itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
GUUUURL what you even gonna do with them tiny flips?
This is the kind of content I come here for.
itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
Do zoo animals ever get spayed/neutered(if it's possible to their species)?
Hardly ever. If mating is not desired they are either put on birth control or just kept separated. Most zoo animals have the opportunity to be a part of the Species Survival Plan (SSP). And therefore aren’t spayed or neutered unless it’s for some weird medical reason.
To add to this (like what cacajao said) virtually all hybrid orangutans in North America are either vasectomized or have their tubes tied. Male ungulates are semi-frequently castrated as well, especially if they are over represented. It generally makes them more complacent and easier to house with other species/co-specifics. In Europe they have also been experimenting with castrating young male gorillas in the effort to allow them to spend their lives in the parental group. Vasectomies with big cats aren’t super unusual either, especially for animals that are over represented or of an unknown pedigree.
Fucking damn bitchy boa
VERY fast chester jumping at INCREDIBLE high speed!
My life is an ongoing series of frustrations and headaches.
porpoise-princess-deactivated20
Why SONIC
because he gOTTA GO FAST
kohola-kai
FASTer FASTERFASTERFASTER
suckmywholewheatass
what
Sonic’s gotta go fast
Oh look I also did the thing that @ulibugs did!
itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
Animal Groupies
PLEASE READ. I’M TRYING TO HELP Y’ALL (and also lower my blood pressure).
Since I have accumulated a few followers, I feel there is a need to post this particular installment of The Middle Flipper. I AM INDEED one of the people she collaborated with for this article, so you’ll be reading my words and hers. I 100% admit to being guilty of groupie-like behavior in my teens and early 20s. I’m very lucky all I had was the internet and I didn’t live anywhere near a marine park when I was at my most annoying. I probably would have been the embodiment of what today-me hates most. I am VERY GOOD at speaking on this topic because I’ve been on both sides of it at this point in my life. It is also time for a RANT! God, I love rants.
I am not referring to folks who act like normal human beings, bring their bigass cameras, and hang out taking photos all day long. I’m STILL one of those people from time to time. You better believe when I visit another facility I FILL SD cards full of images. We like to see familiar faces. It is FINE to be a regular!! We LOVE you!!
The difference between a groupie and a regular is like porn. You know it when you see it.
It goes like….
ME: “Hi, I’m shipshapeseal, if you have any questions about the animals let me know!”
REGULAR: “Hey! How’s it going? I saw on the news you rescued another manatee last night. How’s it doing?”
GROUPIE: *cuts you off mid sentence* “That’s Squeakers right? Her mom is Flippy right? Is Squeakers pregnant? I heard she had a stillborn 3 years ago, who was the father? Where’s Bobert the dolphin? IS HE DEAD? DID HE DIED?”
OR
GROUPIE: *Avoids eye contact because they’ve done the above in the past and know how shady they are already*
Straight up, if someone I barely know or a total stranger comes up to me at my job and starts rambling on about the animals in my care, thinking they know how to ID them all, who they are related to, who they supposedly get along with, THINKING they know their personality, I AM NOT GOING TO BE IMPRESSED. I am NOT going to suddenly kick back and talk shop with you like you’re one of us. I’m going to have a headache from how hard my eyes have rolled back into my head and I’m going to try to excuse myself from you because you’re an INSUFFERABLE know-it-all. Respect the person standing in front of you. That goes for…every social interaction ever pretty much.
This post makes me so very happy.
HEY WOW LOOK AT THIS QUALITY PENGUIN THIS IS ONE HQ PENGUIN 10/10 PENGUIN MUCH AMAZE
itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
porpoise-princess-deactivated20
Question: how can I incorporate an orca into a couples Halloween costume? The only thing I can think of is trainer/orca but obviously I don’t want to do that
I like the chinese dragon type orca costume suggested.
Or perhaps a Orca/Seal or fish costume?
Male/Female orca couples costume?
itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
Alright, so I have a question for you. At my facility we have penguins, sea lions, sharks, sea turtles and all the other razzmatazz. Yet even then our earliest shift starts at 7:30 in the morning, and sometimes even later than that (switches to 8:30 sometimes) Now I realise Seaworld is a TON bigger than the place I work at, but is there any specific reason your guys fish prep shifts start so early, or do you just have so much fish you need to get started so early to get it all out in time?
OH BOY HOWDY is this gonna ever be the loooooongest response you never wanted. My department (Animal Care) has a hand in preparing and delivering the fish to every single marine mammal area in the park whether we work with those animals directly or not. There are two early-early shifts. The Wild Arctic food prep shift which starts at 4AM, and the North Food Prep (NFP) shift that begins even earlier. Wild Arctic has a big enough freezer to stockpile food for about a week. The other mammal areas do not have big freezers of their own, so they rely on things to be delivered from the main Zoological Operations Commissary. The following includes only food prep for the marine mammals who specifically eat fish. The manatees have their own lettuce cooler.
For the NFP shift, two or three Animal Care staffers arrive at the main commissary at 3:00AM, sometimes 2:30 if there are manatee calves who need fed around the clock. These two or three people will handle an average of 3000lbs of fish during the shift. There are medical procedures to be done in the morning, and first training sessions and feeds often start as early as 7:00AM. So, this all has to be done and over with as fast as humanly possible. It’s a lot of fish, dudes. I’ll use capelin as an example. Right now we are thawing 62 boxes (flats) of capelin which are 22lbs each. This does not include the still-frozen boxes delivered to Whale and Dolphin Theater and Sea Lion and Otter Stadium. It’s a lot, and that’s JUST the capelin.
When you first arrive at the shift, probably yawning and maybe momentarily questioning your life choices, you immediately begin the “break out”. Which is the process of pulling out the racks of fish from the cooler that’s been thawing for 24hrs and getting all of the still-actually-very-frozen fish into the sinks to begin the water thaw. While it’s thawing, you wash the racks and scrub the floor of the cooler. The boxes the fish were packed in are flattened and taken to the recycling center at some point during the deliveries.
Next, we grab the pallet jack and go into the freezer to get the pallets of fish boxes (we call them flats…because they are sort of flat I guess?) that were made by the shift the day before. It’s about -20ºF in there, and windy from the blowers, and you’re probably already wet. So it feels…nice. You wheel the whole pallet into the kitchen and load up the racks for the next day and push them all back into the cooler. Rinse and repeat. There are two pallets worth that need to go on the racks each day.
Tired? LOL TOO BAD! Next, you drain the water from the sinks and start bucketing the fish. While one person is weighing out individual diets for the animals we specifically care for (like the otters and dolphins in the back area and Dolphin Nursery) the other person is loading up buckets which are clustered in rows based on where they’ve gotta go. We have a big board that tells us who needs what and how many buckets go where, but generally we count out stacks of buckets the day before so the poor tired 3AM person doesn’t have to brain too much. We do 30# buckets of capelin and 25# buckets of herring. We do this by feel so we don’t have to sit there and weigh each one. AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT. Generally you use a 5gal bucket to scoop the fish out and then pour it into the buckets on the floor. Picture the motion of quickly flipping a bucket when making a sand castle. The buckets of fish are then iced and loaded up onto a truck with a flat metal bed and delivered to the stadiums. There, the trainers weigh out individual diets using what we brought.
At some point, you or your compadre may have ducked out to bottle feed any baby manatees before coming back into The Battle.
The dolphin stadium does not get any thawed fish. There’s a pallet in our freezer (again, sorted the day before) of frozen boxes for them. We load that up in either a golf cart or the truck depending on preference and deliver the frozen flats to them. They leave the empty rack out for us and we load it and push it into their cooler for them. That’s the stuff they’ll be using the NEXT day as they’ve got the stuff in the cooler we brought the day before that’s been thawing for 24hrs. They have a big enough kitchen that they can do the thaw themselves.
The sea lion stadium shares a kitchen and cooler with the pacific point habitat. They get half and half thawed buckets and frozen flats. They have their own pallet in the freezer, too.
Shamu gets an Imperial buttload of thawed fish in buckets…It’s in the ballpark of 1000lbs a day. We drive it over there and the Night Watch Trainer helps us unload and then they immediately begin weighing out the killer whales’ individual diets. We then drive off into the…shit it’s nowhere near sunrise yet.
Dolphin Cove gets thawed buckets delivered as well. This used to be an Animal Care area from 1996-2015 until Training took over.
We also make up one random 10lbs bucket of capelin for aviculture. This is used for any fish-eating birds they have in rehabilitation.
Exhausted? Suck it up, buttercup! It’s time to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS! So now you clean the commissary A.K.A. “Fish House” because it looks like it’s been hit by a scaly, fishy tornado. Better not leave even a single herring scale stuck to any of the surfaces in there!
At this point, it’s about 6:00AM. We do all that in 3 HOURS. You gotta MOVE, man. This is not a slow, sleepy activity. It’s like the most hardcore thing some fitness coach could ever imagine, but more smelly and with weirder weights. The dude who does Insanity would have a proud tear in his eye.
If you are lucky, you will now have time to take a shower. Pray there is time, because you’ve probably got fish gak all over you, herring scales stuck all over any exposed skin, and fishy water and herring blood down your boots. You smell so bad that your own mother would question her love for you.
If you try extra hard, you might be able to scrub away 80% of the stench of an entire Gloucester commercial fishing port from your body and maybe cram a protein bar into your face before it’s time for the first round of feeds and/or any morning medical procedures or animal moves that are scheduled. The dolphins need breakfast and require prompt and friendly service or they’ll blast you on Yelp. So have fun getting that already-wet body into your wetsuit! Do the dance. DO IT! Maybe take a moment to admire the giant bucket bruises on your legs. These come from the bucket rims repeatedly hitting you in the same place on your thighs as you carry them. You earned them summabitches and you should be proud.
At some point during your shift (you’re there until 11:30 or 12:30 depending, it’s a long day) you gotta bundle up and go into the freezer to “make pallets”. Basically building fish flat pallets to be used in this same process the next day. If you’ve been keeping track, this means that between breakout, re-filling the cooler racks, and making up pallets for the next day you and your co-worker(s) have basically lifted and thrown around 3000lbs of fish THREE TIMES.
You can then go home and eat WHATEVER THE GODDAMN HELL YOU WANT in whatever quantity you want and God help anyone who tries to judge you for it.
Thank you, this has been a 12/10 reply!!
Fish prep at Seaworld sounds like it is indeed a very labour intensive process. Ours is quite similar in terms of the actual process, however we only use around 4-5 flats of fish a day, lol.
itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
weloveshortvideos
I can swim yay!!! #iguanaswim
This is a marine iguana! They’re super cool and only found around the Galapagos.
One of my favorite facts about them is that they sneeze to dispel salt water from their faces, very similarly to some types of penguin! Both types of animals ingest excess salt with their food, and so they have specialized glands on their faces that excrete it. When they sneeze, it forces the extra salt out and it looks super cute/weird at the same time.
I actually just saw a really annoying new NatGeo video about these guys, setting them up to be ~monstrous horrors~ with ~tons of teeth~ and ~giant claws~ and asking people how they’d feel to swim with them before going ‘psych! they’re algae eaters and super harmless’. Because, ugh, NG, way to sell-out and go the way of Animal Planet. We knew this was coming but nobody has to like it.
I’m pretty sure that’s a normal green iguana? Galapagos marine iguanas don’t have the strips on their tails nor faces that are nearly as pointed. Green iguanas are very good swimmers just like marine iguanas and can spend quite a bit of time underwater.
Tally-Hoo I too shall proceed with the re-informationing @why-animals-do-the-thing
It is indeed a Green Iguana. Unlike other tumblr users who answer with the infuriatingly dismal responses of “well it looks like it might be a green iguana”, or “more than likely a green iguana”,there is no guessing or possibilities to it. It is a certified 100% Iguana Iguana. As others have mentioned, the striped tail, light coloration, lanky appendages, large dorsal crest and distinctive head anatomy show that this is a green iguana. Just like others have said, they are awesome swimmers as well. Videos like this make it easy to see how some wayward iguanas could have made it to the Galapagos, which is pretty rad.
Also just because I'm a saucy boy and also work with penguins, I shall nitpick on something else. ALL species of penguins excrete salt from their nostrils. Actually all marine birds do. And pretty much any other birds that regularly drink salt water, like coastal Mallards and Black Ducks. It is cold, produced in copious amounts, tastes horrible, and dries a weird light brownish color.
Source: weloveshortvideos.com
itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
porpoise-princess-deactivated20
college tip: take at least one class that you don’t think you’ll like. you may end up loving it. i took invertebrate zoology thinking it was going to be extremely boring, but it was my favorite class this semester. i’ve learned so much and i can identify nearly every animal i find while tidepooling now and i’ve grown fond of marine worms! i found a polychaete worm today that i wasn’t able to identify right away and i’ve spent the whole day trying to figure out what species it is.
Everyone I know who has taken invertebrate zoology/biology has really loved the course!
I’ll have to tastefully disagree on Polychaete worms though. Eugh. *insert shivers down spine here*
itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
cetacean-captivity
two questions about epcot dolphins
1. Is the bottom of the dolphin habitat actually sand (as it appears)? If so, does anyone know what type of sand it is and if there have been any issues with it.
2. Does the dolphin habitat actually use the same life support system as the other habitats? If so, do small fish ever make it into the dolphin habitat?
3. At one point there were small fish in the dolphin side of the habitat. Does anyone know why they were removed?
OOooOOO!!
I think epcots habitat is rad AF, so let me try to help.
1. Yes, the bottom of the habitat is sand. I don’t know what type of sand specifically it is, but its most likely cruhed coral or aragonite or some other generic marine sand mix. I don’t believe they have encountered many issues with it.
2. Yes, the dolphins are only separated from the other part of the tank via a large steel pole wall, so the water flows freely amongst the entire complex
3. Tying in with Q2, there are still fish in the dolphin habitat. The wall keeps the large stuff like rays, sharks and turtles out, but many of the fish are still free to swim in and out of the dolphin habitat, and when I was last there the fish were quite happy to spend time with the dolphins.
cc-responds
Thanks for the info! When was the last time you went, as I’ve been looking at some videos and can’t find fish in anything recent!
Nadda Prablam!
The last time I went was just under 2 years ago, so it’s been a little while.
Looking at recent videos, I don’t see much for fish either, however the wall dividing the fish from the dolphins looks the same, so perhaps the fish just vacate when the dolphins are present?
itsgettinghyakinhere reblogged
cetacean-captivity
two questions about epcot dolphins
1. Is the bottom of the dolphin habitat actually sand (as it appears)? If so, does anyone know what type of sand it is and if there have been any issues with it.
2. Does the dolphin habitat actually use the same life support system as the other habitats? If so, do small fish ever make it into the dolphin habitat?
3. At one point there were small fish in the dolphin side of the habitat. Does anyone know why they were removed?
OOooOOO!!
I think epcots habitat is rad AF, so let me try to help.
1. Yes, the bottom of the habitat is sand. I don’t know what type of sand specifically it is, but its most likely cruhed coral or aragonite or some other generic marine sand mix. I don’t believe they have encountered many issues with it.
2. Yes, the dolphins are only separated from the other part of the tank via a large steel pole wall, so the water flows freely amongst the entire complex
3. Tying in with Q2, there are still fish in the dolphin habitat. The wall keeps the large stuff like rays, sharks and turtles out, but many of the fish are still free to swim in and out of the dolphin habitat, and when I was last there the fish were quite happy to spend time with the dolphins.