Hong Kong’s Ocean Park has started using AI to better track the behaviour of its giant panda twins and golden monkeys, allowing for more personalised care and improved habitat design. There are plans to extend the technology to dolphin research.
The theme park’s chairman, Paulo Pong Kin-yee, also reported a surge in overseas visitors over the winter period, fuelled by a 60 per cent jump in long-haul arrivals, notably from the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia.
On Wednesday, the park unveiled upgrades to its animal monitoring system to make use of artificial intelligence (AI), shifting from manual sampling of video footage to round-the-clock tracking that analyses how animals use different parts of their enclosures.
The enhanced AI model allows caretakers to better position enrichment items that support animals’ physical and mental well-being.
The AI technology has already been used to monitor the park’s home-grown giant panda twins, An An and Ke Ke, and golden monkeys. It can distinguish between individual animals and monitor interactions, such as the distance between a mother and her offspring over time.
Pong said enhanced algorithms and customised AI, now able to identify body parts and postures of the park’s high-value conservation species, have delivered “deeper insights into individual animal behaviours”.
“This has added value for the team to provide more personalised animal care and habitat design,” he added.
The park plans to extend the AI to dolphin research to analyse movements in dynamic environments and integrate acoustic data.
Ocean Park and its Water World facility welcomed a combined 3.46 million visitors in the financial year from July 2024 to June 2025, a 10 per cent increase from the previous year, and marking a fourth consecutive year of growth.
On Wednesday, Pong also reported that overseas attendance rose by more than 20 per cent year-on-year between December and February, with strong growth from markets such as Britain, the US and Australia.
He also said the number of long-haul overseas visitors, particularly from the UK, US and Australia, rose by more than 60 per cent year-on-year.
Mainland Chinese visitor numbers also increased by about 15 per cent, while local attendance, which was affected by outbound travel during the Chinese New Year holiday, rebounded in March and has since exceeded last year’s levels, he added.
