AQUARIUM INTERNSHIP

In the summer of 2021, I had an internship at the Scott Aquarium at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium. Through this internship, I had the opportunity to learn how to be an aquarist and how to conduct research in a zoo setting. The internship provided me with the opportunity to do a research project and present this project to a group of peers and zookeepers. Because I had lots of research experience through MSU, my supervisors wanted me to do a more complex project so I could get the most out of the project. Therefore, we decided that my project would be to target train two eels in the aquarium. To do this, I had to write a project proposal and give a copy of an ethics statement to the head of the aquarium. The basics of my project were that I first had to target train an eel to learn the technique of target training. Then, I had to take this technique and target train an eel with an extreme vision deficit. For this eel, the process was harder because I had to figure out what aspect of the target ball he could see (or if he could see it at all), and then I had to also train him to come to it and grab the food from it. I kept a log every day of what I did and how the eels reacted to keep track of my progress. I had to keep a food log as well to make sure the eels were getting a balanced diet. At the end of my internship, I had to make a PowerPoint presentation to present to my peers to explain to them what I did and how it will benefit the aquarium in the future. Videos of my final project can be seen on the bottom of the page.

​

Although I did not have any formal writing assignments for this project, I still had to do research and analyze articles that I found to see if they would help me on the project. For example, I had to locate an article about the food preferences and size preferences of the two eels to figure out what their “favorite” foods were so I knew what was the best to use for feeding the individuals. After seeing that there is such a wide variety in their diet, I decided that I would have to make my own protocol for a food and size “buffet” for the individual to determine what to use as a high reward item. This project also taught me a lot about the ethics of research, especially when it comes to working with animals. All the training of the animals that I did was public. This means that I had a close eye by many on what I was doing, and I did not want to mess up and do something that may come off as unethical. The biggest thing that I learned about why the research in zoos is ethical is because everything is voluntary. I was never to force my eel to eat the food that I was offering him. If he was not interested after about 15 minutes of being offered the food, then his training was done for the day, and he could eat food from the broadcast feed of the tank if he chose to. When I did the training, I was on the public side of the aquarium. Every guest that was present at the aquarium during that time could see me doing the training and could directly ask me questions while I was performing the task. While doing this, I had so many questions about the ethics of researching and using animals as subjects. It was hard at first for me to communicate why my training was ethical to the public because I did not know how to say it in terms that they would understand. But as I got more comfortable with my research and understood the project and the ethics of the project more, it became easier to communicate this information to the audience. Doing this project, I had to learn how an aquarist would allocate time each day to work on their research. I found that there is not a lot of time in the workday to do an advanced research project when you have to care for animals and do maintenance on systems every day. I learned that sometimes in the zoo setting, research is pushed to the side. The first few weeks, I was not very efficient in making time to do my research, so I ended up doing a lot of it at home. As I got more comfortable with how I needed to structure my day to allocate enough time to do research, I began taking less and less home with me. I hope that learning this fact soon will allow me to make the adjustments I need to make right away when I get a job in an aquarium setting in which  I will do research.

​

The skills that I gained through this research project will help me if I get a job working for an aquarium in the future. I have learned skills that allow me to work with an animal and deeply study and analyze the behavior of the individual. Additionally, doing this project I have learned how to closely monitor an animal's behavior to see if they are acting out of the ordinary for themselves. This skill will greatly help me as an aquarium keeper because you have to know if your animals are sick or injured so you can treat them properly. Having a project like this as an intern is a great first step in the industry to show a future employer that I can handle a research project along with other daily tasks.