Close up on wild days
From how to feed carnivorous plants to what happens to all the animal poo, Chester Zoo’s top team of experts answers thousands of questions every day. And they’re set to answer even more as the Bloom season of spring events captures imaginations of adults and children alike.
Here, learning manager Sarah Bazley reveals some of the most interesting questions asked - and the surprising answers. No need – they just help themselves to insects that fall into their sticky traps. We have one of the UK’s biggest carnivorous plant collections. They are amazing. Pitcher plants (above) lure bugs in so they’re stuck in the fluid at the pitcher’s base. The dissolved nutrients feed the plant. Only birds get live food – locusts and mealworms. Lions, for example, are fed raw meat in different ways to encourage natural feeding and foraging skills. We have a devil’s tongue – an incredible 5ft plant that only blooms once a year for a couple of days – it smells of rotting meat to attract flies for pollination. including trees, shrubs, ferns and grasses. We grow 1,300 species in greenhouses, including rare orchids, endangered carnivorous plants and cacti. Our enrichment garden provides herbs, flowers, leaves and fruit for big cats, primates,
parrots and tortoises. There is certainly a lot of it - one elephant produces 100kg of dung a day. But it doesn’t go to waste – some of the dung from the herbivores here can be used to make compost for our zoo gardens.