The another sidelight of this is that when it was, I think we’d had the animals two weeks. I’m not a marine mammal trainer, so I, I said to the assistant curator, I said, you know, I’m gonna head back to Chicago. You’ve got a staff here that can care… Read More
So we get in the car and we start driving. The activists run around our facility, it’s a city block, and they get to the east side and we just were able to pull out before they surrounded the car and made us stop. We had, we couldn’t drive other… Read More
It’s already been issued by the government, it’s legit. And this is where we’re collecting the, the big deal was the Richard Donner Flotilla that was gonna try and thwart our efforts. They were gonna try find us number one out on the ocean and then get between us and… Read More
And we show it on a map, this is what we think it is. And they said, no, no, no, no, that’s not the Southern California, but it’s a much smaller area. So that we were more concentrated and would probably not realize success. This actually became contentious. We hired… Read More
And just like the ancient Mariners, when you get to an area and you see a huge flock of birds just over the water, probably feeding, that’s where you’re gonna find fish that they’re feeding on. And also dolphins, hopefully, that are feeding on the fish. And that’s, that was… Read More
One of the first pushbacks was by activists saying, well, what does that mean?… Read More
So had to go to the research and there’s actually surveys that are done by the federal government that identify approximate numbers of animals in a given population. So we said, okay, we’re going to collect off the Southern California bite, B-I-G-H-T, and it’s a huge area off the coast… Read More
Sure, sure. The collection, when I became Marine Mammal curator, the collection was pretty well set. Bill Breaker, the director, had basically overseen that prior to my coming on board and said, Pacific White sided dolphins, beluga whales, sea otters, harbor Seals, California sea lions. We also were head put… Read More
What was it taking with manpower from the Shedd to acquire it?… Read More
How long had you started thinking about this, that kind of stuff?… Read More
And were you running the, or were you running this operation?… Read More
That’s a hot one. The, we had conducted the dolphin collection in two parts. We had a permit to take eight animals. The first venture was 1989, I believe. Anyway, we collected five animals. We had ’em in a, an offsite facility so they could acclimate, you know, to our… Read More
Even though it’s a permitted activity by the National Marine Fishery Service or by US Fish and Wildlife Service, there’s a lot of consideration as far as how many you can take and from what environment you can take them. So What were the steps though that to, to get… Read More
You know, if this, like, this happens in the wild, you just don’t see it in the wild. The second collection was tremendously more controversial because there was a much more unified front of the animal activists trying to stop us and other facilities from acquiring animals from the wild. Read More
The other thing about, you know, the, the breeding programs is working cooperatively and there’s a very sophisticated animal record keeping system in a ZA such that we monitor and we actually try to identify pairings of animals that are not closely related. There’s, there’s a lot of scrutiny paid… Read More
So sometimes putting an animal in a specific habitat is not in their best interest because of pollution or somehow it’s been altered. So there’s, there’s a lot of considerations that have to be considered when looking at a national scope or international. So You had talked about activism. Read More
Can you go into a little detail though about the white sided dolphin issue and how you were involved and what was going on?… Read More
Well, okay, there’s still a lot of animals, but at least you’ve narrowed the scope. She aquarium’s tagline at one time was the world’s aquarium, which some of us in the, in the husbandry area thought, who, kind of a bold statement, you know, we don’t have all the world’s… Read More
The big thing with the habitats is that generally they’re being degraded. We have climate change, we’re raising the temperature of the oceans. I would never dream that’s possible, but animals respond to that. Animals may migrate, animals may not tolerate that. A big thing that Shedds involved with our… Read More
Boy, you know, the thing that jumps to mind, it’s going to seem kind of unusual, but to run an aquarium is very expensive. There’s number one, the variety in the number of exhibits. But the bottom line is you have life support that is critical to these animals. Certainly… Read More