Aquarium Day Two - Fish Prep Shift and Cleaning

For day two of my aquarium internship, I woke up bright and early in order to get to the aquarium by 6:30 for my fish prep shift. Usually there are two trainers who come in early in the mornings and prepare the diets for the day. One drastically different thing from the zoo is that the only animals I'm dealing with are dolphins and so therefore the only diets I have to know are fish diets! All of the dolphins eat the same fish, herring and capelin, and the only real difference is the amount they each get. They also get fed 5-6 times a day rather than once or twice which means there are a lot more dishes to do and a lot more food preparation to take care of. In the morning, the main thing to do is sort through the fish and pick out the bad ones that aren't up to the quality to give to the dolphins. The dolphins only get the highest quality fish, and there are three different checkpoints the aquarium goes through to ensure that the fish being fed to them are only the best. The first checkpoint is in the sorting in the morning. Basically, we are dethawing the fish and sorting them into buckets and weighing out the buckets so that we can have all the diets prepared for the day. There are 8 dolphins in the aquarium and at least 5 buckets per day, so we were weighing over 40 buckets of food for the dolphins! It was definitely gross at times sorting the fish, especially when one would break in half and I would just be staring at fish guts or a fish head. Definitely not something I would recommend for those with weak stomachs!

After sorting all of the fish and putting them into buckets, it was time to prepare the first two buckets of the day. This means dethawing the fish again since they are still semi frozen and rechecking to make sure only the best fish are going into the buckets. This is the second checkpoint. The third occurs right as the keepers are giving the fish to the dolphins. If something doesn't look right, they don't feed the fish to that dolphin and replace it with another instead. After getting all of the buckets ready, the final step in the fish prep morning routine is to clean and scrub the kitchen. Anything that the fish may have touched gets rinsed, scrubbed with soap, rinsed again, disinfected, and rinsed one more time before it can be considered clean. The morning was definitely a lot of hard work, but I actually didn't mind getting up early because there was so much work to do that it went by quickly.

For the rest of the day, I was told to keep track of dirty buckets and toys, so I spent most of my afternoon picking up toys and cleaning them and cleaning all of the dirty buckets. It wasn't the most interesting day ever, but it was only my second day, so I know I still have a lot more to learn and do before I can move on to more advanced tasks.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the week and what it has to offer! I'll keep you all posted!