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- Feeding time at the zoo is like a military operation.
To keep all the residents fed, Taronga's kitchens
never seem to shut.
And the live food unit known, as the bughouse,
is quite literally always buzzing.
It's full of little critters that are bred on site
and others that are ordered in.
- All of the insects that we order in come in live.
The main reason is insectivorous animals don't see a dead bit
of meat and think food.
They need that movement, that stimulation to make them
want to go after and chase and hunt the prey.
Nice.
Thank you.
I'll wait for your call.
Bye.
- This morning, Christine is preparing
weekly orders for the zoo's insectivores,
or insect eating animals.
- The orders have to be very precise to make
sure the correct amounts go out.
We spend a lot of time putting all of this
together for it to happen only in one day.
We're sending one to nocturnal, two to retrieve.
- These bags and boxes are packed full of insects
in all shapes and sizes.
- This trolley is full of beetle larvae.
So most people are pretty familiar with mealworms.
The reason they're called mealworms
is that they're actually kept in bran
or like mealy sort of stuff.
And that's what they eat.
Morning, Al.
Is the order in?
- Christine has worked here for four years,
and she loves her bugs.
- Oh, they're adorable!
Look at those little faces, those little mandibles.
Insects are the cutest.
This cute little just soft crawling around,
it's a really comforting feeling for me.
- One of the most important roles of the bughouse
is to breed insects, including houseflies.
- This one net will produce a week's worth of maggots.
This net alone produces 20 kilos in a week.
Every day, we put in an egging tray.
And when we get it out, they are chock-full of maggots.
They are so thick in there.
The containers actually feel warm.
- But maggots are just the first stage of housefly development
that is fed to the hungry insectivores.
- Fly pupae is like the chrysalis for a butterfly
but for flies.
- The next stage is pupae.
And they're just as much in demand.
- They're little packets of protein
wrapped in a little case.
There's this beautiful, grainy sensation like putting
your hand into rice or seed.
And they're just-- they're quite cool.
Though, I will admit they do have a bit of an unusual smell.
On an average week, we aim to produce
about 20 kilos of pupae.
This is actually our week's whole,
collected from our fly room.
To stop them all hatching into flies,
we're going to freeze it.
We want to have the bigger sizes for the majority
of our animals.
Other than that, the really small stuff
is actually great, because we can use some
of the really small hatched flies to feed
our really small spiders.
- With each stage of the fly's life cycle passing
in just a few days, timing is everything,
especially in the maggot room.
- So these guys, believe it or not,
the ones I'm harvesting today, they're five days old.
Tomorrow, when they're six days old, they'll start pupating.
And we'll harvest on day seven.
If we leave it to day eight, they will be flies.
These guys live on bran, effectively cereal.
And they get nice and big on it too,
which is very, very lovely.
We've got 16 trays to collect today.
So there's a lot of hungry mouths to feed out there.
And they all quite love these little tiny, tiny maggots.
- With her maggot orders nearly done,
Christine completes the weekly insectivore
buffet with some crunchy crickets,
which are also bred at Taronga.
- OK.
So we go through different sizes.
So the larges, we only go through about 5,000 a week.
But we go through a hell of a lot more smalls.
So every day when we set up our large crickets,
we actually put in an egging tray, something like this.
And they'll just lay these beautifully almost
translucent eggs that are very, very tiny and thin.
And in about nine to 11, sometimes
14 days, they'll hatch.
And they're incredibly tiny.
These hatched this morning.
And these are very essential for our corporate breeding program.
So the corroboree frogs are very, very tiny
when they're young.
And they have to eat really tiny food.
- Like every animal in Taronga's care,
even the insects are cherished, until they're eaten, of course.
- So we're just pouring the crickets all into here.
Crickets, they like being sheltered.
So when they get buried in the vermiculite,
they're actually not that upset.
It's safe.
It's dark.
Predators can't find them.
We want to make sure that we're providing the best
welfare for these guys, so that in turn,
they can provide the best welfare
to the animals they're fed to.
So when these guys are happy and healthy,
the animals that eat them will also be happy and healthy.
Half of this tub is going to nocturnal house,
and half of it's going to our carnivore team.
When it comes to counting how many
crickets we're assigning to each department,
we have to eyeball it.
It would take me quite a while to individually count
1,500 crickets into the tubs.
And that's just a little bit silly for this morning.
- And with thousands of hungry mouths waiting,
there's no time for that.
Christine's only priority is to get
the insects packed and out for delivery
as quickly as possible.
- This is usually done within 90 minutes,
because after a certain point, the zoo
gets closed to all vehicles.
So our delivery truck can't get through.
If we're running late, it can stop function
in the rest of the zoo, because if they
don't have their food on time, certain feeds can't happen.
- And that's the last thing anybody or any animal wants.
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