Aquatics Internship Week 5 and 6
Time to play catch up. :) Hopefully you're bored this weekend because I have a lot of reading for you.
Now, this gel diet. :) We feed it to both our freshwater and saltwater fish. It's an omnivore diet that includes fish meal, shrimp meal, nori seaweed, spirulina algae (which gives it the green color), krill, vitamins and a few other things. All of this is held together with a unsweeted, flavorless jello. We let them cool on large dough pans and then weigh and cut the gel before freezing it so it lasts longer. When we do feed the fish, the gel is easy to cut into any size pieces, making it a good option for all our omnivore fish. The seafood variety found in the gel offers a great nutritional balance for our fish.
Another thing we make at the zoo are anemone cubes. We melt them into containers with live brine shrimp and this is what I use a turkey baster to distribute to the anemones in the tidepool. We throw various fish (capelin, herring, sardine), shrimp, clam, brine, and krill into a large blender. We blend it all together into a smelly seafood smoothie and pour the mixture into ice cube trays and freeze them.
I'd also like to briefly mention quarantine. I know you captive wildlife minors will know all about it, but some others may not have heard. All captive facilities quarantine their new animals and sick animals. This is so when you get a new animal from the wild or another facility, that animal doesn't transfer illness or parasites to your native population at your facility. In the aquariums business, quarantine is very important because some diseases can not only be on the fish but also in the water. Spreading disease can be as easy as dipping your hand into an infected tank to feed and infecting a clean tank next to it by putting your hand in. Fish holding and Shark holding at the Minnesota Zoo are used for quarantine or sick/surplus animals. We put our fish through formalin, panacur, and copper treatments. The fish may not have any visual signs of disease, but you need to be sure. If an infected fish is introduced to a large tank, you could loose thousands of dollars in fish or corals. After the quarantine period (which typically doesn't last longer than four weeks) the fish can be introduced to their new tank and tankmates.
We also shipped out nine (surplus) white-spotted bamboo sharks during these two weeks. Surplus animals are animals the facility doesn't need because it already has enough, or the surplus animals to not contribute to the genetic diversity of the facilities population. Now all sharks observe internal fertilization, but embryonic growth can happen one of three ways. Some sharks will lay eggs, others will give live birth either with a placental connection or a yolk-sack. Egg-laying sharks tend to be the easiest to breed. White-spotted bamboos are egg layers, making it easy to end up with surplus animals. What is nice though, it that all of our sharks got offers and now have new homes.
Lastly, I should finally address the sharks in danger issue I brought up a ways back. To avoid too much rambling, I will strongly suggest you watch the documentary Sharkwater if you have not done so already. You can watch the trailer here:
http://www.sharkwater.com/
It's a great movie. You'll never know what's been going on out in the ocean until you see it. 4-7 humans are killed by sharks every year...worldwide. That's a tiny number considering how many millions of people swim in our oceans every year. Over 100 million sharks are killed every year by humans. They are mainly killed for shark fin soup which is popular in Asia. It's a very wasteful practice because the fins are all cut off and typically the rest of the shark is thrown back into the ocean alive to die.
And for those of you afraid of being attacked by a shark, here's some information to put your mind at ease...or make you laugh (some of these are almost embarrassing).
You're more likely to die from __________ than sharks:
-car accident
-heart disease
-dog, pig, tiger, or elephant
-lighting strike
-drowning
-coconut hitting you in the head
-faulty toasters
-vending machine
I can't imagine being at the funeral of someone who was killed by a vending machine. They must have really wanted their snickers bar...
*nom*
Now, this gel diet. :) We feed it to both our freshwater and saltwater fish. It's an omnivore diet that includes fish meal, shrimp meal, nori seaweed, spirulina algae (which gives it the green color), krill, vitamins and a few other things. All of this is held together with a unsweeted, flavorless jello. We let them cool on large dough pans and then weigh and cut the gel before freezing it so it lasts longer. When we do feed the fish, the gel is easy to cut into any size pieces, making it a good option for all our omnivore fish. The seafood variety found in the gel offers a great nutritional balance for our fish.
Another thing we make at the zoo are anemone cubes. We melt them into containers with live brine shrimp and this is what I use a turkey baster to distribute to the anemones in the tidepool. We throw various fish (capelin, herring, sardine), shrimp, clam, brine, and krill into a large blender. We blend it all together into a smelly seafood smoothie and pour the mixture into ice cube trays and freeze them.
I'd also like to briefly mention quarantine. I know you captive wildlife minors will know all about it, but some others may not have heard. All captive facilities quarantine their new animals and sick animals. This is so when you get a new animal from the wild or another facility, that animal doesn't transfer illness or parasites to your native population at your facility. In the aquariums business, quarantine is very important because some diseases can not only be on the fish but also in the water. Spreading disease can be as easy as dipping your hand into an infected tank to feed and infecting a clean tank next to it by putting your hand in. Fish holding and Shark holding at the Minnesota Zoo are used for quarantine or sick/surplus animals. We put our fish through formalin, panacur, and copper treatments. The fish may not have any visual signs of disease, but you need to be sure. If an infected fish is introduced to a large tank, you could loose thousands of dollars in fish or corals. After the quarantine period (which typically doesn't last longer than four weeks) the fish can be introduced to their new tank and tankmates.
We also shipped out nine (surplus) white-spotted bamboo sharks during these two weeks. Surplus animals are animals the facility doesn't need because it already has enough, or the surplus animals to not contribute to the genetic diversity of the facilities population. Now all sharks observe internal fertilization, but embryonic growth can happen one of three ways. Some sharks will lay eggs, others will give live birth either with a placental connection or a yolk-sack. Egg-laying sharks tend to be the easiest to breed. White-spotted bamboos are egg layers, making it easy to end up with surplus animals. What is nice though, it that all of our sharks got offers and now have new homes.
Lastly, I should finally address the sharks in danger issue I brought up a ways back. To avoid too much rambling, I will strongly suggest you watch the documentary Sharkwater if you have not done so already. You can watch the trailer here:
http://www.sharkwater.com/
It's a great movie. You'll never know what's been going on out in the ocean until you see it. 4-7 humans are killed by sharks every year...worldwide. That's a tiny number considering how many millions of people swim in our oceans every year. Over 100 million sharks are killed every year by humans. They are mainly killed for shark fin soup which is popular in Asia. It's a very wasteful practice because the fins are all cut off and typically the rest of the shark is thrown back into the ocean alive to die.
And for those of you afraid of being attacked by a shark, here's some information to put your mind at ease...or make you laugh (some of these are almost embarrassing).
You're more likely to die from __________ than sharks:
-car accident
-heart disease
-dog, pig, tiger, or elephant
-lighting strike
-drowning
-coconut hitting you in the head
-faulty toasters
-vending machine
I can't imagine being at the funeral of someone who was killed by a vending machine. They must have really wanted their snickers bar...
*nom*