World Wildlife Day
3 March 2019
Today, 3 March, is World Wildlife Day, a day when people around the world join together to celebrate and raise awareness of the world's wildlife. This year's theme is life below the surface, but since we don't have many aquatic animals, we thought we'd focus a little extra on our critically endangered Sumatran tigers.
In fact, top predators - those animals at the top of the food chain - also ultimately affect water. Predators play a very important role in an ecosystem. They keep prey populations from becoming too numerous and, in turn, eating too much of what the prey eat. But predators have an impact in many more ways than just keeping prey and smaller predators down. The mere presence of predators in an area causes prey to change their behaviour, morphology (shape and structure) and choice of habitat. This means that predators also affect the whole vegetation both on land and in water, benefiting many other species. Predators that keep down the number of large herbivores also counteract the greenhouse effect and climate change on Earth.
Together with the children from Gredby Preschool, who visit us every month, we have created an artwork inspired by a previous World Wildlife Day poster winner. The children have made handprints in different colours. Each finger corresponds to a Sumatran tiger left in the wild (400-500).
Each finger on the black handprints corresponds to one tiger shot annually (50).
The zoo's tigers are Wayan, Bagus, Keisha and Tenga and they are part of a conservation programme for endangered species.
