You know those touch tanks you get at aquariums? Well, this one keeps your hands dry because the fish and sea creatures are all projected onto the tank.
It's part of an updated exhibit in the Conservation Center at the Santa Barbara Zoo.
"The interactive water table is our biggest feature right now," said JJ McLeod, director of education at the Santa Barbara Zoo. "We're going to be able to change it to different ecosystems as well. Anything from creekways and showing our red-legged frogs...really getting to learn about our big blue...all the animals and species out in the Pacific Ocean that we need to try and help as well."
The interactive learning space is not a passive experience; it’s a hands-on way to learn and connect with conservation, with this new exhibit highlighting the southern sea otter and the snowy plover.
"Every two years, we're going to switch it over to some other hyperlocal conservation species that we work with," explained McLeod. "Now we're really leaning into the marine ecosystem. In this space, you'll see anything from cleaning up our beaches and marine debris, to how to spot otters (and) the importance of otter counting. We have a full incubation set up here to talk about our work with snowy plovers and our re-releasing program."
The Conservation Hub opened a couple of years ago as a way to reflect the zoo’s broader conservation efforts, outside of their own physical radius, explained Nadya Seal Faith, the zoo's Conservation and Science Associate.
"We're more than the animals that we have on our ground. We are the mission, our work is the mission," she said. "We want to utilize the experience that our guests have here at the zoo to be able to do real work for wildlife that is in need of it. We don't want to be the ones just telling them over and over — lecturing about what it is the conservationists do so that biologists and field biologists are off in the field doing the things on a silo. Really, conservation doesn't stop in the fields. It needs to extend to our community. Our community is really going to be the ones that move conservation action forward so that we can have species recovery in a very sustainable way."
That’s a mission for the zoo as a whole, said the Zoo's President and CEO, Charles Hopper.
"The conservation hub is a bit of a beacon within the zoo to call out the projects that we're doing across the region, across the Tri-County region. Everything from California condors to snowy plovers, right on our ocean shores to the highest reaches of our skies, the conservation work of the Santa Barbara Zoo is really across the three counties in the Central Coast, and this is a glimpse into that work," said Hopper.
It's also a significant way that zoos are gearing up for the future.
"Zoos have been on this journey for some time, from being menageries and collections of things, to a modern zoo being a call to action and giving our audience members agency within their own backyard to care for the wildlife that we coexist with. And so it's absolutely imperative that we not only display and talk about the animals in our care, but we give our audience agency to care in their own backyard."
The Santa Barbara Conservation Hub is open now at the Santa Barbara Zoo.
