They’re not familiar with that either. So the aquatic veterinary medicine world was way behind zoo and terrestrial animal at that time. And then I just have to share with you the salt water, we would make it up, we had a reservoir of a hundred thousand gallons. So you… Read More
And the lab at that time was a one person operation, one big room. The water testing was very simple, very, I mean, we did a number of parameters, but nothing as far as sophisticated equipment disease analysis was often kind of hit and miss. There wasn’t a lot of… Read More
Some of ’em were 80 pound, but I think the sodium chloride was 50 pound. So you bring it up to the lip of the mixing VA cut the top and pour it in. It was a three day operation, if you’re lucky. And I remember at the end of… Read More
And how did you think you might achieve it?… Read More
You know, at the time, advancement in the early days happened pretty quickly for me, just because positions opened and I expressed interest. So I was not an Aquarius for that long. I’m trying to think, I think it was 1980 that I might have moved to the lab. And… Read More
At this time, as you’re doing your job and starting out, at what point did you know that you wanted to do more than be an Aquarius?… Read More
We’d blown the treasury on the oceanarium and we never did get animatronics. Read More
I remember touring an individual from Disney, and you’re familiar with their animatronics through all their, the animal kingdom or the, what do you call it?… Read More
You know, I probably not in a major way, because I was so new to the aquarium, I, again, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to aquariums in a, you know, my developing years or anything. And when I saw Shedd aquarium, it was kind of like, wow, you… Read More
The magic kingdom. And I’m walking this individual down the north stairs of the Oceanarium. And at the bottom there was a tide pool exhibit, and above it was a tree with an eagle and a nest. And the wings were spread like this. And before we got to the… Read More
Were there any experiences then when you started that changed your notion of what an aquaquarium should be?… Read More
The animal weight, as I recall, 230 pounds, it was the shell was like this, just huge. The head was about basketball size and we took four of us and carefully got em outta the exhibit. ’cause they can extend their neck pretty far and easily snap off a finger… Read More
I was like, whoa. That’s what I learned about care and taking care of that animal and how to feed it and everything beyond that. Way back before my time, we actually had a tursi ops, a bottle mills dolphin at the end of gallery one, which in retrospect was… Read More
Chico? The River Dolphin was very unique. He was at the end of Gallery five, and it would’ve been probably about 20,000 gallons of water. We also had a, my gallery, this large alligator snapping turtle, which they’re not found as far north as Chicago, but they, they’re found in… Read More
He’s not eating. And I’m like, how do we do that?… Read More
And was there any exper, well the other question, were there any special animals at that time that were unique?… Read More
When we started building special exhibits with live animals, we had a, a team of aqua that had to facilitate the care and the setting up of the fishes environments. So that was probably, I’d say probably six people and special exhibits alone. So. Read More
Yeah. Pretty much only men in the fish’s department. And I would guess, I don’t know, 10 people, something like that. There were six galleries and there were six people responsible for the galleries, and then two guys responsible for the tributaries. Former balanced from the small Asian motif area. Read More
And he enjoyed sitting at our company and he knew the scientific names as well as we did. He was very proud of that. And so I kind of got to know him first at that level where we could just sit and chat. But it was always like, oh,… Read More
But it wasn’t until I became curator of marine mammals that I got to sit at the big table. Read More