We are so happy to announce that two of our White-naped mangabeys, Sonja and Efia Marie, are pregnant! By the end of the year and beginning of 2017 we will hopefully have two new-born mangabeys.
This year has been filled with great moments at the centre thanks to several visits/volunteers from all over the world. We enjoyed a training workshop, veterinary nursing advice, and a lot of helping hands to improve the welfare of our lovely primates. In one of those visits we learned how to do rope splicing with the help of two volunteers from ZSL and we were able to give a lot of new rope enrichment to our primates as well as feeding platforms.
Nuba’s family will soon have a new semi-free enclosure in Kumasi Zoo! Thus, they are getting trained to be able to travel. The alfa male, Nuba, is responding very well to hand injection training and the others are already familiar with the box in which they will travel to Kumasi.
We have also been training the patas families to take medication from a syringe. They have been a bit sick lately but we are doing our best to investigate the cause with our veterinary team, and hopefully they will improve soon. It is a bit of a worry for us, but does not stop them from enjoying enrichment using Bel Aqua bottles filled with treats.
Due to lack of proper storage facilities and rats, some of our food at Accra Zoo goes to waste. Therefore, we undertook an investigation of our primates’ diet. The food given and taken out of the primate enclosures was weighed and we discovered the amounts consumed during a week. This gave us a precise idea on the amount of each food type that they got. The results obtained will help us reduce waste and adjust the quantity of food given to them daily to improve their diet.
Thanks to all the small efforts brought together to make the EPBC great and better! We will continue to do our best to keep it up!
The EPBC team!