Monsoonal downpour within museum habitat

Photo by Linda Robertson.

Otago Museum living environments co-ordinator Murray McGuigan gets a taste of a heavy artificial monsoon at the museum's popular tropical forest yesterday.

Since the forest opened in late 2007, it has been equipped with a facility to generate rain, but although this system has since been switched on briefly once a week to test it, the resulting burst of "rain" has not previously been open to the public.

And the forest's plants are watered individually, and more regularly, by hand.

From today, visitors to the forest, which is part of the museum science centre, will be able to experience a "tropical monsoon" every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at 2pm, only for this month, as part of educational sessions designed to demonstrate the sensation of heavy rain in a tropical forest, organisers at the museum say.