Aquarium - Days Seven and Eight

I had to combine my two days into one post because time is just flying by and I feel like I'm always busy trying to finish work or busy at my actual work at the aquarium! Anyway, these past two days have also been great ones. Yesterday I got to learn some Sd's which are the hand signals the trainers give the dolphins to ask for a behavior. I also got to learn more about husbandry behaviors, which are behaviors used for medical purposes. The dolphins are trained to do layouts to have their bodies checked, they can give fecal and gastric samples, give blood samples, and even breath samples, plus many more husbandry behaviors! It was interesting to learn about the behaviors and the different things the dolphins are trained to do. I also learned how to take respirations, which is another one of the AM tasks. Basically, you count how many times the dolphins breathe in a 5 minute period and record it. This is just to make sure that everything is normal and no one is acting unusually. This may seem easy, but when all 6 girls are in the same pool it can get quite difficult to keep track of who is breathing!

Today was actually my best day so far! I got to shadow one of the trainers in the amphitheater during her narration of the training session and listen to some commonly asked questions and even give out some answers myself. I like to talk and interact with people, so this was a lot of fun for me and also very interesting. A lot of the questions are "what time is the next session?" but a lot of other people are interested in the dolphins themselves and their pools and some characteristics of dolphins. The best part of my day was when I got to help out with a mock-encounter session. An encounter session is a service the aquarium offers where you can pay extra and come have some private time to meet the dolphins! One of the newer trainers is practicing her encounters, so I got to be her pretend audience! We laid by the side of the pool with Foster, one of the male dolphins. She asked him for certain behaviors and I got to listen to her talk and give Foster lots of rubs on his back and belly! I was really glad that they gave me this opportunity and it was definitely the most fun thing I have done so far!

Of course the day wasn't all fun, there was a lot of work too. We had a shipment of squid come in this morning so I stood in the -9 degree Fahrenheit freezer for a while helping to unload the squid. That was definitely a cold experience. I also helped out with cleaning, as always, and practiced some more gating. I was also able to get a few more observations in on Bayley these past two days. So far I haven't really found any correlation, but I only have a few data points so it's still too early to tell anything for sure.

Tomorrow looks like it's going to be another busy day since I am learning all about enrichment for the dolphins! Stay tuned for more posts about my aquarium internship and all of the great experiences I am having!