Holly dropped me off at the Animal Care and Rehabilitation Center (ACRC) at around 7am today! She had interviews to do to fill a job on her team, so I worked at ACRC all morning. This part of the ACRC is run by all women, and they were very nice to let me shadow and help with their work for the morning. Right as I got there, the team was working on loading up different types of fish for a habitat at the main aquarium. I helped by tallying how many of each fish were being transported, and totaled over 200 killifish! They then pumped oxygen into the water and air surrounding the fish, and sealed them up for the quick transport to the aquarium. I got to ride in the truck to transport those, and then headed back to the ACRC. Meredith, a senior aquarist, showed me around the facility and we went to all of the tanks and wrote down their temperature and made sure everything was functioning properly. In some of the smaller tanks, there were just two fish as they were trying to breed them. We went through and made sure that there were in fact two fish in each tank, and everything checked out. We then did copper testing on some water samples. From my understanding, the water has to be between 0.18 and 0.23 for 21 days. Not going to lie, I did not catch why it was only these two tanks or what the units were for the measurements, but it was interesting to see Mer ideth test the water and use chemicals I had only used in my chemistry lab in college in real practice. I then went and followed Ashley, as she was taking turtles from their tanks and bringing them to another room to be checked out by the vet. They drew blood from each of the turtles by extending their tail and holding the turtle down but on an elevated object so it couldn’t use its legs to escape. It would take a few tries to get enough blood as the angle to draw it was very specific. After the first two turtles were cleared, we brought them back and got Bertha, the bigger turtle, and brought her to the vet. She needed her blood drawn, and an ultrasound done. The tests were a bit harder on her as she was very active and bigger, but they got them done. Ashley and I then went back to the area where the turtles were, which is the non-quarantine area, and looked at this one named Kai. He had been struck by a boat, and had a gnarly scar down his shell to show it. During that boat strike, something happened internally where he now gets a lot of gas stuck in his body. This makes it really hard for him to swim anywhere but the surface. This makes him unreleasable because if he only could swim at the surface he would be subject to much more predators. In order to help increase his quality of life, they are trying to engineer a weighted prosthetic that could help make him more mobile.
And to end my time at the ACRC,
Katie and I fed the two stingray! The stingrays are normally in the Atlantic Coral Reef Habitat at the main aquarium. However, they could only be fed by hand by divers, and during covid there were little to no divers, so they had to be transferred and haven’t been returned. Katie was explaining to me that they are trying to train the sting rays to come to the surface for their food so that they don’t rely on the divers. They are doing this in stages. First they are putting the food in little balls with holes in them that are tied to a rope and belayed to the bottom of the tank. Then, they are starting to introduce the hand feeding tool into the water so they aren’t afraid of it. Then they are slowly raising the balls of food so the stingrays get used to coming up to eat. Then, removing food from the balls but still using them as a cue that food is coming and feeding them with the hand held grabber thing. We were on the stage where the hand held grabber was in the water but food was still in the balls. We actually got the smaller ray, Garfunkel, to eat a piece of fish from the grabber tool, which was the first time she had ever done that! I had a great time at the ACRC!
The rest of the day was spent studying for my DAN First Aid course that I am taking tomorrow. I am very grateful to get the opportunity to get first aid training here at the National Aquarium, and tomorrow will be a great day full of learning. Holly and I had some yummy soup and cornbread for dinner, and rested up for Friday.