評論
打印
This is News Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Now from the U.S. to South America. It's mind-bogglingly cold in the Northern Hemisphere. But the sweltering weather on the opposite end of the Earth has man and beast alike dreaming of ice.
Brazil is sizzling, and with the heat index sometimes soaring above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or almost 50 degrees Celsius, keepers at the Rio de Janeiro zoo are giving the animals ice pops to beat the heat.
The homemade treats come in various flavors. For the big cats, there are bloody, 30-kilogram blocks of ice and raw meat.
There are bucket-sized cornucopias of iced fruit for Ze Comeia, a brown bear rescued from a circus, and a supply of chilled bananas for Karla the elephant.
The simians' treats are strawberry or mango-flavored frozen yogurt pops on sticks. They look the most appealing to the crowds of human visitors last week who stood in the blazing sun to gape at the apes.
The apes couldn't get enough. Paulinho the chimpanzee reached long, leathery fingers through the bars to snatch a strawberry-flavored treat from zookeeper's hand, and then gobbled it down. He then delicately handed the stick back through the bars, a trick he's learned to win another ice pop.
Zookeepers say in addition to cooling the animals down on days like this when the heat is downright unbearable, it's also fun and keeps them active.
Zookeepers have been handing out nearly 100 of the frozen snacks daily during the heat wave that has seen temperatures soar above the mid-90s degrees Fahrenheit, or around 35 degrees Celsius, for around 10 straight days. The apes alone consume around 70 of the snacks per day, with the fruit and yogurt- blends in highest demand.
The heat wave extended to neighboring Argentina, where hundreds of dead fish floated in a lake in the capital of Buenos Aires.
Catfish and shad were the most affected. The high temperatures had stolen oxygen from the water life.
