Aquarium - Day Four

Today was leaps and bounds better than yesterday! I finally feel like I understand the flow of the day at the aquarium and I am now able to do enough tasks where I can be helpful and accomplish a lot of things in one day. I learned how to do AM/PM tasks this morning as well as help with the weekly and monthly tasks, so now I know what I can do whenever I feel as though there isn't anything else I can help with.

I also got to help with three enrichment sessions today, which were a lot of fun. In the morning we ended up playing jump rope in front of the windows for the dolphins, which they actually found really amusing! One of the dolphins, Spirit, was super into it and kept bobbing her head up and down with the jump rope. Later on in the day, I got to go up on the roof and through jello cubes down into the tank from way up above. I loved doing this because the boys were so confused during the whole thing and it was really funny to watch them try to swim around and figure out where the jello was coming from. The last enrichment of the day we used ice cubes and were throwing, rubbing, and sliding them against the windows to get the dolphins attention. I had a lot of fun with this too, and Bayley and Spirit were cracking me up because they kept trying to eat the cubes we were throwing despite there being a huge wall of glass between us!

Today there was also a lot of time to sit down with Kimmy and go over a lot of material and training basics. She took me down into the observation pit where I will be learning to take observations on the animals and conducting my research project. We also talked about training session types again and about bridging stimuli and least reinforcing scenarios. Bridging is when you do an action which lets the dolphin know that they did a good job and will receive a reward when they return to their station. A lot of times this is done with a whistle, but the trainers can also do it by pointing at the dolphin or slapping their palm against the water. Least reinforcing scenarios are what you do when you are unhappy with something a dolphin did. You don't punish them or act angry, but you also don't give them attention or a reward. Essentially, you continue doing what you were doing and don't give the dolphin any sort of response. It's interesting for me to learn more about training and different terms and situations. I feel like I've already learned a lot more about the topic and it's only day 4, so I'm excited to see all that I know by the end of this internship!