Animal Updates | Mammals | Conservation | Volunteering

Monday, February 25, 2008

Staci

Update: Sea Lions Behind-the-Scenes

If you’ve had the opportunity to visit the Aquarium lately and be a part of one of our Behind-the-Scenes Tours, you’ve probably caught a glimpse of our two youngest California sea lions. If you recall, Harpo and Milo were two of the four animals welcomed to the Aquarium a few months ago. While Troy and Odin have already joined the family in the main Seal and Sea Lion Exhibit, Milo and Harpo are still working hard with their trainers on new behaviors and living it up in their home behind-the-scenes.

Just like the main exhibit, the animals in the mammal pad behind-the-scenes have multiple training and feeding sessions per day. It is very important they learn several basic behaviors before going into the main exhibit! As you can imagine, having two very young, energetic sea lions running wild in an exhibit could be dangerous for the animals and trainers alike. Our mammalogists are working diligently with these youngsters and getting them ready to join the rest of the gang. They’re learning very quickly, and it’s such a treat to be able to watch them grow!

In addition to their feeding and training, as always with animals, there’s a lot of cleaning to be done! One of our projects during one of my recent volunteer days was completely cleaning the mammal pad. We scrubbed the decks, cleaned toys, and even drained and scrubbed their main pool! Harpo and Milo both hung out in the shade in their kiddie pools and watched us work, occasionally coming out to say hello or slide across the deck. It was a slightly warmer day (even in February) so the automatic sprinklers felt great to those of us doing the scrubbing. Sadly, we didn’t have kiddie pools of our own!

At this point it is unclear when we will see Milo and Harpo in the main exhibit, but as fast as they’re learning and growing, I would definitely keep and eye out for them sometime in the near future! We’ll keep you posted!

Sustainable Seafood Day

In a blog post a few months back, I touched on the subject of sustainable seafood. If you eat seafood, you can make environmentally informed decisions on what you purchase! Please join us this Saturday, March 1, for the Aquarium’s annual Sustainable Seafood Day. There will be sustainable cooking demonstrations, tons of useful information, recipes, and of course, samples to try! This is a fun, interesting, and delicious way to learn how to help our oceans. I hope to see you there!

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