Monkey Walkway
Living Links www.living-links.org is a new world class research facility at Edinburgh Zoo for Capuchin and Squirrel monkeys. Created by the University of St Andrews in partnership with Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and Edinburgh Zoo it cleverly allows both species to live together.

Our brief was to create a walkway that allowed the safe passage of monkeys from their internal to external enclosures. The walkway also had to be able to temporarily hold the monkeys to allow researchers to interact with the monkeys and monitor their behaviour.

FifeX produced four monkey walkways. Each walkway is made up of 8 cubicles. When in the ‘open’ position the monkeys can come and go as they please. However a researcher has the ability to, through the use of sliding panels, control and temporarily hold a monkey allowing them to feed or interact with it.

The full specification for the walkways was trickier than meets the eye! Each of the walkways had to house a number of monkeys of different sizes meaning that access holes and openings had to be fully adjustable. In addition, each sliding panel (horizontal or vertical) had to be removable and inter-changeable with any other panel in the walkway.

That said, the hardest specification to conquer was the fact that everything had to be monkey proof!! Nothing prepared us for the amount of damage these little ‘monkeys’ can cause. Therefore we decided to use some of the same materials that were used to build Terminal 5 at Heathrow and bomb proof shelters!

Ultimately we have ended up with a superb high-tech walkway that is monkey friendly, easy to clean, very adaptable and easily upgradeable for the Zoo.

The walkways are being used in the Zoo right now and we highly recommend a trip to Edinburgh Zoo to see the whole facility, which is world-class.