The Life Aquarist

Cownose rays are THE BEST. Big ol water puppies. A fun fact- they have little flaps that come down in front of their mouth to help the root around in the sand to find prey.

There’s not too much of a difference honestly. I’m not going to say specific locations where I’ve seen good/bad things, but I’ll give you some generalities. I’ve seen AZA facilities that are really messy behind the scenes. I’ve seen non-accredited facilities that are spotless. And I’ve seen everything in between. AZA requires that you have a lab for water quality and necropsies that is different from your food prep kitchen. I’ve seen some non-AZA do all of this in the same room. AZA requires a vet to routinely be on site at least twice a month. A lot of non-AZA places will only call vets “as needed”. So you see a lot less sick animals treated and less real quarantine procedures in the absence of a routine vet. Record keeping is usually a hot mess at non-AZA because no one is holding that accountable. Something that is an issue at every aquarium I’ve ever worked at or been to is storage. We just have a lot of stuff that we need and there’s never enough good places to store things. So anytime I’ve been behind the scenes anywhere you will see weird aquarist ways of storing things on shelves, hanging from the ceiling, hap hazardly piling things, etc. But there’s no AZA standard for organizing haha. I would encourage you to look up the AZA standards and give them a read. It will give you a pretty good idea of what standards places are held to, and I bet you can easily pick out which ones are too hard or inconvenient to do if the facility isn’t accredited.

Hey! Touch pools at *good* zoos and aquariums are designed in a way that the animals have choice control over whether they want to be touched or not. So while animals don’t feel emotions the same way we do, we can assume that (after they have acclimated to their touch pool environment after a few weeks and figure out all the locations) if they want to be touched they will come to the areas where they can be, and if they don’t want to be touched they will stay in the area where they won’t be. There is no germ danger in either direction from touching a shark or stingray. They are not like amphibians and do not absorb things through their skin or secrete things. What is very important is to touch the animals exactly the way the touch pool attendant tells you to. It can different between facilities but at my aquarium we ask that guests only use two fingers to touch (more fingers promotes grabbing, one finger promotes poking) on the edges of the stingray’s wing. This spot on the body is all skin and muscle, contains no vital organs and it far from the eyes and mouth. For sharks we ask the same two finger on the second half of the body. The sharks are just big puppy dogs so any of their body is fine to touch, but if we say second half of the body then fingers stay very far from the sharks mouth. If touch pools were dangerous for the humans or the animals, then experienced animal care workers would not let you do it. But it’s safe, it’s fun, and if done correctly it’s zero stress for the animals. I definitely recommend touching cute creatures when presented a safe opportunity like a touch pool!

Yeah. My company owners have actually contacted me commending me on my work and I’ve signed a contract with them to help them produce content for the aquarium’s social media. They only follow me on Facebook and Instagram but they don’t follow me on tumblr 😏 Haha.