At the end of my week at the New England Aquarium main campus, I drove down to meet Dan Dolan (friend of the Sea Rovers) and his wife Dawn at their home in Higham, MA.
We went for a lovely dinner while we talked about my week and the experiences I had at the New England Aquarium. It’s truly been an incredible week. As I told Dan, I thought I knew the aquarium well, having spent so much time there in the past and then having interned as an educator last summer. However, every single day I was learning about new behind-the-scenes areas, new aspects of exhibits, and new responsibilities and roles off the staff that I never knew about. Dan and Holly are good friends and coordinate their respective Internship aquarium weeks in conversation with each other, and I think that it was very interesting for me personally to learn so much at the different facilities because of my amount of experience (or lack thereof) at each aquarium. In Baltimore, I was learning that aquarium for the first time, and I was exposed to a lot of the behind-the-scenes cogs and systems before I became too familiar with the layout of the Aquarium itself. Because of that, my understanding of the Aquarium and how it runs was being filled in from the inside out, as one big picture revealing itself. However, because I already knew a lot about the guest side of the New England Aquarium operations, seeing so much behind-the-scenes expanded on and colored in my previous understanding of how it runs, and I saw NEAq from completely new angles. Two very different learning experiences at two different aquariums, and I’m glad I got to have both, since I got different things out of each!
After Dan and Dawn and I finished up our dinner and conversation, we stepped outside to find a Beatles tribute band playing by the harbor!
The next morning, Dan and I drove down to the Quincy animal care center a few minutes away. I had heard about the Quincy center in the abstract, but knew very little about what actually happened there, so I was very curious to see what it was like! I would be spending the morning in the husbandry section, and after lunch would move over to the turtle rehab section. The first thing I saw when we walked in was the tank with the cownose rays. Most of the tanks there have viewing windows on their side, and the cownose window faced the entrance directly, so I could see them all swimming by.
Dan gave me a tour of the husbandry area, and after introducing me to the cownose rays, he brought me to a darkened viewing area to see into the tank with three juvenile sand tiger sharks! They were beautiful, and very different from what I know adult sand tigers look like from Shark Alley in Baltimore.
After my tour, we got to work. Dan and I worked together to vacuum the floors of two of the larger tanks, before I joined the 10am cownose ray feeding. Their biggest and oldest cownose is named Mystic, and she’s very noticable because she’s at least two-thirds bigger than the rest of them. The rest of mine and Dan’s morning was spent helping to build a new rack for smaller tanks. We helped cut the fiberglass bars, and I was the driller making all teh holes for the screws and helping to screw it all together. After we had finished the first story of the rack, it was time to break for lunch – our thai food had arrived.
After lunch, I headed to the other side of the warehouse to the turtle hospital. Most of the sea turtles have been released, with only two left (one just finished medication, the other is getting moved to a longer-term treatment facility). I carefully siphon-vaccumed their two tanks and then helped the team finish draining one of the empty tanks. Once the turtle team was done for the day, I rejoined the construction efforts and we finished another section of the rack.
And then, all too soon, my time with Dan at NEAq was done! What a whirlwind week, every day brought so many new experiences to the table and I love the New England Aquarium even more for it. It was truly such a fantastic week, and I couldn’t have asked for a better wrap-up to my aquarium weeks. Thank you Dan!
– Sofia