestrial and they're more land-based than many other otters. One thing that people will notice is that there is a large land area. They've got lots of visual stimulation, not just inside the habitat but outside. They've got a tiger going over the top, which they love shouting at and telling off. They've got orangutans swinging by. They've got people visiting all the time and people might notice that part of their habitat does run under a bridge. You might think that's a bit odd, but otters have actually adapted to live within urban environments as well. It's just a bit of a nod to the fact that otters can be found in all sorts of areas, not just in the deep, deep jungles of Sumatra. The team that did the theming for this habitat have done an amazing job, just fed in that natural behaviour into our design. So it's really, really fabulous to see that that's all paid off. Hi guys, my name's Steph and I work on the carnivore team at Auckland Zoo. I'm here to show you around our amazing back of house otter habitat. So yeah, let's have a look. Here we've got three dens. We'll come in here. So we have the entrance and this is where they come through from the habitat straight to the den. So it's really easy access. Here we have where they sleep. So this is one of their nest boxes. They have two nest boxes here. So here we've got some stashed shells. They like to take material from their habitat that they'll put in their nest and they make it nice and cosy. Fun fact about this floor is it's coated with a special floor coating. They have very sensitive paw pads, so this is very important. Our back of house area for the animals, it's very simple because some of the things we're doing behind the scenes require some space for safety for the animals and safety for the keepers and also to be very clear for the animals, so they know exactly what's happening for certain situations. Like for example, if we do have to do weighing or hand injection training, if there's a lot of clutter, a lot of stuff in the way, that can actually get in the way of the animals interacting with each other. Although sometimes we do provide them with enrichment, it's easy to quickly whip that out for any medical procedures that we might be doing. So here we have lots of different types of enrichment for the otters and we can store them really well and close to where we need to access them. Today we've got king prawns and salmon. It's kind of like putting some kind of substrate in between where their food is so they can pull it out and it's just kind of what they would do in the wild. They would fossit through leaves and rocks in the water to get their food. So it's just a fun and interesting way of them getting their food. Cool, so now the food's all prepped. So we're going to recall the otters. We'll pull the slide and they'll come in here into the entrance. Otters! And then we'll go out and put the food out, make sure that it's all spread out and then we'll come back inside and let them out so they can enjoy their food. So we're just going to spread them around the habitat. One, two, three, four. Cool, now we'll let the otters out. Working in the zoo is extremely different to working on other construction projects. Everything is custom made and they're all one-off. Everybody has to bring unique solutions to unique problems. We wouldn't get anywhere near where we are now without everybody's input. There's no one person can come up with all of this. This has been a real labour of love for me and it's just so fabulous to see them having such a good time. The thought of this area, Southeast Asia, to its completion has been a massive journey from concepts and design all the way through to breaking ground. It's almost a bit surreal to have it actually completed. I think we're going to have to take a bit of time just to step back and have a little think about that and just appreciate the journey that we've been on because it's been quite epic.