Well, two weeks of my internship done
already and oddly enough, it feels like I've been here so much longer.
Anyways, I decided for this post I will
focus more on how my internship began and some of the general tasks I have to
do everyday.
My internship started off by meeting my
supervisor and getting a general tour of the areas I would be working in. There
was another intern that started that day as well and our supervisor went over
the internship manual with us. After that I was just thrown right in with the
aquarists at Discovery Reef and they started introducing me to the aquatic
zoo-keeping field. Every day is different in some way, but certain things are
the same. Mornings for me are mainly filled with food prep, YSI water quality
testing, raising brine shrimp, and feeding all the animals. When there are
multiple people working these jobs get done really fast and I have to occupy my
time with some of the other jobs that need to get done. Obviously keeping tanks
clean is really important and a lot of time is spent on that. Water changes and
water quality tests a two other tasks that are frequently done. Below is a
photo of one of the aquarist cleaning the Coral Exhibit:
So far my favorite thing to do is the
food prep and feeding the animals. Feeding the sharks is really fun. The
aquarists have to feed the zebra shark every afternoon. She is target trained
to be moved to a separate tank for feeding while a diver is in the Discovery
Reef tank feeding the other fish. There are two bonnethead sharks that we feed
from the surface of the tank. The bonnethead sharks look like hammerhead
sharks, and they are related to them, but the bonnetheads are about three feet
long. Below is a picture of a zebra shark and a bonnethead shark:
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| ZEBRA SHARK Photo from: http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/-/m/images/animal-guide/fishes/zebra-shark.jpg?bc=white&h=678&mh=738&mw=1312&w=1200&usecustomfunctions=1&cropx=0&cropy=81 |
BONNETHEAD SHARK
Photo from: http://www.tnaqua.org/Libraries/Fish/Bonnethead_Shark.sflb.ashx |
Oddly enough, as much as chemistry has
never been my favorite subject in school, I really enjoy conducting the water
quality tests. Every morning we use the YSI to measure salinity, temperature,
pH, and ORP (oxidation reduction potential). Aside from this we conduct tests
for nitrite, ammonia, nitrate, phosphate, and alkalinity levels in the
different water systems.
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I'll leave anyone reading this post with a fun fact of the week:
Do you know why the tanks at Discovery
Reef are made of acrylic instead of glass?
This is because acrylic will not warp
your vision of the animals inside the tank. Glass can magnify or distort you
view of a fish, so when guests are looking through the walls of the tank the
size of the animal that they see is the actual size of that animal.
Till next time,
Sierra
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