The Leaf cutter Ant Exhibit is the first enclosure guests look at when they enter our design. This space also includes many interactive activities including a life size ant farm for children to climb around in. Since we want guests to learn about the layers of the rainforest from top to bottom, the leaf cutter ants were chosen because they live on the forest floor. Another reason we chose leaf cutter ants for our exhibit is because the Nocturnal Exhibit at the Minnesota Zoo house sloths and a python which are very inactive animals. Leaf cutter ants are extremely active, and would be the solution to this problem.

The rainforest houses almost half of the world's animal species, and most of them live on the forest floor. So, to showcase a few more species that live in this layer of the rainforest we created the Forest Floor Inhabitants enclosure as well as the Leaf Cutter Ant Exhibit. This enclosure includes a cohabitation of four different species of animals that have been specifically chosen to display both aquatic, semi-aquatic, and arboreal habitats.

The understory is the layer that's right above the forest floor. This layer contains mainly arboreal animals that spend most of their time climbing in the trees. This section of our exhibit has three enclosures. The first being for a chameleon, the next has tortoises and sloths, and the last has frogs. This space also has an Animal Encounters stage for special shows. One of the animals that would be showcased on this stage would be Nikita, the Minnesota Zoo's 14 foot burmese python. Nikita would be kept backstage because she isn't active enough to have her own enclosure on display.

Finally, to top it all off would be the Creatures of the Canopy enclosure housing a flock of rainbow lorikeets. One of the most popular animals that dwell in the Canopy are monkeys, but since the Minnesota Zoo already has plenty of them, we decided to go with a more unique animal. This enclosure includes a few distinct features that sets it apart from the other previous enclosures. In the front a touchpad would be given to the guests to select music for the birds to listen to. Lorikeets are known to be silly and playful, and may dance to their favorite songs. Another interesting feature is a fallen down tree centered in the middle of their enclosure to symbolize deforestation. Being the last of our enclosures, we wanted it to give a conservation message to give awareness to this issue.

We couldn't print the following models because of all the details the printer wouldn't read. So, here's a look at the simplified model we printed. Yet, even in this simpler version there were a few places in the design that the printer wouldn't print correctly, so we had to work with what we had. We also had to split this into three parts to print because if we printed it all at once it would have been less than 10 inches long.