News and Stories

Canines come in all shapes and sizes, like these pint-sized fennec fox pups!

Fennec foxes are the smallest member of the canine family, and Comet and Astrid are the two resident fennec foxes at Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. This species is typically active after dark and thus their behavior can be hard to observe in the wild. However, here in our Night Hunters habitat where the foxes reside, we use a reverse light-dark cycle meaning in the middle of the day outside, it’s “nighttime” inside. This helps us sync up animal husbandry like cleaning, feeding, and training with their typical active cycles. This also gives us an opportunity to study their behavior and better understand how to take care of them!

You may notice one of our Animal Excellence Scientists out in front of the habitat observing their behavior. Being so small, fennec foxes can be shy and nervous around changes in their environment. In the wild, big changes could mean big predators like African eagle owls or jackals in the area or that a reliable source of food is no longer nearby. Change is normal but can be scary (think about how nervous you might have been jumping from middle school to high school!) so, whenever we make changes in their day-to-day life we observe the foxes for changes in their behavior.

Some recent changes we’ve been making have been expanding their habitat (they now enjoy two connecting rooms) and switching up what kinds of food are provided to hopefully see behaviors that we would see in wild foxes. Observing Comet sniffing around for bugs, Astrid digging in the dirt, or even the pair taking long naps together, lets us know how they’re adapting to those changes and what we continue to incorporate into their care.

There’s still lots to understand about these fennec foxes so next time you see an observer, ask them what fun things we’ve learned!