Dirt, water and trees are all part of the animal environments at the Fort Worth Zoo. The goal is to mimic what they would have in the wild. Noelle Walker shows us how a class at TCU is working with the zoo to enrich the exhibits.
Class projects from TCU's Zoo Enrichment class weren't just an exercise to get a grade. They were tested in the real world to see if they made the grade.
"To create an enrichment structure that helps to mimic behavior that would be seen in the wild," TCU Zoo Enrichment student Abi Welch said explaining the class assignment.
Welch was part of the first student team from TCU to design an enrichment activity structure for elephants.
"It's amazing! It's honestly one of the most incredible feelings I've ever experienced," Welch said watching elephants play and feed from a browsing arm her team designed and built. It uses truck shocks to provide resistance and spring as the elephants use their trunks to grab branches and hay. "When they pull down, it kind of provides that jump back up, that resistance you would see in a tree, and that's exactly what we were looking for."
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"It creates a situation where the elephants are working for their food, but they are also being stimulated both mentally and physically," Fort Worth Zoo Elephants Supervisor Peter Briggs said.
The students worked with the zoo to research, design, and build their enrichment projects. They incorporate art, ecology and engineering.
"They show us when they have something as far as design goes," Briggs said. "But then we have to give our input because we have the animal said. We have to think of how the animal will react with it."
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"This is a whole semester's worth of really hard work," TCU Zoo Enrichment student Peyton Harper said. "It was super different than any class I've been in before."
Harper was part of a team that designed and built a tree enrichment structure for the Colobus monkey exhibit.
"It's very important for them to have a dynamic space for them," Fort Worth Zoo World of Primates Swing Keeper Kaylee Cook said. "They want to climb and jump and love to be up high."
"So we wanted to create this tree structure to exhibit those natural behaviors that they do in the wild," Harper explained. "They're using it exactly how we expected it to...so to see all that work we put in and it's paid off!"
The TCU Zoo Enrichment class has been working with the Fort Worth Zoo for a decade. This year was the 5th class to develop enrichment projects for the zoo.
