Smuggled tortoises move into new 'shipping container' pad of luxury at Blackpool Zoo
The group of tortoises were once treated as nothing more than cargo.
Tortoises that had a terrible start in life and are now thriving at Blackpool Zoo are living in a purpose built homestead created from a shipping container.
The group of tortoises were once treated as nothing more than cargo.
Wild-caught in Africa and smuggled into the UK without paperwork, they were seized by customs and handed to the zoo, which has cared for them for more than 20 years.
Ironically, their forever home is the kind of steel box built to haul cargo across the world.
Except this one is going nowhere.
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Fitted with infrared lamps that recreate the heat of the African Sahel, a sealed wet-room floor and a glass viewing panel, it now sits on the zoo’s Kidepo Trail, next to the giraffes.
It is the fourth container Blackpool Zoo has commissioned from Universal Containers, a Greater Manchester firm, and the most technically demanding so far - a habitat engineered to last the tortoises’ 70 to 100 year lifespan.
The zoo has been their permanent home for more than 20 years.
For most of that time, they lived in a wooden enclosure near reception, off the main visitor trail and out of public view. The whole idea was to bring them into the heart of the visitor experience, give them the right environmental conditions, and build something that would last.
Recreating the conditions of the Sahel inside a steel container on the Lancashire coast took careful environmental design. The specification Universal Containers delivered includes:
- Wet-room tanked floor with drainage: waterproofing protects the container and keeps the enclosure hygienic, given the tortoises’ cleaning and moisture needs
- Sand bedding layer: an appropriate substrate for a semi-arid species
- Infrared heat lamps and heaters: replicating the long-wave radiation of direct sun, the same heat the tortoises bask under in the wild
- Glass viewing panel: a clear view for visitors without restricting the animals’ movement
- Rear growth apertures: oversized for the current residents, ready for substantially larger animals in future
Project manager at Blackpool Zoo, Luke Forster said: “It took an awful lot of persuasion to get our first container in place.
“The main concern was the zoo looking like a shipping yard. Once the first container was in, that was totally forgotten.
“The females are currently full size and don’t need apertures as large as we had installed.
“This enclosure may hold males in future, and they can grow to 80kg and more than double the size of the females.
“The container holds temperature very well, regardless of outside conditions, and it is easy to keep clean.”
For Universal Containers, the project is a fourth enclosure for the same client and a deeper grasp of what animal habitats demand.