Newly rebuilt hippo home at Taipei Zoo allows visitors to watch their underwater behavior

台北動物園重建的河馬之家，遊客可以觀看他們水下活動

The rebuilt home for the hippos at the Taipei Zoo opened on Oct. 21, giving the giant mammals a more spacious and comfortable environment to live and enabling visitors to observe their underwater activities.

TAIPEI (Taiwan News)—The rebuilt home for the hippos at the Taipei Zoo opened on Oct. 21, giving the giant mammals a more spacious and comfortable environment to live and enabling visitors to observe their underwater activities, according to the zoo.

Delivering his remarks at the inauguration of the new facility, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said the construction of the new habitat for the hippos has taken into consideration of comfort and livability for the animals, and therefore water changes and purification as well as access to ventilation and sunlight were identified?as important factors in building the new facility.

Currently, the zoo has 15 hippos (five males and 10 females) and nine pygmy hippos (2 males and 7 females). As hippos are very territorial, they are apt to fight each other to defend their territories. Therefore, the zoo said the new hippo facility is twice as big as the original one, which was 1,500 square meters in area, the zoo said.

Zoo spokesman Eric Tsao(曹先紹) said that before the?facility was rebuilt, zoo visitors could only watch the hippos from the above. But hippos spend much time soaking themselves in water to relive the pressure of their body weight on their limbs, which means they have a lot of underwater behavior, which unobservable in the old facility can now be watched in their new home, he said.

Hippos are vegetarian animals and eat at night, the zoo said. An adult hippo eats an average of 30 kilograms of forage grass and excretes about 15 kilograms of poop a day, so that’s equal to a total of 200 poop in the habitat, which in the past required two changes of water (each using 250-300 tons of water) per week and much human effort to clean, and even so there was still lots of feces slurry in the water, the zoo said. The new hippo home in the zoo will provide a cleaner environment and save more water, thanks to the new advanced water change and purification systems,?the zoo said.

About NT$100 million (US$3.3 million) went into the reconstruction of the new facility, where hippos will live more comfortably and visitors will be able to observe their underwater behavior through the glass, according to the zoo.