Renovations and Food Duty

The past two days have been extremely busy for the aquarium since the new Ohio Lakes and Rivers exhibit will be open in less than a week. So, it's been all hands on deck to finish everything on the to-do list. Over the weekend a flooring company was working to install the new pebble flooring mixture to the exhibit, so the area was completely closed off on Monday, causing a bit of chaos with the guests. In order to keep things running smoothly for both the aquarium staff and the guests, I helped to reroute the guests around the exhibit so that they could continue with their visit. This went on until lunch, where afterwards I transferred over to the education department to create shark identification flashcards to use for one of the many education programs that the aquarium has. 

Today was definitely more interesting and more educational for me. When I wasn't hard at work cleaning bags of substrate for the tanks in the new exhibit, I was able to work with the animal husbandry team for a portion of both the morning and the afternoon where I  helped to prepare food for the different marine animals in the tanks. This morning, food prep started in the kitchen; we cut frozen Capelin fish into chunks for the stingrays in the touch pool, we thawed frozen, unhatched brine shrimp and mixed it with saltwater and fortified algae (for extra nutrients) to feed the seahorses and the moon jellyfish. 

Life Cycle of the Moon Jellyfish

While doing our rounds to feed the animals, I learned the process in which the aquarium hatches its own cultures of moon jellyfish to display in its tanks. They have three separate tanks to house jellyfish in each of the main stages in their life cycle; tank 1 houses the polyps/budding polyps, tank 2 houses the ephyra, and tank 3 houses the fully matured medusa. Once the jellyfish has completed one stage of its life, it is transferred to the next largest tank to continue to grow. Jellyfish are filter feeders, (meaning that they eat small organisms that float close enough in the water column for their tentacles to latch onto) so the brine shrimp solution has to small enough for them to consume with ease. 

Another highlight of my day was feeding the stingray in the coastal touch pool. It is a really cool experience to interact with these animals as they swim up to you and suck a piece of frozen raw fish out of your fist! The mouth of the stingray is on its belly so we have to make sure to hold the fish under the water far enough so that the stingray can hover over our hands to get the fish. So far, this has definitely been one of my favorite parts of this job, because there's nothing better than getting to interact with the animals first hand.