The Life Aquarist

Cownose rays are THE BEST. Big ol water puppies. A fun fact- they have little flaps that come down in front of their mouth to help the root around in the sand to find prey.

There’s not too much of a difference honestly. I’m not going to say specific locations where I’ve seen good/bad things, but I’ll give you some generalities. I’ve seen AZA facilities that are really messy behind the scenes. I’ve seen non-accredited facilities that are spotless. And I’ve seen everything in between. AZA requires that you have a lab for water quality and necropsies that is different from your food prep kitchen. I’ve seen some non-AZA do all of this in the same room. AZA requires a vet to routinely be on site at least twice a month. A lot of non-AZA places will only call vets “as needed”. So you see a lot less sick animals treated and less real quarantine procedures in the absence of a routine vet. Record keeping is usually a hot mess at non-AZA because no one is holding that accountable. Something that is an issue at every aquarium I’ve ever worked at or been to is storage. We just have a lot of stuff that we need and there’s never enough good places to store things. So anytime I’ve been behind the scenes anywhere you will see weird aquarist ways of storing things on shelves, hanging from the ceiling, hap hazardly piling things, etc. But there’s no AZA standard for organizing haha. I would encourage you to look up the AZA standards and give them a read. It will give you a pretty good idea of what standards places are held to, and I bet you can easily pick out which ones are too hard or inconvenient to do if the facility isn’t accredited.