So there was, you know, necropsies performed on animals trying to identify a bacterium or a parasite so he could treat those animals from that same tank that were still alive. The challenges came probably toward mid to late eighties, and that’s when we got into the marine mammal field. Read More
We did have, way back, we had a dolphin, a South American river dolphin, that was the subject of, one woman in particular is concerned that, you know, we shouldn’t have that, this poor animal suffering, da da da. And I didn’t deal with her directly, but I could see… Read More
Can you comment on that?… Read More
Certainly the smaller fishes. The other thing when, besides horse art, weed feed is trout chow. It’s just dried pelleted foods like dog chow, but formulated for fish still, we use that in the off days. But on the the regular feeding days, we got into different species of fish… Read More
You know, it was a time of tremendous growth at the aquarium. Not only of the animal collection, but in the old directions we were going. Real easy thing is, when I first started as an Aquarius, the diet we offered the fish was very basic and included horse heart. Read More
Certainly the main thing was water quality monitoring, but also it had to do with the actual analysis of why did an animal get sick or why did it die?… Read More
Now you’ve held many positions, but being a curator, especially in the eighties when you were there, what were the advantages as you saw them or disadvantages of being in that position?… Read More
And I’m like, well, I pull my people back, you know, outta safety. He goes, we actually received that threat. And I’m like, and they also told me that if you’re beyond three nautical miles from the coastline, we can’t be out there. We can’t help you. And we were… Read More
I was called to a meeting with Coast Guard from San Diego and Los Angeles, and they said they wanted to know what we’re gonna do, where we’re gonna collect all the specifics. Read More
And at one point, one of the Coast Guard individuals said, what would you do if one of the activists jumped in the water with a knife?… Read More
Activism. We’re a large city. We had local individuals. We actually had some people that were more international, even in scope. But certainly on a national level coming in to the front of the aquarium and staging protests, trying to divert our guests away from coming to the Aquaquarium. The… Read More
And the way we ended up curtailing, that was number one. There was not a lot of interest on the half on behalf of the audience, but it was disruptive. They were distracted, but we had curtain walls that would drop down and that would, that was the end of… Read More
It was a, it wasn’t being used as a marina anymore, but we had to create a barrier around the marina with 24 hour security, just because the activists were parked right across the street and looking for us to screw up so that they could capture that they would… Read More
So What, during your time, what was your most difficult time at the aquarium?… Read More
Oh gosh. I would venture to say probably when we started acquiring the marine mammals, a tremendous amount of animal, right?… Read More
Probably larger fish would be the answer to something like that. That has not happened. We did try it with the sea otters and Monterey Bay Aquarium had success and I actually got the list of fish. They had success with putting in with the sea otters. Sea otters had… Read More
But during your time at the Shedd Aquarium, what had, what did you hope to accomplish but you were unable to finish?… Read More
Oh gosh. There were many things that we were working toward. I guess if I had to say one thing as when I became the director over the entire animal collection, I was looking for ways to meld the marine mammal department with the Fishes Department cross training, for instance,… Read More
We worked with the octopus, very intelligent animal, but getting the trainers to interact with the Aquarius was a bit of a challenge. They don’t necessarily speak the same language. So that was in progression, I presume it’s still going, that they’re looking for things to accomplish together. The, the… Read More
And the best thing is the fish quality is so good. My wife, who would never eat fish, loves the fish now every week. It’s a good fresh product. I don’t know how they do it. We’re far from any ocean. There’s some that come from the Great Lakes like… Read More