#Ueno Zoo

[theyshapedlikefriends]

Look at this Ueno Zoo staff

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Source: Japan Times

Breaking News: Kobe's "Tantan" dies, the oldest panda in Japan, at 28 years old

1 April 2024

🖤🐼🖤

[mothershewrote]

Happy Mother's Day from the Ueno Zoo! Thankfully there are no weird noises emanating from any administrative buildings in the area.

[sonimage1965]

Ueno

Tokyo, 1961

[frostynovaprime]

Japan 8/8

[aers-radio]

When is a theme park attraction technically a railway?

I'm not going to make @todayintokyo wait too long on this, because the discussion isn't nearly as spectacular as the question makes it out. In fact, I may not have the exact answer. What I have is maps, and a geeky eye.

This is a railway map of Tokyo, specifically the area around Ueno. We see the massive Ueno station with the Tohoku and Yamanote lines in black, the underground Keisei terminal nearby, and on the left, the green line denotes the Chiyoda subway line. In between, there's this tiny line, just 0.3 km in length (less than a quarter of a mile).

It's the Ueno Zoo Monorail.

Or at least, it was: service ended in 2019 due to escalating maintenance costs. Point is: from a practical standpoint, this was a theme park attraction. And if it's on this map, that's because it was officially a railway. And it's not the only one.

On this map, seen in a timetable book, there's this loop just below Maihara station on the Keiyô line from Tokyo to Chiba. I actually passed Maihara on my last trip to Japan, and saw this myself (but unfortunately, just like Doctor Yellow, no time for photos).

That loop is the Tokyo Disney Resort Monorail.

And it's officially a railway.

And it's got its timetable published in the book! :O

So what makes these officially railways? I don't know for sure, whether it's down to the legal and technical definition of a railway and/or a railway operator, subjecting them to certain standards... What they have in common is that they are monorails, which technically falls under the railway umbrella (whereas, for example, ropeways don't), their purpose is transit albeit within the confines of a park or resort, and charge passengers a fare. Maybe that's all it is.

All I know is, the miniature railway discussion reminded me that I'd noticed that all materials listing or displaying railway lines in Japan will include the Disney Resort Line. It's as if railway maps of Germany included the Europa Park Express monorail.

Roller-coasters wouldn't be classed as railways as they don't provide transit as such (or not the kind we're talking about), and aren't held to transit standards. But, they are vehicles on steel rails, right?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[2000ghosts]

september 22, 2010

[secretaryoftheinvisible]

Ueno Park, Tokyo

[fotographee]

あなたのために // for you

上野動物園 ー　都教日本 // ueno zoo — tokyo, japan

july 4, 2018 // 1:26 PM

click for higher resolution ヘ(^_^ヘ)

[japantaketwo]

[end-yamada]

[gabostudio]

There were newborn baby panda plushies, and I also caught a glimpse of the zoo animal cemetery tributes. I wasn't expecting there to be representations of birth and death that were so accessible.

I was hoping to catch a glimpse of a red panda, but the lines were incredibly long. So I ended up in the "Birds of Prey" exhibit. It was strange because there were so many exotic birds in these cages, and so many of Tokyo's crows were interacting with them from the outside. I'd like to think they're scheming together.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

The spotless giraffe, born at a Tennessee zoo, is the first one seen in more than 50 years.

By Dina Fine Maron

24 August 2023

Just a few weeks old and still without a name, a newborn giraffe at a zoo in northeastern Tennessee could rightly be nicknamed “spotless.”

The female giraffe born without its characteristic spots instead boasts a solid brown coat, a phenomenon that hasn’t been observed in any giraffe for more than 50 years.

She was born last month at Brights Zoo, a family-owned facility in Limestone, Tennessee.

A spotless giraffe was last reported at a Tokyo zoo in 1972.

“The spotless giraffe calf is certainly an interesting case and that type of coloring has never been seen in the wild," says Sara Ferguson, a wildlife veterinarian and conservation health coordinator at the Giraffe Conservation Foundation.

The animal’s rare coloring is likely due to some sort of mutation in one or more genes, she says.

But there’s no indication of underlying medical issues or that the newborn reticulated giraffe — a subspecies native to eastern Africa — is at a genetic disadvantage.

David Bright, zoo director at the Brights Zoo, says that the baby’s nine-year-old mother, Shenna, had previously birthed three other calves and the trio were all spotted.

This latest addition to the zoo’s giraffe family was born at a weight of around 190 pounds, he says, and her veterinary care team concluded “she’s healthy and normal” — though her coloring was a surprise.

A case of spotlessness

Genetics often influence animal coloring in diverse ways.

Giraffes with all white coloring have previously been spotted in the wild, including two at a reserve in Kenya in 2017.

Those animals had a genetic condition called leucism, which blocks skin cells from producing pigments.

"There’s no known explanation for the spotless giraffe in Tennessee beyond that it’s almost certainly due to some kind of genetic mutation or mutations," says Fred Bercovitch, a wildlife conservation biologist at the Anne Innis Dagg Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on giraffe conservation.

The last known case of a spotless giraffe was an animal named Toshiko born in 1972 at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, Japan, CBS News reported.

That giraffe’s mother had birthed another spotless calf several years earlier, according to Bright.

The Brights Zoo, which is home to just over 700 animals of 126 different species, including nine giraffes, asked the public to vote on four potential names for the giraffe calf on its Facebook page.

It accrued over 17,000 votes in the first day, Bright says.

There are four candidate names, all in Swahili: Kipekee (unique), Firyali (extraordinary or unusual), Shakiri (she is most beautiful), and Jamelia (one of great beauty).

What’s in a spot?

A 2018 study published in the journal PeerJ found that certain aspects of giraffe spots are passed down from mother to calf, such as how round the spots are and their smoothness (which is technically referred to as “tortuousness”).

The study authors also noted that bigger, rounder spots seemed linked to higher survival rates for young giraffes.

Still unanswered, however, was if that was possibly due to better camouflage or other unknown factors like enhanced ability to regulate temperature.

Bercovitch, who wasn’t involved in that study, says he wouldn’t be concerned about the spotless giraffe’s health even if the giraffe was born in the wild and away from a zoo’s medical care.

“Among mammals, the fur and the hair are the primary features that assist in thermoregulation, not the color of the fur,” he says.

“Giraffes can regularly raise their body temperature by a few degrees … they don’t sweat,” he says.

“That’s one of the reasons you find giraffes under trees—they want to keep their body temperatures within certain limits.”

Even the lack of camouflage wouldn’t necessarily mean the giraffe would be at a disadvantage in the wild, he says, since the mortality rate for young giraffes from lion predation is already so high.

Ferguson, the wildlife veterinarian says she looks forward to hearing more about the giraffe in the years to come.

“What would be cool,” she says, “would be to take an infrared light photo or a thermograph of her to see if the spot pattern is still there but invisible to our eye.”

🤎🦒🤎

[otntnprproooon]

UENO Zoo

※ No unauthorized reproduction is allowed.

[nikonstudio]

At only ¥600 a pop, there's no complain paying this zoo a visit.

In all, as all cheaper telephoto goes, handholding the Sigma 150-600mm to get sharp images is largely possible under the open sky, with any attempts to do indoor shoot quickly becoming a game in probability.

Theoretically, the results should fare better on a FF camera, with the uncropped focal length demanding a slower shutter speed release for each shot.

Let me schedule a reshoot in another zoo soon, so observation made here becomes more conclusive.

Note - Images found in Nikon Studio are best viewed on a minimal 250 DPI display resolution since my uploaded work are delivered above that resolution since 2022.

[they-let-bob-into-japan]

I achieved a lifelong dream of seeing the pandas at Ueno Zoo. These lovely babies just turned two years old in June.