If your family road trip takes you to Indiana or Atlanta this summer here are a few attractions you might want to make a pit stop at:
INDIANA
People are going bananas at Michigan City’s zoo… and now you can get in on the action too.
As you might have guessed the hoopla centers around the zoo’s monkey exhibit. According to zoo officials, a spider monkey recently used a garden hose to scale the wall of a moat at the facility and took off for town. However, the agile animal’s escape was short-lived as he got caught at a nearby boat dealership a few hours later.
Officials say the spider monkey is one of two new additions to the Washington Park Zoo and simply slipped away while workers were cleaning the moat, which had been emptied for cleaning.
The zoo director said workers figured the monkeys would remain inside their enclosure during the cleaning, but realized that wasn’t the case when the monkey took off over the empty moat and jumped onto the roof of a water filtration plant. Zoo staff along with local law enforcement officials finally recaptured the rascally animal while it sat in it a white and blue speedboat at a local dealership.
The incident has made the monkey somewhat of a star and zoo officials say now that it has been returned to its enclosure visitors are swamping to the park to catch sight of the Curious George wannabe.
GEORGIA
A trip to Atlanta is not complete without a tour of the massive Georgia Aquarium. And now families have one more reason to visit the popular underwater attraction.
Guests are clamoring to catch sight of a pregnant weedy sea dragon–one of the rarest creatures on Earth. Aquarium managers say this is only the third time ever that a sea dragon has gotten pregnant at a U.S. aquarium.
But if you make the trip to Atlanta don’t look for an expectant mom; rather aquarium officials say males carry the eggs in the sea dragon family. (Sea dragons, sea horses and pipe fish are the only species where the male carries the eggs, aquarium workers say.)
The Georgia Aquarium’s sea dragon has about 70 fertilized eggs – which look like small red grapes – attached to his tail. (During mating, the female lays dozens of eggs and then transfers them to the male’s tail.) Aquarium officials say the male sea dragon is expected to give birth in the next couple of weeks.
In addition to the pregnant sea dragon, the aquarium is also home to six other 18-inch sea dragons, which resemble Dr. Seuss characters with long aardvark-like snouts, colorful sea horse bodies and multiple paddle-like fins.
Only about 50 aquariums worldwide have sea dragons, which are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s list of threatened species.
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