As Baton Rouge is embroiled in a growing controversy over the fate of its zoo, The Associated Press reports the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans is preparing to open a new night house on Friday.
The AP got a sneak preview of the new feature, which includes indoor lights simulating a full moon, on Tuesday. The centerpiece of the $1.6 million night house is the 42-foot-long flight cage for 200 Seba’s short-tailed bats—fruit-eating mammals up to 2½ inches long and with a foot-wide wingspan.
The animals in the Creatures of the Night Bat House all are from Central and South America. The building’s interior simulates an abandoned warehouse set up to protect Mayan artifacts during a dig. One wall is painted with maps of the supposed site and its general area. Tiles, plates and other “artifacts” hang on other walls or sit on shelves.
A much smaller colony—eight vampire bats—lives in one of a half-dozen exhibit cases set up as if a visitor was looking through a broken wall into the jungle. Their home is made to imitate a tropical ceiba-tree’s buttress-like root with cup-like green lichen growing from it. During the preview, a half-dozen bats hung together from one such cup, forming a clump that could fit easily into one hand, while a seventh lapped cow’s blood from a small bowl on the ground.
Other cases hold giant cave cockroaches, reddish poison dart frogs with creamy white stripes, two kinds of tarantulas, and thumb-sized green tree frogs.
