Shedd in the Gulf

As a respected leader in the field of animal care and environmental conservation, Shedd Aquarium is lending its experience and expertise to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill rescue and rehabilitation efforts. In fact, a member of our animal health division, vet tech Mayela Alsina, is in New Orleans now to work with Audubon Institute’s sea turtle and marine mammal rescue and rehab efforts. As the scope of the environmental tragedy has increased, so has the need for help, and Mayela joins other animal care specialists from the area and around the country at the Audubon Aquatic Center, where she will spend the next two weeks. Currently the center is caring for 106 sea turtles, 101 of them directly affected by the undersea oil well blow out that continues to pollute the Gulf.

In Memory of Nuka

Shedd employees were saddened to learn that Nuka, one of the Oceanarium’s original sea otters, died on Thursday, May 27, at the Seattle Aquarium, where she had lived since 2001. The 21-year-old northern sea otter had been part of Shedd’s quartet of Exxon Valdez oil spill survivors. Like the others, Nuka (shown in the center of this 1990 photo) was a pup when she was pulled from the fouled waters of Prince William Sound in spring of 1989 and sent to a sea otter rescue center for around-the-clock care. Tiny pups orphaned or abandoned in the aftermath of the spill could not be released back into the wild on their own, so the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed them at qualified North American aquariums. Shedd’s were the first sea otters on display in the Midwest.

Beluga Calf Update - Next step, he gets a name!

If you haven’t visited the beluga calf in more than a few weeks, you will be amazed at his progress. He’s more than 6 feet long and weighs about 400 pounds. In fact, he has traded his fetal folds for rolls of baby blubber. He’s big enough to actively play with Bella, 3½ (and the calf’s full sister), and (half-brother) Miki, 2½. He even barges in on their games. The other day, the trainers placed a huge knotted nautical rope in Secluded Bay for the whales to play with. Bella and Miki were doing headstands on the bottom as they jostled to grab the end of the rope in their mouths. The calf used his head, literally, to push the big rope away from both of them. Did I see him crack a smile?

A mother's work is never done

Here’s a fun word: oophagous (OH-ah-feh-gehs). It means living or feeding on eggs. For Mother’s Day, another Shedd mom is the strawberry poison dart frog, Oophaga pumilio. Despite its evocative common name, this species comes in a rainbow of solid colors and interesting patterns, such as Shedd’s tan, yellow and orange polka dot varieties, known to biologists as color morphs. (And, of course, these bright hues are a visual warning to would-be predators that the bite-sized frogs are toxic.) But it’s little O. pumilio’s parenting behavior that is really attention-getting.

Amazing Amazon mom

We’ve got lots of moms at Shedd. The biggest is beluga whale Puiji (and her calf was the biggest baby at birth, weighing 164 pounds). The flattest might be the tiger ray in Amazon Rising. Tiger rays (Potamotrygon schroederi) must get their common name from their striped tails, because their disks have a dense pattern of small golden rosettes on a dark brown background.

Moms in the aquatic world

We’re thinking about moms in the aquatic world as we approach Mother’s Day on Sunday, but parenting is teamwork among some fishes, including two species of cichlids that live in rivers: quetzal cichlids of southern Mexico and Guatemala, and twinspot jewel cichlids, from West Africa. Each has fry that you can see right now in the Rivers gallery. The colorful quetzals have a swarm of tiny fry that the mom and larger dad round up on the back wall of the South America habitat. These doting cichlids give their offspring the scales off their backs, or at least skin secretions that the little ones feed on. They also herd the fry across the bottom in search of microinvertebrates. The parents crunch up larger food and regurgitate it to the babies. If any of the little ones stray on one of these outings, mom or dad will collect it in her or his mouth and spit it back into the group. You’ll also see another pair’s older offspring—several dozen inch-long fish—feeding on the bottom.

The turtle and the remora: a love story

For one male remora at Shedd, it's been tough to get a girl to let him "stick around" for Valentine's Day. Instinctively he has always wanted a large predatory fish or other marine animal to cling to for help finding food, transportation and protection. But he can recall countless rejections and brush-offs from the large fishes, who find him annoying and bothersome. This year, that feeling of solitude is all in the past. On Valentine's Day, our lovable remora will be happily gliding under the protection of a very special Shedd Aquarium lady.

Transporting turtles

Update from Releasing a sea turtle, Turtle surgery, Saving sea turtles

I said goodbye to everyone at Gumbo Limbo and headed north about an hour to the Loggerhead Marinelife Center. Dr. Mette was doing a flipper amputation on a loggerhead and I was able to see the removal of a badly damaged flipper. This poor turtle was hit by a boat propeller and got osteomyelitis--fancy word to say bone infection. These infections are very hard to clear up, especially if they are so wide spread as this poor turtles was.

Releasing a sea turtle

Update from Saving sea turtles and Turtle surgery.

After the big round of surgeries yesterday we got in to find that one turtle recovered so quickly that he decided to get out of his pool and walk around the class room all night!  Very silly turtle.

Heather, a Gumbo Limbo Turtle Research staff member, and I medicated all turtles and then started to decide where everyone should go.

Turtle surgery

Update from Saving sea turtles.

Today we focused on surgery to remove the fibropapillomas (paps) tumors making it difficult for many of the turtles to move. Right now we think that these paps are a direct result of pollution. The most likely cause is “urban runoff” or pollution like fertilizers, oil and gasoline from streets and lawns washing into our water ways.

I got to Gumbo Limbo early to prep turtles and set up for surgery. There are many obstacles today: first, there are so many turtles that the surgery site does not have enough room to house all these turtles after surgery. We will use classrooms as a post-op site. Second, the weather is chilly so we have to heat up large classrooms to 80 degrees. Because turtles are cold-blooded, it’s important to regulate the room temperature.