I’m no Greenpeace weenie, but I admit to discomfort at zoos. Locking some animals up into small enclosures is downright cruel, and a lot of animal exhibits are simply depressing. The final straw for me was back in the 90’s: my father and I visited the National Zoo in D.C, and there was a lone male rhino in a relatively small enclosure… and it had been driven so mad by loneliness and/or boredom that the path it wore in the dirt as it endlessly circled its enclosure was four or five inches deep.

That said, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium is spectacular, and one of the few things about California that I miss.

Anyway, here;s a piece about a remarkably realistic robotic dolphin. The suggestion is made that some animals – dolphins, orca, tigers, etc. – could be replaced in captivity with robots.

The robots maker says that what he wants to do is replicate extinct sea critters… you know, the *good* ones like mosasaurs and ithyosaurs and pliosaurs and the like. Now, if there was a good sized aquarium that had Jurassic Seas as an exhibit, I’d be all over that like ugly on an ape. But a regular aquarium, where all the fish were replaced with robots? The otters and penguins and such replaced with Nexus Seven replicants? If I *knew* that, my interest would be minimal. A zoo where the lions and tigers were also robots? Meh. But am I an outlier here? If zoos had wholly believable robotic bears and tapirs and pythons and the like… would people pay to see them? Not just initially for the novelty of it, but years and decades down the line. And would zoo patrons start demanding more and more of the robots? Instead of watching a lion lounge around, would people come to expect the robolions to hunt down the robogazelle every quarter hour? Would the kids demand that the robolions put on a song and dance act?