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New York|Spend an Hour in the Dark With Bats, Cats and Naked Mole Rats
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/nyregion/spend-an-hour-in-the-dark-with-bats-cats-and-naked-mole-rats.html
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On a recent morning in the Bronx, three vampire bats circled around a bowl to drink their breakfast: warm beef blood.
Nearby, a red-rumped agouti — a South American rodent that looks like a large, long-legged guinea pig — scuttled behind a tree trunk. A few feet away, an Arabian sand cat put its paw inside a log to grab a mouse. The fluttering noise in the distance was coming from several Egyptian fruit bats that were zooming around.
It was a bright and humid day, but inside the World of Darkness at the Bronx Zoo it was a cool dusk. The exhibit, which was originally installed in 1969, closed in 2009 because of budget trouble. It reopened on Saturday, with a fully updated and reimagined nocturnal experience.
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The exterior of the building housing the exhibit, a 13,000-square-foot Brutalist structure near the zoo’s Asia Gate, looks almost the same as it did back in 2009, but with a new charcoal paint job. The original World of Darkness sign from 1969, which provided a creepy thrill for kids for decades, with its spare sans-serif letters (a font called alternate gothic), still stands. And the concept is the same: to use a reverse light cycle, giving visitors a peek into the lives of nocturnal animals that are generally active while humans sleep. When it’s daytime outside, it’s nighttime inside the World of Darkness.
The interior is all new. A soothing soundtrack plays cricket chirps and other nighttime forest sounds. There are acoustic panels shaped like forest canopy and a highly customizable LED lighting system that is tailored to each species and able to replicate the natural transitions of dusk and dawn.
