Who run the world? Plants.
Most humans suffer from a little-known prejudice that has been ingrained in us as a species since childhood. It’s called zoo chauvinism, also known as plant-blindness.
Danielle Green, a zoo horticulturist and the gardens and grounds keeper for the Naples Zoo, said it’s not our fault; it’s the atmosphere we were raised in.
“Most children are raised to associate life with ears and eyes and button noses and whiskers,” Green said. “So, they associate something living, almost always, with animals. So, they grow up and they don’t understand that plants are living too.”
Green spends her days planting living things for the benefit of other living things. She plants trees, shrubs, flowers and all other kinds of plant-beings in enclosures made for lions, tigers and bears (…oh my?).
Green said there are a few primary considerations that define why specific plants are placed in each exhibit.
“There’s a few different reasons why we plant what we plant where we plant it, and it just depends on the exhibit and the situation,” Green said, “We’re not going to put anything that’s super rare or hard to take care of in an exhibit that we can’t get into very easily because obviously we don’t go in with the animals.”
The first of these reasons is whether or not the horticulturist is designing the exhibit to look like a certain habitat. So, in the Florida panther exhibit, Green and her team plant a lot of native plants, like Sabal palm, species of viburnum and fiddlewood shrubs.
“Cats in general can be really hard on plants, and you’ll see that now that Athena the kitten is in there,” Green said. “It’s not nearly as heavily vegetated as it used to be.”
But Green said that aside from just knowing the general behavior of a species, knowing the preferences and personality of the specific animal can make all the difference in creating the perfect habitat.
Athena the Florida panther kitten shares her enclosure with Uno, an adult Florida panther who lost one eye before he was rescued from the wild. Green said that because of Uno’s disability, there are certain plants and utilities she might consider allowing in other exhibits that she wouldn’t allow in the panther exhibit. One of those utilities is hot wire, which is an electric wire used to fence off areas the animals aren’t supposed to go into. Hot wire surrounds some of the palms in the bear enclosure so that the bears don’t constantly kill the trees by climbing them and using their claws to eradicate the tree bark. Green said that the hot wire doesn’t harm the animals, it just makes them aware of their surroundings.
“They tap that once, and they decide ‘no thanks, I don’t like that’ and they don’t go back.”
Whether the plants in an exhibit are edible or not isn’t really a main concern for Green and her team, but obviously they also don’t put any plants that are dangerous in the exhibits. One of the most invasive species in the zoo, a woody, shrub-tree called Brazilian pepper, is a favorite snack for the giraffes, but it can cause skin irritations to some humans because it belongs to the same plant family as poison ivy.
And aside from accidentally tasty invasive species, Green and her team provide the giraffes with food the team calls “browse.” The name is a kind of tribute to the way the giraffes consume this type of food.
“Giraffes are browsers. They like to browse around the exhibit all day, and they’re constantly moving food around,” Green said. “It fosters a lot of natural behavior, and it keeps them moving and helps exercise their neck muscles, which is what they would do in the wild.”
Every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, Green and her team go to an off-site location where they collect the browse and load a truck-full of it to take back to the giraffes. The browse is then distributed in their food troughs and around the exhibit for them to spread around and enjoy.
When planting, Green also takes into consideration that plants set the scenery for what people see. Plants that are used to hide buildings or structures that guests don’t need to see are called screen-off plants.
“Let’s say if there’s a holding building in the back and we don’t want people to see that because it’s not very natural looking,” Green said, “if (the plants) are big and evergreen and tough and will screen off a view or a gate that we don’t want guests to see, we’ll choose plants for their function.”
After Hurricane Irma rampaged through southwest Florida, Green and her team were left with plants that had been ripped up by the wind and enclosures that were nearly unrecognizable. The oasis exhibit, which used to hold gazelles, was destroyed, but this also left Green with the opportunity to start completely over, which she said was both terrifying and exciting. The exhibit will soon house a few African bongo, a species similar to antelope, but smaller with reddish-brown fur with white stripes.
Green said that species like bongo and forest antelope usually live in habitats with lots of trees and greenery, but they’ll also eat anything and everything they don’t recognize before it can grow back. Green’s solution was to plant lots of trees on the hillside, but fence them off until they grow and mature. Then, as the animals also grow and mature, they get used to being in the exhibit they barely knew.
“Otherwise, you might as well dig a hole and throw dollar bills in the ground,” Green said.
Plants are vital to the survival of not only these animals, but also to all inhabitants of the planet. Green wants people to see and appreciate the chordate creatures, but to also look past them and recognize the power of the plant kingdom.
“It’s kind of sneaky. If you were to plop down on a planet that had absolutely no plants, I think it would be shocking to most people the difference (plants) make,” Green said. “They are unaware of the marked difference it would make to their psyche, their attitude, to everything, without the existence of plants.”
