What do wild animals do during a partial eclipse? Well, at the Philadelphia Zoo on Monday they mostly went about their day as normal.
Big cats napped, giraffes gladly took branches from visitors’ hands and otters swam laps around their enclosure.
To gain a better understanding of how different animals react to an eclipse, America’s oldest zoo asked visitors to observe animals, before, during and after the eclipse.
The initiative was in partnership with nonprofit SciStarter, and part of multiple events across the country to gather data from citizen scientists at eclipse viewing events across the country. All of this was part of the One Million Acts of Science citizen science month.
Twenty minutes before the eclipse began, 8-year-old Kai from Easton, predicted that the birds and rodents would potentially act the strangest when the light started to change, while the reptiles, sloths, and zebras would be the least perturbed.
What visitors and researchers likely didn’t hope for was cloudy skies during the eclipse’s peak coverage. But that’s what the day brought.
From 2 p.m. onwards, gazes began to avert from the animals and towards the skies. Visitors put on their protective glasses — some didn’t — and tried to catch a glimpse of the sun when it occasionally broke free from the cloud coverage.
By the 3:23 p.m. peak coverage, the light quality matched dawn or dusk and the temperature dropped noticeably. Many visitors were facing away from the enclosures, looking frustrated that the weather was blocking the relatively rare spectacle.
The animals though seemed largely unperturbed, doing what zoo employees said they normally do at that point in the day. Abrazzo, the zoo’s largest and oldest Galapagos tortoise continued to graze. The geriatric pair of African lions Tajiri and Makini were sprawled out for an afternoon nap, while Koosaka the Amur tiger paced around her enclosure. All of this was standard behavior, zoo employees said.
Drew, 9, said he and his family saw two monkeys, maybe lemurs, fighting loudly during the middle of the eclipse. Again, not too out the ordinary, and likely fitting since the family was in town town from Warren, N.J., to watch WrestleMania XL the night before.
One part of the zoo seemed to react visibly to sudden change in light and temperature conditions; The tulips in the flower beds close to the main entrance of the zoo closed up.
Full results of the NASA Eclipse Science Debrief will be discussed in a SciStarter LIVE Zoom call that can be joined live from 2-3 p.m. on Tuesday.
