Zoo animals have been celebrating Easter with their own specially designed eggs filled with bugs and vegetables.
Meerkats, red pandas and squirrel monkeys have been opening their papier mâché easter eggs filled with appropriate treats.
The animals, looked after at Drusillas Zoo Park in Alfriston, are being offered the treats to celebrate the holiday as well as stimulate them with a puzzle to find their food.
Gemma Romanis, head zookeeper at Drusillas, said: “It’s always great fun during the holidays to theme our enrichment and we’ve not introduced eggs in this way before, so it’s fascinating to see how the different species react to the same thing.
“For example, our red pandas were a little hesitant and did lots of tentative sniffing and checking before they interacted, the meerkats just wanted to all bundle inside, and our naughty armadillos and monkeys dived straight in and started grabbing things without giving it a second thought.”
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“Introducing new and unusual things helps encourage them to use natural and instinctive behaviours such as recognising scents, foraging, and problem solving. If we just handed them food in the same way every day, they would lose their natural abilities.”
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