Taronga Zoo opened on 7 October 1916 after a seven-year relocation from Moore Park, chosen for its 75-acre harbour-facing slope and the promise of natural light reaching every enclosure. The name derives from an Aboriginal word meaning "beautiful view," recorded by surveyor James Meehan in 1804 and applied to the headland long before the first Sumatran tiger arrived by steamship. By 1917 the zoo held 228 animals; today the collection spans more than 4,000 individuals across 350 species, two-thirds of them part of coordinated breeding programs for species classified as threatened or extinct in the wild. The ferry route from Circular Quay to the zoo wharf has operated since 1919, though the original timber jetty was rebuilt in stone in 1967 and again in 2005 to accommodate modern vessels. Visitors boarding at Wharf 2 cross 4.2 kilometres of Port Jackson in twelve minutes, passing Fort Denison and the naval dockyards at Garden Island before the harbour narrows toward Athol Bay. The zoo's Sky Safari cable car, installed in 1987 and upgraded in 2016, rises 180 vertical metres from the lower entrance to the hilltop precinct in five minutes, offering unobstructed views south across the harbour to the city skyline and the sandstone cliffs of South Head. Taronga Zoo ferry tickets combined packages were introduced in 2003 to streamline entry logistics and reduce congestion at the ferry ticket office, which had operated separately from zoo admissions since 1987. The bundled pass eliminates two separate transactions and allows direct boarding at Circular Quay without queuing at the zoo gate. Conservation remains central to the site's mandate: the Taronga Conservation Society Australia, established in 1916, now operates field programs in twenty countries, including Sumatran tiger breeding partnerships in Indonesia and little penguin habitat restoration along the New South Wales coast. The zoo's breeding successes include the first zoo-born platypus in 1943, the first African elephant birth in the Southern Hemisphere in 1977, and the reintroduction of more than 1,200 regent honeyeaters into wild habitats since 1995. Architect John Sulman's original 1912 masterplan specified naturalistic moats instead of cage bars, a radical departure from Victorian zoo design and one that required excavation of 14,000 cubic metres of Hawkesbury sandstone. The site remains the only major zoo in Australia accessible by scheduled ferry service, a logistical advantage that delivers 1.5 million visitors annually to Bradleys Head Road without adding vehicle traffic to the narrow Mosman peninsula roads.