Geckos and iguanas and pythons, oh my!

The Santa Barbara Zoo is opening a new space this week dedicated to tropical creatures from all around called Tropical Wonders.

Tropical Wonders features 15 animal habitats, a sensory tunnel, and the Thomas & Nancy Crawford Tropical Aviary.

The space is opening to the public on Friday after more than six years of planning and construction, but donors, zoo executives and supporters were invited to a sneak preview of Tropical Wonders on Tuesday evening.

Charles Hopper, who was hired as the Santa Barbara Zoo’s new president and CEO in January, said seeing the Tropical Wonders space open gives him confidence that the zoo team is ready for the future.

“That’s really reassuring for a leader to come in and know that a team has that ability to get these things done,” Hopper said. “When we’re casting our next vision for what’s happening at the zoo, I have that confidence that our team’s equipped and ready to take on that ambition for the iteration of the next phase of the zoo.”

The Tropical Wonders space used to be known as the Eeeww! exhibit, which featured a darkroom with small portal windows allowing visitors to peek through to see the animals. The Eeeww! exhibit was meant to stay open for only a year but ended up staying around for 15 years before it was time for a refresh. 

Rich Block, the zoo’s president emeritus, said he loved the lightened and refreshed design of the space. 

“This is exactly what the zoo needed,” Block said. “This is a really important space, physically at the zoo, so people were going through and by and around here for years with nothing to see, and now we’ve got a renovated tropical aviary, thanks to the very generous donors, and we’ve got this basically totally overhauled exhibit in Tropical Wonders, so it’s fantastic.”

The new space has floor-to-ceiling windows, tropical-themed murals, rocky walls and a sensory tunnel with a fake frog, snake and flamingo legs for kids to touch and feel. 

After walking through the sensory tunnel, zoo visitors will be met with habitats for a beaded lizard, a jungle frog, a Jamaican boa and a prehensile-tailed skink, and the newly reimagined tropical aviary. 

Julie Barnes, the zoo’s vice president of animal care and health, said they closed the Eeeww! exhibit in late 2018 and began working on plans for Tropical Wonders, but the project was ultimately delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of the animals in Tropical Wonders are brand new to the zoo, such as the Fiji banded iguana, the Grand Cayman blue iguana, the prehensile-tailed porcupine and an Eastern Indigo snake. The reimagined space also will be home to a few zoo animals that have been living behind the scenes at the zoo since the Eeeww! exhibit closed. 

Some of the animals, such as the Grand Cayman blue iguana, the Fiji island iguana, the Panamanian golden frog and the Southern three-banded armadillo, are considered endangered or threatened. 

“Having these endangered species at the zoo, it gives us a platform to educate about their plight and to try and motivate our guests to take action to try and prevent further loss of the species,” Barnes said.

Barnes said the theme of Tropical Wonders is the interconnectedness of animals, humans and the environment in order to bring awareness to the importance of having a clean environment for humans and animals. 

“It’s not just about saving the animals,” Barnes said. “If we save the animals but there’s no habitat for them to go back in, it’s going to be unsuccessful. It’s all about conserving the environment, conserving the animals and, therefore, ultimately healthy humans.”

The $3.2 million project was funded through community donations. A list of all of the donors can be seen here.

“This is a community zoo,” Hopper said. “It took the community to build the zoo originally, and this is still, 62 years later, a testament of what the community still does to continue to make the zoo thrive.”