AKRON, Ohio – The Akron Zoo is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic and Gov. Mike DeWine’s stay-at-home order, but essential zoo staff members are still coming to work each day to feed and care for the animals.

Cleveland.com visited the zoo with spokeswoman Elena Bell for a behind-the-scenes look at how more than 1,000 animals are cared for during the zoo’s longest-ever closure.

The Akron Zoo’s Galapagos tortoises – 69-year-old Boxie and 37-year-old Pagos – have seen a lot over the years, but they’ve never seen the zoo without visitors for this long, Bell said. The zoo typically only closes for four days each year - Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.

“They definitely miss the visitors,” Bell said of the tortoises. “They love coming up and looking at people.”

Last month, the tortoises were able to enjoy a leisurely adventure of their own as they explored the zoo’s “Komodo Kingdom,” and Bell said they took a particular liking to their smaller, distant cousins – the turtles in the rainforest exhibit.

Other animals that have been missing the zoo’s visitors are the 14 goats, who reside in the Pride of Africa exhibit that opened last summer.

“The goats are really missing the people, since they can get scratches through the fence,” Bell said. The African pygmy and Nigerian dwarf goats’ short heights put them at eye-level to receive plenty of attention from younger visitors.

Quite a bit taller are the zoo’s grizzly bears, 9-year-old siblings Jackson and Cheyenne.

Jackson, the male, is the zoo’s largest animal and towered over trainer Greg Moon as Moon instructed him to stand on his hind legs before he could eat a piece of fruit. What might be perceived as an entertainment trick is actually a way for the animals to participate in their own health-care, as trainers use those opportunities to check the animals’ stomach areas, claws and teeth, Bell said.

Other training behaviors allow the staff and animals to build a rapport, which can sometimes take years to develop into a trusting relationship. For example, trainer Vicky Croisant has been with the penguins for 15 years, and it would take a significant amount of time for another trainer to step in and learn about each of the 16 penguins, and for the penguins to get to know a new trainer.

Croisant hand-feeds the penguins two kinds of fish - capelin and smelt – and while it seems a bit like a feeding frenzy of identical penguins, Croisant is able to tell the penguins apart and keep track of how many fish each one eats.

The flamingos eat a mixture of krill and kibble, which has the nutrients needed for them to maintain good health and their signature pink coloring.

When feeding the zoo’s approximately 25 fruit bats, animal-care staff have started to wear more personal protective equipment due to the outbreak of COVID-19, since it’s believed that the disease may have originated from bats.

Staff also wear masks and gloves when working with the lemurs, but those practices were in place before the coronavirus pandemic. Since lemurs are primates, there is a greater chance of infections of “zoonotic” diseases, or those passed between animals and humans, Bell said.

Like the grizzly bears, the red ruffed lemurs, ring-tailed lemurs and blue-eyed black lemurs perform a series of training tasks so staff can monitor their health and well-being. If there are any issues, animals are taken to the zoo’s on-site animal hospital.

Despite decreased revenue due to Ohio’s stay-at-home order, the zoo has not laid off any employees, Bell said. Some administrative employees are working from home, and no more than 40 animal-care and veterinary staff members are in the zoo at a time.

Animal-lovers still have opportunities to see the zoo’s animals and learn more about them through the daily “Lunch and Learns” on the Akron Zoo’s Facebook page. Each day at 12 p.m., the zoo live-streams a program that showcases animals and answers the audience’s questions.

Earlier this month, the zoo donated about 1,400 N-95 masks to the Summit County Emergency Management Agency for medical workers combating the coronavirus crisis, and registered its two ventilators on Ohio’s registry.