San Diego Zoo gets ready to open $68-million Africa Rocks exhibit

The San Diego Zoo, which recently celebrated its first 100 years, will step into the future next week with the opening of Africa Rocks, its biggest construction project ever.

The $68-million project incorporates the latest ideas about animal exhibits at a time when zoos and other parks find themselves in an ongoing debate about the treatment of animals in captivity.

Zoos are now designing exhibits that are more naturalistic and more focused on conservation than entertainment, officials said.

For its latest venture, the San Diego Zoo set aside an 8-acre parcel for African penguins, an endangered species, that includes giant artificial rocks similar to the granite ones found at Boulders Beach in South Africa. The penguins will also swim in a 170-foot-long pool that includes a wave-making machine. And there are nesting caves carved into some of the rocks to encourage breeding.

“It’s more than just what you see on display,” said Dwight Scott, the zoo’s director. “It’s making connections here with the [conservation] work we do around the world.” Africa Rocks replaces Dog & Cat Canyon, which dated to the 1930s.

During the zoo’s early history there was little effort made to recreate the natural environments of the animals. For example, a sidewalk for pedestrians and a road for tour buses ran next to the zoo’s enclosures.

The new space will separate the buses from the sidewalk. Pedestrians will walk on a gently sloping, meandering pathway — built wide to accommodate strollers and the increased number and girth of visitors — past six distinct habitats housing flora and fauna from the African continent.

There will be a 65-foot waterfall people can walk behind and a 2-acre tensile metal aviary net overhead. In addition to the penguins, Africa Rocks will highlight baboons, lemurs that can leap across expanses of 40 feet and monkeys that live in social groups led by the females.

The plan had been for the entire project to debut at the same time this summer. But last winter’s heavy rains delayed construction, and Africa Rocks is opening in phases. Up first Saturday is the habitat the zoo is calling Cape Fynbos, home to the penguins.

The San Diego Zoo and its sister facility, the Safari Park near Escondido, draw about 5 million people combined per year, and officials are counting on Africa Rocks to bring in more visitors.

Steve Fobes, the zoo’s chief architect, said the project was first presented to the board of trustees about a decade ago. “Everyone is familiar with the big animals from Africa, the elephants and the giraffes, and this became a chance to showcase some of the smaller, lesser-known animals from the continent,” he said.

So the Madagascar Forest area will have fossas, a predator that’s related to the mongoose. The Ethiopian Highlands will have gelada baboons, distinctive for the red hourglass-shaped patch of skin on their chests. And the West African Forest will have dwarf crocodiles, the smallest of their kind.

Scott said the ultimate goal is also to develop a breeding population of African penguins in San Diego that may one day be used to augment efforts in Africa aimed at saving the penguins from extinction. The zoo is a partner in that effort, one of about 140 conservation projects in 80 countries it’s involved in.

john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com