The Toledo Zoo's endless encounters

It would be impossible to visit the Toledo Zoo & Aquarium and leave without experiencing some level of sensory overload. A zoo, an aquarium, and a natural history museum all land on the same admission. The latter two could easily stand on their own. On summer nights, an amphitheater opens for concerts. 

My Pueblo Zoo membership earned me a discounted admission ($16 instead of $30). The ticket clerk had never heard of it, but they go off a list, and there it was. I will take a zoo discount any day. 

The zoo kicks into gear quickly with Arctic Encounter, where a lively polar bear splashed in its pool and flung a bucket around. An indoor blind allows visitors to see how huge the bear really is. The massive bear showed off his size and speed after leaving the pool and moving around the enclosure. In the adjacent exhibit, the harbor seals and California sea lions had no idea how lucky they were, an apex predator just one exhibit away. 

Many of the African animals can only be seen from a great distance without getting tickets for a train ride. We opted to feed lettuce to the giraffes – staff requires you to stop if six-month-old giraffe Eugene approaches, but even with three giraffes our lettuce leaves disappeared in seconds, their giant prehensile tongues showing no hesitation. At that point the zoo felt a little slight. I didn’t realize the rest was across the highway. 

Our tour guides – Meg’s nephews – showed us to the pedestrian bridge. There’s also a tunnel that runs under the street. From the bridge we descended into the big city zoo I expected. We passed the cassowaries and entered a large aviary that offered a cross-section of species from across the globe. 

Among newer exhibits, the Works Progress Administration construction of the 1930s zoo buildings still stand tall. Many have been renovated but the stone facades were incorporated into their new looks. 

The zoo includes several attractions that could stand alone. One is the aquarium building, which hosts enough creatures and galleries to fill an hour. A sea turtle with paralyzed rear fins propels through the tank solely by her front fins. Numerous small sharks cruise the tanks – leopard sharks, bonnethead sharks, and nurse sharks. The bright silver scales of a tarpon glimmer. A sturgeon moves slowly, barbed face hiding a gentle demeanor. 

No aquarium attraction draws as much attention as the saltwater touch pool, where rays, skates, and other fish cruise around. I bumped a few rays’ heads and grazed fingers on their squishy backs. 

Bonnet head shark

 

Sturgeon

Japanese crabs in the dark

But the giant Japanese spider crabs break out furthest from the other exhibits. Giant crabs move silently in a darkened tank. They are conserved in Japanese waters to prevent overfishing. With their oversized limbs they move methodically across their tank, alien and unknowable. Crustaceans don’t often get a spotlight, but these crabs deserved their large, delicately lit tank. 

The zoo’s other standalone is The ProMedica Museum of Natural History, founded as the Toledo Science Museum. It’s a stately WPA building, with taxidermied remains of numerous animals spread across two floors and a rainforest exhibit we ran out of time to visit. 

Reconstructions of extinct Ice Age species tower on the main floor, from the short-faced bear to the giant sloth to Irish elk. One gallery gives visitors an ant’s eye view, with mushrooms, toads and other ground coverings pushed to massive proportions. 

Walking through this gallery, I spotted another touch pool in a distant chamber. This pool had no line and no visitors. I washed my hands and dipped my fingers into the freshwater, hoping to run them along the back of a sturgeon. 

More than a dozen sturgeon cut through the pool. They favor the pool bottom and did not make touching easy. I caught of the backs of a few larger ones. Bony fish is no joke, as my fingers traced their vertebrae down to the tail. 

Sturgeon touch pool

 The most recent WPA building to receive an overhaul was the Reptile building. The stone and brick core of the original building remains, but the Toledo Zoo has refreshed the exhibits with steel and glass, giving the animals more room to move. Viewing areas also displayed the American alligators and a separate pool for a massive saltwater crocodile estimated at 60 years old. Along with its eyes and snout above the water, the pool viewing window revealed its armored tail.  

Dwarf caiman

But the smallest member of the crocodilian family stuck with me most. A dwarf caiman occupied a much smaller exhibit than its cousins. They tend to top out at five to six feet, and sport bony plates across their body that prevent them from being easy prey. They are a keystone species across much of South America, including the Orinoco and Amazon watersheds, their presence the indicator of a healthy ecosystem. In a zoo where no one could see everything in one visit, the little crocodiles and sturgeon pool are the things that stuck most with me. 

The last stops spotlighted the zoo stalwarts, the animals that make a visit incomplete if we don’t see them. The African elephants leisurely grazed in their yard, a calf following its mother and sometimes hiding beneath her legs. Tigers hid in the midday heat, as the takins seemed unfazed by the 90-degree afternoon despite their Himalayan roots. 

Bears have no trouble retreating to the water when the heat grows too strong. A trio of brown bears splashed and lounged in their exhibit’s pool. The signs identified one as a Kodiak bear. The Kodiak subspecies can grow twice as large as standard brown bears, even as large as polar bears. It was not hard to figure out which one hailed from the Alaskan island, as its head was way bigger the other three brown/grizzly bears. 

Unlike the solitary polar bear on the zoo’s other side, the brown bears didn’t seem to mind each other as the water warded off the heat. 

Just like that, three hours breezed by, the Toledo Zoo’s almost limitless animal encounters filling every second.