Denver Zoo’s Asian Tropics habitat is still under construction, but its first new future resident has just shown up. A 3-year-old female Malayan tapir, named Rinny, has arrived from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Denver Zoo is currently home to one tapir, a 4-year-old male named Benny. Until her new home is ready guests can see Rinny in the Zoo’s Pachyderm Building.
The two tapirs are in for a treat once Asian Tropics is completed. They will have access to the five main yards that the Asian elephants and Indian rhinos will also rotate through, but they will also have a special yard with a shallow pool, just right for tapirs, all to themselves. All together their yard space will expand from their current 3,000 square feet to about 100,000 square feet. Their individual yard will geographically resemble their native habitat as well with mudbanks and limestone rock formations.
Though they are most closely related to horses and rhinos, tapirs are similar in build to pigs, but significantly larger. Malayan tapirs have a large, barrel shaped body ideal for crashing through dense forest vegetation. Their noses and upper lips are extended to form a long prehensile snout similar to a stubby version of an elephant’s trunk. Malayan tapirs are the largest of the four tapir species. They stand more than 3-feet-tall and can stretch from between 6 to 8-feet-long. They can also weigh more than 1,100 pounds. Rinny currently weighs about 875 pounds. They are also excellent swimmers and spend much of their time in water. They can even use their flexible noses as snorkels!
Malayan tapirs have a distinctive color pattern that some people say resembles an Oreo cookie, black front and back parts separated by a white or gray midsection. This provides excellent camouflage that breaks up the tapir’s outline in the shadows of the forest. Young tapirs have spots and stripes which help them blend into the dappled sunlight and leaf shadows of the forest and protect them from predators.
Malayan tapirs are the only tapir native to Asia. Once found throughout Southeast Asia, they now inhabit only the rainforests of the Indochinese peninsula and Sumatra. With a wild population of less than 4,000 individuals they are classified as endangered by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) due to habitat loss and hunting.
