Some animals are very specific as far as what, what they want to eat. Qua bears, for instance, when we had the project seahorse collection, our special exhibit, I remember many of our aquarium colleagues saying, oh, good luck with that. We can feed ’em nothing but Brian Shrimp. ’cause… Read More
Yes, tremendously. The sophistication of the job, I think is grown by leaps and bounds. Back in the day. It was important to get to know the animals, of course, know their taxonomy, you know, do a decent job of exhibiting them. I don’t think there was a tremendous amount… Read More
It’s grown to the point that not only is the natural history important, but certainly the environment from which the animals come and how do we best represent that?… Read More
Because we wanna educate our public about where these animals live and what are the threats to their continued existence or to their habitat type of thing. Again, the record keeping that has been generated through a ZA animal record keeping systems, pretty sophisticated conservation breeding programs. There’s all these… Read More
It’s like, well it’s, you know, part of our special exhibits we’re highlighting this animal group and we’d like you to get more familiar with them. The, the, the bottom line is once the exhibit came down, and it was usually two years, was the run that we would allocate. Read More
So Do you feel that the role of the curator has changed from when you started?… Read More
Yep. The special exhibits was, gosh, highly successful. And it didn’t always originally deal with live animals with, that’s the trend we went to, to the point that it was live animals. Our point in doing it was to highlight a certain group of animals like frogs. And you could… Read More
I remember we had a lizards exhibit, we had a, a monitor lizard and Komodo dragon was on loan to us, big animal. Read More
A lot of people are like, wow, you know, what’s that doing here at an aquarium?… Read More
And you know, as far as working with other facilities, that becomes more of an international effort, which is more successful I think. So The Shedd has, with design the Shedd has had a number of what I’d call temporary exhibits that have lasted a long time frog seahorses. Read More
What is the advantage of that?… Read More
And then what happens afterward to these animals?… Read More
Yes, yes. Generally US facilities that I’m aware of are Sister Aquariums in Europe and probably Japan most commonly. A lot of interest on, in both geographic areas in fishes and zoos and aquariums and that type of thing. And then, you know, when you say like a sister facility,… Read More
I mean it’s, you know, the classic example of food fish that I think of as orange ruffy, when they first came on the scene, it was like, oh my gosh, this fish is delicious. And the community just went crazy collecting, you know, the commercial fisheries collecting these animals. Read More
Seahorses in many cases are in a tough way because the environment’s not what it should be. And there was a lot of international effort at not only China to propagate them so we don’t have to extract them from the wild. But also talking to local communities that are… Read More
But the idea of them approaching people in boats is not a good thing. Witness down in Florida, Dr. Randy Wells’ work in Sarasota Bay, how many times they find animals dead that have ingested things, that fishing hooks, things that are injurious to their health. The, the, I’m way… Read More
This poor guy doesn’t know this environment and is gonna be confused and most likely picked off by a predator probably in a day or two. So the born, born free philosophy sounds good, was great in the movie, but it doesn’t really work as putting animals back in the… Read More
And does, do aquariums have sister aquarium relationships?… Read More
Matter of fact, we had a program at Shedd ko called Shedd the Straw. They had a number, I don’t know where this came from, but they said there’s upwards of 500 million plastic straws used every single day in the United States. Think about it, you get a cocktail… Read More
Is it for the purpose of putting them back in the wild or do you want ’em for your collection?… Read More