What's it like taking care of 12,000 animals?

Dr. Lance Adams, Director of Veterinary Services at the Aquarium of the Pacific, discusses his 20+ year tenure and the diverse responsibilities of his role, including preventative care, quarantine, and managing over 12,000 animals.

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Episode Transcript

(00:05):
Erin, Hi, I'm Erin Lundy, and
I'm Madeline Walden, and this is Aquarium of the Podcific, a podcast brought to you by Aquarium of the Pacific, Southern California's largest aquarium.
Join us as we learn alongside the experts in animal care, conservation and more.
Welcome back. Of the Podcific. I'm Madeline Walden, the aquarium digital content and community manager. And I'm Erin

(00:27):
Lundy, the manager of conservation initiatives. Here at the Aquarium of the Pacific today, we have on one of our staff veterinarians. Dr Lance Adams, welcome. Hi. Dr Adams,
hello. How are you today? Good.
We're good. We're excited to do this re record it again, because I don't mind peeking behind the curtain. We did record this episode about a year ago, but so much has happened. Do

(00:48):
you want to change my intro? Because I'm actually like the director of veterinary medicine. Oh
my gosh, I do snap.
Why don't I have you introduce yourself
today we have on me. Dr Lance Adams, the director of Veterinary Medicine at the Aquarium of the Pacific.
Thank you. We should actually make all of our guests introduce themselves.
I like this. It's better do it yourself. We're tired. It's better because I also forgot to ask you what your official title was. I did it, Director of veterinary medicine. That is also new veterinary services. Oh my gosh, I can't even do tired. Yeah,

(01:20):
it's okay. My job's still the same, my title change, but
continues to grow help the animal
since and how long have you been at the aquarium? Now?
I started in August of 2001 so just a little over 23 years. Wow.
Long time.
That is a long time. Did
you start out as a veterinarian then too? Or Where has your has your job title changed over the past 23 years? Yeah, I

(01:44):
was hired on as a full time staff veterinarian. Right when I started, it changed when I actually applied. It was a part time position, but by the time my start date happened, it got converted already over into a full time position. So I was really happy
about that. What's it like taking care of 15,000
Well, I mean, luckily I don't have to do that all myself, right? So my job is basically to plan out the preventative care for the animal collection, to make sure that things like quarantine are done and that we don't bring new diseases in, so that the animals that we do have don't become sick, and we try and minimize that, but they still have problems either from, you know, just nature, right? Even though it's it we're in an aquarium, there's still nature, things that happen, and fish interact with other fish, and animals interact and problems happen. Sometimes, different problems, and they would get out in the wild, but problems none the same. It can be a challenge. It can be like a tidal wave. Sometimes, if there's a lot of problems happening, and other times, it can be a little bit slow. But the diversity of the responsibilities of my job are really broad. So it's not just coming in and looking at the animals every day. There's, you know, a lot to do with research or conservation and doing PR or marketing and training students and dealing with things as a manager, from, you know, employment issues, things like that. So there's always something to do, and it kind of just shifts like today. What's the really important thing to get done? We focus on that and then we go to the less important stuff,

(03:13):
truly day by day. Yeah, there's really no average day in your life here, right? No,
no. Day is really ever the same,
yeah, with 12,000 plus animals, I guess there's always something different going on. What about before Aquarium of the Pacific? Where did you work before? And what was your schooling like?
Yeah, so after I finished my undergrad degree at Cal Poly Pomona in animal science, I then went to Kansas State University for veterinary school. I initially thought I was going to be interested in becoming an equine practitioner, working on horses, but when I was in school, I found out about kind of an opportunity to work in the aquatic animal medicine field, primarily with fish, which I was very comfortable with from my home, hobbies and things, having aquariums and knowing a lot about fish, and so at that point, I looked into that as a career option. I was like, wow, you know, this is actually something I'm probably more prepared for, from my experience before going to vet school than a lot of people. So it might be a neat niche job that I could get into that would really fit me, even though I still love horses, and it just seemed like something that would be better suited to me. So after veterinary school, I did some additional training. I actually practiced small animal medicine for a year in a training facility at VCA in Los Angeles.

(04:33):
What does small animal medicine entail? Yeah, so small
animal medicine and surgery would primarily be like dogs, cats,
I pictured hamsters, yeah, domesticated
animals, yeah, and, and part of that is there too. We usually classify those as, like, pocket pets, ferrets, rabbits, rodents, small pockets,

(04:53):
different and then exotic reptiles. You know, there's, there's a large variety up there, right? Right? So. But then after that training program, I went to do a specialty aquatics training program at the New England Aquarium in Boston for a year. Very cool. And while I was there, this position opened up at the Aquarium of the Pacific, and this is where I lived before I went to veterinary school. So I was like, hey, that's great. I get to come home and be around my friends and my family. So I took the opportunity, and luckily I got it, so

(05:22):
we're lucky. That's awesome. Back to SoCal too. I'm sure that was a nice change in pace, yeah.
And there are still times where all of your schooling comes in handy. One of my favorite things is that when we were doing an auto transport once, we were driving past just fields of cows, and for some reason, Dr Adams was able to name every breed of cow. And I was like, Why do you know every cow by name? And it turns out that was, like, your special interest when you were in college, right? Like you very much studied, like hoof stock

(05:51):
agriculture. Yeah, it was a big part of my agriculture training. We had to do a lot of work with the cattle industry and learn about it. And, yeah. So I had to learn all of the different main breeds of cattle that are raised here in the US. That's
my favorite mainland. He knows every cattle we would drive past the field. And I'd be like, what's that? And he would know and believe it. And I believe it.

(06:14):
I fully believe it. Wow. So going from horses to fish, that's a big difference in their anatomy is, did you find any similarities between them or the way you learned about them?
Yeah, so it's kind of their systems are all kind of similar in that their body components, the building blocks of their bodies, are not all that different. And then if you take those building blocks and you arrange them differently and sort of modify the physiology of how things work for the life that those animals have living in water, fresh water or salt water, different, you know, you know. Then you just learn those differences, and then you can start to adapt things that you learned on the other species to these so. But now in the last I don't know if 15 years aquatic animal medicine and the study of these particular animals and how to manage them in human care, and also for wildlife purposes and managing wildlife populations, helping wildlife populations. There's a lot more now that's being learned. Like, every year I go to an annual conference for aquatic animal medicine, the International Association of aquatic animal medicine, and it just amazes me. Like, every year there's like, I'm like, Really, somebody studied that, and now we know that, like, for sure, definitively. Before it was always like, hey, you know, how does this fishes Gill work? Or, how is this lung fish different than a water breathing fish? And that kind of information gets studied, and you're like, wow, and a lot of it all. And so there's almost more information coming out every year about aquatic animal species than I can keep up with and learn. So that's a challenge too, is staying informed and educated, I'm sure.

(07:53):
I mean, even you're saying horses and fish are very different, but those are at least still vertebrates. I mean, we have jellies, we have sea stars, we have so many different species of animals that are even more diverse and far apart than horses and mammals and fish are. But it must not be easy to keep track of everything.
It's It's interesting trying to adapt things over you know, like, how do you treat an enemy? What are the problems of an enemy? How is its anatomy different? And how can you help it? Because, I mean, when you get down to it, primarily, the way veterinary medicine works, or medicine works in general, is, you know, you're not completely fixing that animal body. You're just giving it enough help and fighting off whatever pathogen it has so its body can then recover and then fight itself, fight off whatever the problems are, or heal from whatever the problems are. So we have to try and do that for these animals like you know, how do you how do you take that step to help them get over the hump of recovering from whatever is bothering them? That's

(08:52):
crazy, just imagining trying to look at an animal that is further away from me than, you know, like already a shark seems pretty distant, but a sea star and understanding the systems and processes that go on in that animal's body are going to be significantly different than anything else. Do you feel like a lot of the learning that you've done on these species is sort of on the job, exposure to them, and then you kind of do research to follow up, or is it, as problems arise, you learn them

(09:18):
both, both, sometimes we have an opportunity to sort of perspectively learn things by trial and error, like we're gonna try this, see what happens, try this, see what happens. And sometimes we're trying things and they just fail, and then that's how we learn and we do something different. Next time crazy, my
brain's going to so many different places. Yeah, my
coral has a cold, and, you know, it's sniffly. Yeah. So it's, it's interesting variety. I mean, they definitely have diseases that bother them. And, you know, the there's a realm there where biology and marine biology and veterinary medicine can really overlap in studying and understanding diseases and how to manage those diseases. And how to help coral populations from problems that are occurring from climate change. So it's amazing what having a degree in veterinary medicine and working in that provision can lead you to, it's really, really varied. And then

(10:14):
just being in a place where you are working with such diverse species too, you're just constantly learning, yeah, fascinating. Have you done any more official learning since being at the aquarium? Have you studied anything else through any schooling, or has it been mostly just attending these conferences and learning on the job?
I've taken a few college courses, and I definitely attend a lot of like web webinars that are put on through different universities and led by veterinarians for special topics. I just It doesn't have much to do with the job here, but I just spent several days at home listening to a webinar on rabbit disease, a specific rabbit disease that was produced by one of the laboratories that we work with, and they offered this free seminar. And I was like, Wow. You know, this has been a really challenging disease when I have seen rabbits in private practice. And I was like, I need to learn what's up with this. Yeah? So, yeah, I spent 1012, hours watching lectures by experts in the field on that particular disease so that I could be better and know more.

(11:17):
Just in your leisure time I'm learning about rabbit, there's no leisure time,
but I'm sure there's something there that will come in handy down the line. Who knows? You know you're learning, just constantly learning. And like you said, so many diverse species here.
Do you feel like the field has changed pretty significantly since you started here?
Yes, the knowledge has DEF. The field is really grown like before, you would look, try and look something up, either in books or online, and you might get, like one article about it or mentioned in some historical article, but it's not exactly what you're looking for. But now there's like, every year papers coming out that you know are saying, like we specifically tested for this in bat rays or cownis rays or sharks or fish or marine mammals. And it's really impressive. Some of the work folks are doing is really, really amazing, exciting

(12:07):
time.
It is cool. There's definitely been a couple of times where, I mean, we had some pretty niche amphibians at some point. And I feel like bringing you a case of like, hey, this Sicilian has this strange thing going on with it. It's crazy to think that that might have been the first time that anyone had ever attempted some of the treatments that we attempted on those animals ever, just because of how niche those animals are. And it was, it's cool to be a part of process. You know, even if something doesn't work out, you still learn from it, and you certainly learn from the process. And so it's cool to be at a place where we're like, Hey, this is the first time anyone's ever tested for this thing on this species of animal. This is the first time we've ever tried anything on this species of animal. And I'm always happy that we're trying, even if things don't end up working out the way that we potentially hope them to work out. So it's been cool, all good research. Yeah, that's for sure. Do you use that data and like, do you share that data externally to kind of better practice elsewhere? Yeah.

(13:00):
So there's a couple of different ways we can share information. There's, you know, we call, you know, word of mouth between veterinarians on list serves and things like that, where we can talk about cases and share our experiences. It's a little bit harder when it comes to trying to get say something published, to get into the literature and then into books and stuff, because those types of studies have to be very regimented. They have to have a lot of controls on them so that the outcomes are you truly know that the outcome is what you think it is, and it hasn't been affected by some sort of other factor. And so those are more difficult because they usually require larger number of animals set environmental conditions. And yeah, that just it. It's not always something that we can do with our animals, because we're also not only just looking at how to care for the animals or how to fix them when they're sick, but also, like managing their welfare and such and so doing procedures on a research basis that could have some sort of negative impact on the animal is really, truly avoided Unless it's super important, and there's no other way to figure that out.

(14:03):
But you do participate in research in sort of a different capacity here, and kind of more specifically with Zebra sharks, right? Yeah,
we do. I would refer to it mostly as, like, clinical research, where we're not trying to figure out, like, how a toxin affects an animal, or how that animal's physiology necessarily, specifically works. Or if we can, you know, test a cosmetic product on an animal like, you know, standard research, we're looking at research projects like, what can we the things that we do to the animals to help take care of them? Can we validate that through a scientific process to make sure that, you know, we're getting true results, that we actually are helping the animals by what we're doing. And our work with Zebra sharks is a little bit different. It's a little bit of work that we're doing just for scientific advancement in the reproductive area. And, you know, with with sharks in general, and aquarium. And managed populations. A lot of aquariums will have a few sharks of one species. And if we do have reproduction, and those babies then go to other aquariums, eventually, those that successful breeding pair is going to be really over represented. And so we were looking at a couple of things, or we have been, and we still are trying to crack the nut on Shark reproduction and captivity is one. How do we breed the animals that we want to breed together for genetic reasons from different institutions without having to move them all over the United States? Can we use reproductive technologies like artificial insemination to do that. And then for those animals that are in captivity that just don't breed, whatever the reason is, you know, trying to look at their physiologic systems to see, like, what about their reproductive physiology, their cycles, their bodies are not working right, that they don't want to breed. And it could be so many different things. It could be water temperature is wrong, lighting is wrong, water quality issues are wrong. There's something that's different in their their water we don't do they have enough room to have enough depth, do they have enough of their species to have the right social interactions to want to reproduce. And so, you know, we look at those types of factors too, and make modifications and try and determine what it is that might be the hurdle to getting those animals to reproduce so we can have sustainable populations without going back out and collecting another animal in 20 or 30 years when this one expires.

(16:38):
I want to back up a little bit and talk a little bit about your team here at the Aquarium. What does that look like? I know you are not our only vet anymore. I know that was the case for a long time. How long were you the Aquarium's only veterinarian?
Maybe 16 years. 17 years I was the primary staff veterinarian. It was myself and a vet tech working here together as a team to try and manage the needs of the animal collection. But more recently, we've expanded that, and that's primarily also because we expanded our hospital. We did that in 2010 built the Molina Animal Care Center, which is kind of like a custom built veterinary hospital for an aquarium, and also it serves as a an exhibit, something to engage our visitors as well. They can one side of the building is completely open with Windows, and they can watch us providing the medical care to the animals, doing their exams, doing their procedures. You know, it starts to kind of show people that, you know, the practice that we do of animal care here, and that stewardship over those animals that are under Managed Care, and how that kind of can relate to the stewardship and management of the animals in the wild that, you know, the the oceans huge place. The world's a huge place, but it is kind of like our planet's aquarium, right? And so, you know, if we care so much about these animals, to take care of them on an individual basis, I think hopefully it encourages people to think more about like, Hey, how are we as a human population, taking care of the animals in our world? Aquarium?

(18:07):
Absolutely,
the Molina Animal Care Center. I really appreciate the transparency in the care. You know, people can literally watch surgical procedures happening. They can watch sometimes people just watch meetings, which is always very funny, but we have people who can just come up, and there's usually an educator who interprets what's going on with the procedure, why the animal is getting the procedure. And I think guests really appreciate that level of transparency with our aquarium, that, hey, sometimes animals do get hurt or sometimes they're sick, and that's okay and normal, and that we have a plan to react to that and what we can do to to provide care for them. I think people really appreciate being able to see that. Was that always meant to be part of the design with the animal hospital. I know you were a big part of sort of building, that building and making it what it is. Was that always the intention? Sure, yeah.

(18:53):
I mean, I think we always want to, you know, when we're spending money to build facilities at the aquarium, where I was trying to get the most out of it that we can, and certainly that educational component and engagement component of what we do in the hospital, we wanted to be able to open up to our visitors so that they could see what we were doing. So it was always part of the plan. I got a little bit of exposure to that when I was in my internship, because I had something similar the New England Aquarium. Their whole hospital wasn't on exhibit, but they did have an area where the animals that were getting treated could be seen by the public, and there was some interaction that could take place so people could ask questions or get some additional learning about especially care the animals received.

(19:35):
Have you ever had anyone react negatively towards like a procedure that's happening in there? Yes, there
hasn't been anything dramatic. You know, it's not really dramatic, but, you know, you hear the oohs and ahs from the people, and some people would be like, and they'll like, turn away because it's too much for them, or whatever their level of tolerance is for that sort of thing, or interest and that sort of thing. Then there's other people, I think, who come and watch and they're like, Wow, I never thought I would, like, enjoy this, or feel like I'm learning or part of this. And then they do, and they're like, Wow, that was really exciting, and it's amazing. And how did you keep that animal alive through everything you just did? And now it's swimming back around just like it was normally.

(20:20):
It's been really cool. And I think the times that I've seen people react more strongly in sort of a negative or like fearful way, is usually the animals that are closer related to humans. And it's just, you know, that initial reaction, I think our harbor seal had cataract surgery, and I think people were very squeamish watching eye surgery happen, although it was happening right up against the window. And the other one that I saw a bunch of guests, specifically male guests, react poorly to was one of our sea lions chases neuter surgery. Everyone watching that surgery, I could just tell the moment that there was some separation. Made that all the male guests

(20:56):
were like, ooh, squeamish, for
sure. But all those things were things that guests could engage with and they could watch. And even just last week, we were watching crab surgery. And so, you know, there's surgery on all different types of animals. The spider crab surgery that you've been doing recently is really cool. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that looks like?
Sure, sure. Yeah, that's a really interesting process that we've been doing. There's a lot of backstory there too, so I probably talk a lot about it, but we have done this work on Japanese spider crab. More recently, we've been working on a California king crab. His name's Caesar. His name is Caesar, and Caesar came in to us about a year and a half ago. He was rescued by the aquarium after a collection in a trawl survey off of our coast, Caesar had a big hole in his shell that big, maybe the size of a quarter, little smaller than a quarter. And of course, that doesn't make for the best exhibit animal for us, because the folks who come or get really concerned, they're like, hey, that animal looks different than all the other animals. What's going on with it, which is great that people have that much concern. But for the employees who are taking care of the animals, you have to answer that phone call or a radio call multiple times every day to say, it's fine, it's normal. Yes, what? Anyways, so we decided we were gonna, you know, put a little patch over it to hide that hole, cover it up, so that the animal looked normal and see what happened. And so for about a year and a half, we did that, and he was looking really good. He's still alive, doing great. And more recently, he started developing some other, what we call black shell disease, in which these dark patches start to occur on their shell, and it's largely from invasion of bacteria into their shell. And crabs would often, could often, just like, molt in the wild, but as they get bigger, they do that less often. And so these lesions become significant for the animals, the infection can then get inside them. And so we've had to try and work on ways of one, preventing it from happening and trying to slow it down through things like nutrition and water quality. But it's still happening. Now we haven't solved that one yet, but in this case, he had a large area that developed on his shell, and actually one on his back, a couple on his legs. And so we would take this crab and we would anesthetize him so he goes to sleep, becomes unconscious, stops moving, and we keep him moist and wet. Luckily, they don't have to be constantly submerged in water like fish, so we have a little more flexibility there. And then we clean up the lesion. We remove the parts of the shell that are damaged and eaten away by bacteria, get back to the healthy stuff, seal it up, and then put a patch over it that looks just like his regular shell and blend it right back in. It's a pretty cool process. I certainly never planned on having to do this. It wasn't anything I trained in really, you know, experienced

(23:52):
specialized in plastic surgery. Yeah,
this was kind of a new experience, but it's been fun. It's been interesting and exciting to see it kind of work and come together. Sometimes we've had to do the patches more than once to get a good fit and a nice seal on there. And, I mean, we're still in the experimental phase too. It's not like we have done this for years and years and years. This guy is, you know, a little bit of our practice animal to see if we can actually help him through this. And so far so good, yeah. And hopefully it continues to go on year after year. And underneath those patches we put on, he'll heal his shell up and be good. And then when he has comes time to molt, if he's gonna molt again, you know, hopefully his new shell will be even nicer underneath, yeah, you know, for now, he's on exhibit, living good crab life, his little crab leg and her, no one's asking about him constantly, so the kickers can do their work. So it's so it's a win, win. Yeah? Situation was so cool to

(24:50):
be up here and a part of something and or seeing something in action of something like that, that's so new. And we've never had to do before, and you've never studied, and this is, it's just really cool. Yeah, crab. Esthetics.
Is the reason you patch it, because you spend a good amount of time matching the shell color and matching it, so you almost couldn't tell that this crab had had a procedure like it looks just like its shell. Is that level of attention to detail and what it looks like more for the crab, so other animals don't pick at its shell, and so it doesn't have like, a weird spot on it that looks different, or is it more for guests to not really appreciate the fact that this animal has had this procedure done?

(25:26):
Yeah, I don't, I don't know about the first part of that question. I haven't really tested that out for this particular situation. I know animals and aquatic animals, like fish in general, do notice things on other animals. You know, when they look different or, I mean, it's a fish eat fish world out there, literally, literally, literally. And so they're always looking, you know, is that one not quite right? Is that my next meal, potentially, you know? So I imagine the same thing happens with other species too. And so it may offer some level of protection, though. Here in our closed systems and stuff, there's not crabs aren't in with those predators, you know. So I don't know that, you know. And under those circumstances, we're providing them with that much protection. And I would say it's mostly so that, you know, the guests don't perceive that there's, you know, they think there's something wrong with that animal because it looks different, even though it's different. Even though it's healthy and thriving,

(26:24):
it looks so exactly like your shell. I'm really excited for
our followers to get to see it, because we're going to do a couple stories about it, and we were just shooting today. Actually, Brooke and Dr Adams were working on Caesar, a different crab. No, that's
Caesar. Yeah, yeah, one of our aquariums. Brooke has done a really good job. She took a special interest in, like, aquarium structural design, designing corals, life like structures, things like that, using materials that are non toxic, that we can put into tanks. And so because she had that interest, and I was like, Hey, I think we could do this, and we can make this mold, it will look really great. She's like, I can do that. So she experimented with some different materials that to find out what would work well and stay on underwater and be adhesive and be structurally sound for this animal. And it's turned out to be really, really amazing looking so far. Yeah, it looks

(27:11):
really, really good. And that was something that our guests got to watch and enjoy. Today, we had a bunch of field trips coming by, which was really cool. I got to look over and see all these kids watching. It was awesome. I walked outside. They're like,
they're doing surgery on a crowd. Yeah, I don't, I
don't even get to see that because you're like, a rock star
so focused on the procedure that I'm doing, I'm just like, right there and everything else that's happening. I don't really know if people are like, appalled, looking through the window. You're aware, like, oh my gosh, this is great.

(27:40):
And, yeah, that's so cool. I was gonna ask, is that something that you're ever distracted by, or, if, I mean, you're so tuned in, like, occasionally
I get distracted. For the most part, I try and I try and function like they're not even there, and that way they're getting a realistic, like, impression of what's happening in the hospital. But, you know, we do get a lot of people who, like, knock on the window and then try and get our attention, give them a little wave and ask, yeah, don't do that or

(28:05):
so, what was it like before the Moline Animal Care Center was built? Oh,
it was great, because I was doing what I loved. I had a job at an aquarium working on these really unique animals, doing really cool stuff, but it was a puzzle, like we were working out of a very small room, probably about the size of the studio right now, maybe, you know, small, small. And we always had to arrange it for whatever was happening that day and try and figure things out. We did a lot of our procedures tank side, you know, more like a Army field hospital than a regular veterinary clinic. And so when we did get the million Animal Care Center built, it's amazing, like things happen so much faster. Someone can come to me and say, hey, my animal has this problem. I can say, Okay, bring it down. Half an hour, we can start this procedure. Whereas before I'd be like, well, give me, like, two hours so I can pull this equipment out of the room and clean this all up and set up just specifically for this animal. So it opened up a whole nother level of practice. And then as our program expanded, to be able to fill that space by bringing on, I think you mentioned earlier. Now we have a full time tech, a part time tech, a full time veterinarian, and myself as the director. And so now we have this full staff of folks there that can really handle the bigger caseload of the collection that we have, and get things done immediately, rather than saying like, Oh no, we're too busy today. We have to see that animal tomorrow. We can do it all. That's great. And

(29:35):
what kind of specialized equipment does the Mac have? We
have most equipment that a general veterinary practice would have, and maybe some a little bit of specialty equipment too. That the thing that's different about it for us is we have to deal with water all the time. So our equipment and our cabinets and our carts and all that stuff is designed to be more water resistant than you would typically see. But you know, we have radiography equipment, which is like for taking x rays all. Sound equipment for doing exams, laparoscopy, endoscopy, we have all the tech equipment for monitoring animals under anesthesia and ventilators and, you know, electronic thermometers and oxygen measures and radiocautery, the things that we use for surgery. So it's a pretty advanced set of equipment that we have here, I'd say we some of our things that we don't have, like people would be used to knowing about, like we don't have a CT image or MRI image or things like that. For that, we have to go outside to a referral hospital and transport our animals to get to do that. We just don't have the space large equipment. Yeah, and you really need to have a lot of patients to justify having that kind of thing that needed. We just don't have that. But it's great because, you know, veterinary hospitals do specialty veterinary hospitals where they didn't 15 years ago, and now we can bother them instead of bothering, you know, human hospitals. Okay, can we please bring our sea turtle or sea lion to the human hospital? Think

(30:59):
about that. That's something that we have to do at some point. Yeah, and
they're like, yes, sneak them in the back door tonight in the parking lot. Yeah?
Just imagining them coming through, like, the ambulance bay doors. There's just a sea lion coming through. But, yeah, mine
don't mind our baby.
He just looks a little different. Yeah, he's just, like, 400
pounds. Don't worry about him. There's been a handful of times we have utilized an off site, MRI, you know, for some diagnostics, especially in recent times. And it's been cool to watch the process of, like, moving an animal there. And that, in and of itself, is its own puzzle. Of, like, logistical people need to be able to handle the animal. We need to be able to sedate the animal on that end of things, and then, you know, monitor them through the procedure. And so it takes a whole suite of people up and out of everything that we have, we have so much specialized equipment. We have so many amazing things in the hospital. The thing that every person stops and asks me about is the fish anesthesia cart, which, like, not that high tech of us. It's amazing. It's

(31:55):
that classic Utility Cart that you guys have totally transformed, sure, sure. So it's almost the least impressive part, because it's so, it's so, you know, just a lot, yeah, basic, it was the word for it. But it does the job. But it's really cool looking. Can you talk about that a little
bit? Sure, yeah, the our anesthesia cart, we have for like, medium sized fish, you know, maybe, gosh, in the smallest, you know, few 100 grams, all the way up to maybe 10 pounds, we can put on that anesthesia machine. It's like one of those utility rolling carts made out of plastic, which is great because it doesn't rust with the salt water. And then we have it fitted so that we can have our anesthesia water down below a pump that pumps it up to the fish, and it circulates through the fish's mouth and over its gills so it can breathe, and we have anesthesia in that water so it stays asleep. But then we can still have the body of the fish kind of out of water, whatever part we need to work on, so we don't have to worry about that contamination. And then the water drains down and back into the sump below, and it just recirculates like that, so it stays oxygenated. We of course have to monitor the temperature make sure it doesn't get too cold, but yeah, it's really, really pretty simple. It's a gravity base, but then a pump that pumps the water back up, not too many components, and the fish do really well under anesthesia. The medications that we use are very safe in them. And you know, we can have fish anesthetized for several hours that way and manage them successfully and still be able to recover them and wake them back up.

(33:24):
What kind of procedures are you doing on that table?
You know, it's really varied. Sometimes we're doing like injury repair, sometimes, which often happens to their eyes or their skin over your body, and we're putting in sutures, like getting stitches to help that wound heal faster by being closed and prevent infection from happening. We also do ultrasounds on that table when we're trying to examine animals. We've done mass removals. We've done procedures where, you know, we have to go in and say, retrieve fish. Aren't the brightest. You know this, this has happened with you know, they're smart in their own way. Yeah, yeah. But even, like our domestic pets, there's probably listeners who are thinking like, oh yeah, my dog ate this rock. Or, well, fish do it too. So every once in a while, we'll have fish that eat something that's too big to come out of his stomach, and they are not regurgitating it back out on their own. So we have to anesthetize them, and we'll go in with like a long pair of forceps and grab a hold of whatever it is it's in their stomach and bring it out. Or sometimes we have to send the endoscope in there to see what the problem might be. But we also sometimes do surgery on them. Occasionally, animals with reproductive disease, we might like say something listeners would be accustomed to, would be having your dog spayed, in which case you remove the ovaries so it's can't reproduce anymore. And occasionally with fish, we have problems where their ovaries become hyperactive because they're not breeding correctly, and it fills up their body cavity, and then they get sick. No, feel good. So then we could potentially have to remove those over the ovaries to accomplish the same thing for them. So.

(34:59):
Fascinating, really, anything
that needs to be done under like, heavy sedation on that size of animal is appropriate use for the fish cart for water, an animal
that breathes underwater. Yeah.
And most people like to understand. They're like, fish can't survive out of water. How do you take it out of water? It's like, well, we're mostly taking it.
His insides are in the water, pouring water over it constantly, including Caesar he was getting surgery on that cart, right? Yes, same thing, because he, like fish breathe through his gills. Yeah. His

(35:25):
challenge is he's got to stay really cold. So those animals are like 50 degrees and less, and our room temperature is like 70 degrees. So yeah, while he's out, we have the water that's circulating through the cart, being iced, and keeping a track of that with thermometer. And then we keep, you know, dousing him with it, so his body and his blood are all circulating, staying cool. It's

(35:47):
a lot of things to think.
It is a lot to think about. I
also really like the compression chamber for fish. That one is always funny, and it's also not something people think about with, like people or small animal medicine, of just having this compression chamber. And oftentimes I walk by and there's just a single fish in this huge system. And sometimes it's a really small fish, and I'm always just like, What is this little guy doing in here? What is the compression chamber? What is it treating for?

(36:13):
Yeah, so it's not uncommon for fish to have problems with gas management in their body. So I can try and relate it to like a scuba diver that goes down and they're breathing air, and under pressure, there's more of that dissolved gas in their bloodstream, and then they come up, and the pressure decreases as they're less deep, and that air then comes out of solution, because its solubility is dependent on pressure and temperature. So as they come up, it comes out into their bloodstream, and then it has to have somewhere to go. And it's not really meant to be there in gas form. And so then it can come out in parts of their body and block blood vessels, things like that. One fish that happens too. So they actually have, most fish have a swim bladder, trapped air pocket inside their body that helps regulate their buoyancy. So they're not always floating up or floating down there or sinking. They're kind of just maintaining neutral position in the water. And sometimes things happen to where that swells up too much, if you change their depth too much, or sometimes when fish are fighting or getting into trouble, sometimes the gas will come out of their bloodstream and go off into their eye, and then their ice walls up like they got, you know, punched in the eye. And they have this globe that's three times the normal size with an air bubble in it, and all that does damage to the fish's eye. And, yeah, there's a couple ways we can manage it. One is put a needle in there, which is always fun, to put a needle in an eye and then take the air out. It's always fun using that. But, you know, that can cause more trauma, even though it resolves the condition and the trauma can heal. But we modified a system that was used for bringing fish up from depth without injuring them, to treat these fish that are already at sea level in our collection that have these gas problems, and we can put them in there and repressurize them using a water pump and restricting flow to increase the pressure, just like we are sinking them deeper into the ocean. So sometimes we'll put them down to 30 feet or 60 feet inside this little chamber. And the same thing happens when a diver gets bends just with them, they're in a chamber full of pressurized oxygen or gas because they need to breathe that but with fish, it's in water, and it's actually easier. It's a lot easier to manage the pressure and water than it is in air. Makes sense? Yeah, and so and they get relief almost instantly when we put them at that depth. So the air, for every one atmosphere, About 30 feet of depth we put them at the air will shrink 50% of its size. So the first the first 30 feet is great boom, half its size. And then the next 30 feet, it goes half of that again. And then, plus the solubility of the gas into liquid increases because of the pressure. And the gas will then move from a free space back into the fish's body fluids. Those will circulate, go to its gills. The gas will go out the gills, and now it's equilibrated at that pressure, and we can slowly lower the pressure over time, and the fish slowly adjust, bring it back, and bring it back to sea level, surface temperature, surface pressure, and then they're usually pretty good to go. I'd say that changed our success rate from about, you know, 5050 to probably, like, 80% and being able to resolve that problem for those fish,

(39:23):
that's amazing. Do you see, like, the pretty immediate change in the behavior of the fish when that's happening, or is it just, are they just kind of hard to read? They're
a little bit they're a little bit hard to read. The thing you can check is, even though we're treating for the gas in their eye, you can see how the pressure is affecting their swim bladder. So a lot of times, you know, the fish will be neutrally Bucha floating around with this really big swollen eye, which is kind of trying to lift him up like a balloon underwater. And we'll get the pressure up, that'll shrink, and all of the fish will just like, settle down. Just be like, yeah,

(39:54):
swim right. Again.
Swim right. Yeah. So they do get some immediate. Get relief. Yeah,
that's wonderful. We have a video, a tick tock, of the hyperbaric chamber. Yeah, not to link in the show notes. That's it's a really, really cool device.
I always laugh, because every time I walk by it, without fail, there's, like, the smallest fish, and it's this huge piece of equipment, little seahorse, so tiny. And it is amazing that we, you know, the level of investment for every animal, even the smallest little thing, and I'm sure it is, most of our equipment is probably not super cheap to operate. You know, there's a lot of medications and things that go into it, but every animal receives the same level of care. And I so love that about the aquarium. It's amazing to see, and it's funny because, you know, I have grown up working with the animals that people see is like it needs veterinary medicine, like a sea lion or a seal like that is very obvious to people, and I don't think it's always very obvious to people that corals and anemones and those animals also need the same level of care. And potentially, in some ways it's more challenging, because how do you get it to eat medicine? That's what it needs to do. So yeah, it is tricky. What's your most challenging

(41:01):
solvers all the time? That's all we do is try and figure out how to do something that won't hurt the animal and will accomplish what we need to accomplish so it can get better. Who's
the most challenging taxon of all the animals?
They all have their things that are tough, you know, like and most of these animals are wild animals too. They're not even always very used to human interactions, not habituated to humans. So, you know, things like you would take for granted with a dog or a cat, like putting in an IV catheter, leaving it and give them you can't, you can't do that because as soon as the animal would be awake. I mean, we have to anesthetize them to even be able to work on it. As soon as they're awake, they just rip that thing. There's nothing you could do to stop that. Trying

(41:47):
to do anything to a sea otter, yeah, forget it.
Forget it. Forget it. Is the correct answer to try to do anything to a sea otter unless they want to do it, yeah, which they never do. They don't trust me. I've spent years trying to train the sea otters to do the things our veterinarians want to do, and they don't want to do hold still
for an IV. No. Hold still is the hardest thing

(42:07):
for a sea otter. They're
like, I'll stop you right there. Yeah, nothing crazy.
We still do it. We still have to do it, but usually under sedation, which is a little bit easier to manage with some of these animals.
What are some of your most rewarding parts of your job?
There's a lot, I mean, there's certainly the part of like, just being able to work with unique species and have that opportunity that you wouldn't normally get. Also, I really like fixing things. I get a lot of success out of, you know, being able to have a problem not have a solution for it. Have to brainstorm through that, come up with something that works. That's really gratifying. I also really like being able to provide service, like being helpful to someone. And I don't know, I guess you know, you can do a lot of service for human beings, and there's tons of people that are out there trying to help out less fortunate people, but this feels a little different, like these animals can't get any help from anybody else, really, and so, you know it's, it's really nice to be able to provide a service for them, and you know you're not going to get a thank you. You know you're, you're not going to get any appreciation from them. So it's not like you're doing it to get some sort of reward. It's very selfless, and doing something selfless can always make you feel pretty good inside.

(43:26):
Oh, I love that. That's
a good you're right.
They're they're not really good about saying thank you. They will just poop on you instead, literally. And
sometimes they're even more angry because you're the one who had to handle them recently. And so we work so hard to build this relationship, especially animals that are trained and can recognize you as an individual, just like, please
just Shelby, come over. Nice guy. Veterinarian,

(43:47):
Shelby is the harbor seal that actually really likes our veterinarians, but, and specifically Dr Adams, but it is you just try to maintain this relationship, because you're like, he is helping you. You just don't understand that all of the stuff that stresses you out, is helping you, and it's hard, and it must be hard to never feel like they appreciate right?
They see you coming. They're like, Oh no, no,

(44:08):
something's happening.
Run away.
They get poked. Yeah, books aren't always that bad. No. Have you ever had a case where you were really unsure of how the outcome would go, or this animal seemed really bad and just the recovery was gratifying to you. Like, this case was so seemingly impossible on this animal made a miraculous turnaround.

(44:29):
Yeah, there's few of those. I mean, I can think of a number of situations. I mean, we've had some injuries and some unique animals. Like we had a sawfish at one point that's rostrum got snapped. If you don't know what a sawfish is, it has this long beak basically coming off the front of its face. It's a shark species, and it has little teeth sticking out the sides. That's why it's called a saw and it's quite long. And we had one that snapped that, and we had to perform procedure on it, anesthetize it, manage. It and sort of come up with a unique way to cast that or splint it so that it could be held in position while the animal healed. And I thought like, Oh, this is probably never gonna work, because there's so many things stacked against us. This animal isn't gonna sit still. It's not gonna lie in a bed and rest after we do this, you know, and is this is our equipment going to stay on underwater? And that animal pulled through and did really, really well and recovered. And so, you know, it's when those things happen. It's really great. And another one was a sea turtle that we worked on recently, and we had to do anesthesia on it for the procedure. And then we got to the end of the procedure, and the turtle didn't wake up. He just stayed asleep, even though he should be waking up from anesthesia. And we had to work on that animal for about 24 hours, you know, with fluids and supportive therapy and breathing for that animal, before it started to breathe on its own and restabilize, and then came back. And I mean that that next day when that turtle went back into his tank and was swimming and breathing on its own, it's like the relief that was very stressful and very concerning. Because we certainly, you know, even though we're trying to help them, we realize some of the things we do can be dangerous, can hurt them. We don't always know the outcome, but, you know, we're always shooting for for not doing any harm to the animal as much as possible. And and when something happens or goes wrong, even unintentionally, you know, we feel a lot of pressure about that, a lot of sure sadness that, like, oh, maybe, you know, I had some sort of influence over why this went sideways. And, yeah, that doesn't feel good

(46:41):
with the sawfish. Was that an emergency situation? Like, was it something that you had to act really quick on? Oh,
absolutely. Because not only was the saw broken, but the way it was broken, it was bitten by one of the other products in the tank. And so, you know, there were cuts into this rostrum as well. It was bleeding quite profusely, and wow. And if we didn't do something quickly, that would have wiggled itself loose and come off before we had a chance to get it stabilized and attached. And so yeah, we were we had to work quickly for that one. And everybody was great. The team that came together for that, lots of people involved with animal management and handling and dealing with that animal is quite large, eight feet, you know, and quite strong enough to really injure somebody when it's thrashing around. And figure out, how do we take that animal and get it out of the tank, get it restrained, get it onto a table, get it anesthetized, be able to work on it, keep it alive. And

(47:38):
right now, and yeah, and right now,
there's no time to think soon as you possibly can get this done and then get it back into the tank so we can survive, you know? And
with, like, no
instructions, right? Like, you were the first person to have probably ever done this surgery on,
oh, sure, yeah, there was definitely some trial and error. We're like, Well, we think we could do this. How can we, you know, we were trying to use some tubing to make the splint and stuff. And then it was one of our assistant curators, or senior aquarist, that was like, hey, what if you tried using this epoxy stuff? And I was like, Yeah, we could try that. Let's squish it like a sandwich between two popsicle sticks to make a rigid piece that holds underwater and secure those teeth together to keep this thing straight while it heals. And, yeah, it worked, yeah, dryer trying to get it to be warm so it would dry faster. And yeah,

(48:31):
there's fascinating
just figuring it out. It's
such a ridiculous animal to have had to do emergency like it is. It looks kind of like a dolphin with a chainsaw or on its raw ship like that's always to describe it exactly, the idea of just people trying to grab this animal as it panicking and not get thrashed by it, and then doing surgery and doing something so unprecedented, you're probably the only person who has ever done sawfish surgery. It's interesting. No, there's others. Oh, the same surgery, not

(49:00):
the same surge, but
we're trying to give you a pat on the back. Yeah,
thank you. I can't take all the credit. I don't want anybody thinking I'm the
sawfish expert. Yeah, you did write the protocol on how to fix a raw strip on a sawfish, though. Yes, pretty much. That's pretty cool. Yeah,
we could only get them to have babies. Yeah, that's
what the AI is for. And then once we put those things together, we'll have a sawfish again. Yeah, would you ever get another sawfish here? Sure. Oh, immediately, yes, okay, immediately,

(49:28):
yes, yeah, they're
pretty awesome. They're
pretty cool.
Yeah, our sawfish went on to move to another ACA accredited facility for, I believe, a breeding program, correct?
Yeah, yeah.
She, he, she's still around, she is, oh, well, I feel like that is sort of a career highlight of being able to operate on this animal and doing something so unprecedented. There are obviously huge highs to the job when things go right, but what, in your experience, is sort of the hardest part of your job as a veterinarian.

(49:57):
I mean, I think it's like with anybody deal. With loss or failure can be really hard. You know you have, you have both the loss of an an animal that's important to you and important to the aquarium, but then also, like a loss or failure for what you're trying to accomplish. And when that happens, it's kind of a double whammy, and can bring you down a little bit, but I think over time, people in our profession and medical profession, we sort of learn how to cope with that and get through it, and usually by the next day, there's a whole nother round of different problems that need attention. So that kind of takes your mind off of it, and you get back to work and and you just make it better next time. That's all you can really do is say, like, this is this is what we tried this time that didn't work. So what are we going to do different next time to have a better chance of success?

(50:51):
That's a tough part of I'm sure. Like with any job failing at something, you're like, Wow, that feels really bad. But, you know, feeling sort of that double edged sword of it was both things now and now, I feel like there's this animal loss. It must be really tough. So many
things that are out of control and out of a personal control in that situation, you know, the animals doing what it's doing, the people are doing what they're doing. Though, there's the whole water situation, the uniqueness of those animals and managing them. There's, there's a lot of things that can go wrong each time, and you can't, you know, accept the responsibility or blame for every single making sure that every single one of those things is perfect. I feel like

(51:28):
it's also situation. I feel like there are so many aspects of like, if an animal is showing a disease process, you might not know how advanced that is. You might not know all the details of what other things it's got going on at the same time. And then I feel like our staff relies so heavily on our veterinarians, and I hope that you never feel like it's a failure to us if an animal passes, because we totally understand that life is life and death is part of life as well, and these things happen, and I feel like our entire vet team does such a wonderful job of being supportive and responding in an emergency and being there for us when something is going on with our animals. And sometimes the correct answer for some animals that aren't going to get better is also euthanasia. And although that sounds like it would be the hardest part of the job, sometimes those decisions actually relieve a lot of weight from our staff, and we appreciate you being there for guiding those decisions as well. Yeah,

(52:17):
those decisions are tricky always, because you're conflicted with wanting to, you know, fix whatever the problem is, make it better. But at the same time you're like, I don't know. It's not always like, Can you do it? We also have to consider, like, Should we do it? Is this is a process that's going to happen for this animal in its best interest, in its best welfare, because we don't, we don't want to make an animal have suffering. That's one of the things. As a veterinarian, we take an oath to try and prevent that, and so we want to try and make sure that what we're doing, you know, if it's short term or something, that animal is going to get past and worth what it's going to have to get go through to get there, then, you know, we can do that, but sometimes a better decision is to let them go.

(53:04):
Yeah, very hard decision to make.
Well, thank you. I feel like, oddly, did not mean to make it a sad interview, but I do think it's, it's pertinent information that you know Animal Care is changing. I'm sure veterinary medicine is sort of changing in kind, or right alongside how Animal Care is operating. And it's been cool to watch both things sort of evolve. Over even the course of my short career that I've worked here, I've seen a lot of advancements, and I've seen people think a little bit differently about how some of those decisions are made, too, and be a little bit more open to euthanasia as a more humane option, as opposed to, you know, like extensive treatment. And part of my growing up in animal care was realizing that there is a limit to what we should do, and that there is euthanasia is a helpful and a nice option for animals sometimes at the end of their life. Sure, it is. It's a big part

(53:54):
of relieving animal suffering is the ability to do that in a fast and relatively painless way. You know, that's that's much better for them, if we think about it from a welfare standpoint, and, you know, going through a slower process of death or
something that's not controlled. Yeah, on that very sad note, to kind of approach some of our questions from social media,

(54:19):
yeah, we have just a couple. I feel like we hit a lot of them, but maybe some challenges of working with aquatic animals versus terrestrial the differences between them, any off the top of your head? Well,
I mean, yeah, certainly we have to keep the aquatic ones wet, though we do have, we do have air breathing aquatic animals, the mammals, and then also water breathers, which I love them most

(54:43):
of all. But no offense, mammals,
but yeah, that that's a big difference. And then, you know, they have, they have different adaptations for where they live that we all have. We have to pay attention to whether it's reptiles, who, you know they're, they're cold blooded, instead of one. And blooded sore fish and the invertebrates that we work on and such. So we have to adapt to those sorts of things. Their physiology is a lot different. We don't always have a guidebook to that. We have to extrapolate from what we do know, get information from biology, resources and stuff, and sort of say like, Well, we think this is how this is gonna go. There's that. And then just dealing with big animals, or very sensitive animals, where it's like, Oh, don't handle it too much, because that's enough to put it into shock and have it expire. And so then, how do we come up with a situation where we can work with it carefully, you know, wearing gloves, keeping it in water, relieving weight, stress, you know, a lot of different what's an

(55:42):
animal that's pretty prone to shock
birds? There's birds definitely, you know, especially ones that are not habituated to humans. I mean, the minute they're entrapped, they go into this really heavy fight or flight response, and it's just get away at all costs, you know. So they're going to struggle and fight, and their heart rate goes way up and and so you have to be cognizant of that when you're working on them. And, you know, either take steps to avoid that or condition them originally so they're more comfortable. But yeah, a lot of times we have to take breaks with the animals and come back to things later, just so that they they don't get overwhelmed. Time out. Yeah, like we said, they don't know we're trying to help them. We're trying to eat them,

(56:26):
especially if they're already injured or sick. They're like, I'm very vulnerable right now. Please don't come over here.
Wish you could just tell them you're here to help with our internships and our fellows, etc. What is your responsibility in teaching them?
Yeah? Yeah. So, I mean, with the job as a veterinarian at the aquarium, really training and teaching other individuals isn't a primary part of that job, it does. It's not part of animal care, making sure the collection is healthy and safe. But you know, we all want to give back to our profession. We want to help the next generation start off in a better place than we started off as far as our knowledge base and experience and things like that. So we do have programs here at the Aquarium for training opportunities for students in veterinary medicine, and we don't charge for that. You know, they they come here and they're taking time out of their school schedule to learn, and they would be considered volunteers with us, and we have programs currently for undergraduate students. We offer two training positions every year in the summer when they would be out of school, and we train them in the basics, just basically to see so they can decide, you know, oh, do I? Do I like this part of Veterinary Medicine, and you know, is this something that I would want to pursue more later, and not as much teaching them about the specifics of how we're treating the animals and things like that. And then we have veterinary students that are in their third or fourth year of veterinary school, that are coming through on two or three week rotations who want to learn, you know, these special things. How do we hold these animals correctly. How do we, you know, deal with their special uniqueness, to be able to provide veterinary medicine to them, and it's great here, they get a lot of hands on experience. We put them right into the mix as soon as they feel comfortable with giving injections and tube feeding animals, even doing surgery, if it's something that they've already been trained on how to do in school. So it's a pretty cool program. We also train post graduate veterinarians as part of a UC Davis aquatic animal fellowship program, so one year program, and that individual has graduated from veterinary school wants to do more training in aquariums and gets to rotate through UC Davis and their aquatic animal health program there Steinhardt aquarium and here at the Aquarium of the Pacific, it's

(58:46):
pretty cool. I'm watching our most recent fellow going through and number one, I was very happy because she fell in love with frogs in the time was here. And she was like, wow, I really want to get into amphibian medicine. I was like, thank goodness. That's just the way to your heart. Yeah, it really was. But it was cool watching her, sort of from, you know, day one, where she was, kind of, obviously, is a veterinarian, very qualified, but learning and absorbing this information to sort of the final days of her fellowship, where she was very much a part of care and practice, and, you know, doing treatments and going around. And it was really cool to watch even that level of growth in just a few months, and especially in the amphibian Erin, instead

(59:22):
of like, standing back with, yeah, it's like, then they're in the in the mix there. Like, I can do that. I can help with that. I know you need next.
Yeah, let's do this and helping to make decisions that sometimes were tougher decisions to make too it was cool to watch just her feel more enabled over the course of her fellowship. So it's
amazing. I'm going to add more information about that in our show notes. So if you're more interested in learning more, that'll be more, but it'll be in our episode description. Do you have a favorite animal here currently, individual

(59:47):
or a species of folks both? Okay, so I really like sea turtles. They're great patients, and they're pretty cool animals, and they're really cute and super unique. So they're probably my. Favorite species of animal that we have at the aquarium, and then, gosh, I could go down the list. I have some special animals that I really, you know, have some attachment to, yeah. So we have one of the birds in our program collection called Lola, so, so rustic cockatoo, and we have a really good relationship. I don't know why. I don't know. I'm not exactly certain. I definitely have worked on this bird a lot, but, yeah, is in it, and it's great, because the relate that relationship, like, makes me be able to provide treatment to that animal so much easier without stress. I mean, it's great. Like, he's like, Oh, if you scratch my head and put my feathers, fine, give me the injection. I don't care, you know. So, so that's really nice, if that that's one of those things like that animal actually, like, makes you feel like there's some gratitude.

(01:00:54):
That's one of the only ones. Yeah, yeah. There's not that. He does say, I love you too. I'm sure that helps. It does? It does, yeah, but
he is a fussy animal with a lot of people, and so if Lowell likes you, you're in, you know, like he does. I think he likes like three total people. And we even tried to have him on the podcast, he's been
our only animal guest, but you wouldn't know it, because he just didn't the whole time. We should have brought you, yeah. That should have been, yeah. Now we know this should Lola

(01:01:20):
whisper a combo X episode, but
we should interview Lola. So what is it like? He
probably would have said something. To be honest. It is so cute to just see this animal who can be a little bit unpredictable and a little bit maybe fractious with some people, you know, like he has his moments where he is still a cockatoo at the end of the day, attack bird. And then, I guess, you know, coming into treatments someone, one of our aquaculturists, was like, you know, he was being so fussy with me this morning. Dr Adams had to go in and give him an injection, and he was just sitting in there, petting him.

(01:01:50):
It's cool to
see. And then
some other animals I love just because of, like, who they are, not so much what they do with me. And that's like, what the relationship with Shelby is, like, Shelby is one of our older harbor seals, and she's just so great, like she's tolerated so much she, you know, still is coming up and will do interactions with me, even though, you know, I've been a negative reinforcer on her with all the medical care that she's gotten. And the best thing about her that I really like it. I mean, she was just such a good mom. Good mom to her pups, and like seeing that happen, and having her raise those pups and just be so dedicated like that, that really endeared her to me. So I think, yeah, for her marine mammals, she's probably one of the special

(01:02:36):
mama Shelby. Yeah, she's
a good one.
I like them all.
Do you have a favorite of our sea turtles?
Of our sea turtles now, they're kind of, oh, they're almost identical, like, they're the same age from the same watch. They're like, almost identical, yeah, I wouldn't say I had like, I like one of those more than the others, copper, Lou and Theo. They're they're all in there. Some of the stranded ones that come in are, you know, I get rooting for them because they got an uphill battle. Yeah, I

(01:03:08):
wanted to end on that our current projects, one of them being turtle rehabilitation and releasing wild sea turtles. We actually just released one last week, a loggerhead sea turtle. And then we have, we're gonna release another one next, next week, Tuesday. Tuesday. Yeah. So stay tuned for that. This episode will come out after we release those animals, but we're actually going to be building a space to house these rehabilitated animals near the million Animal Care Center, right?

(01:03:33):
Yeah. So this is a cool project that we're doing. It's not a real big build out for the aquarium. It's a smaller project, but it's something that's going to be very useful for us. We've been rehabilitating sea turtles a couple years after the aquarium opened, so in about 2000 I think, we got our first rehab sea turtle in. And really at that time, it was kind of like, hey, we have this live stranded sea turtle that's obviously not doing well, what can we do with it? And they're like, Well, let's try the aquarium. And we were all them, okay, yeah. And then the government agencies who manage sea turtles in the wild were gave us permission to do that, and that started off the relationship. And since then, I think we've, you know, had probably close to 50 sea turtles in WoW, and about 35 of them released amazing back out into the wild, and it's been a good program. It can be challenging from time to time, because when they do come in, we don't, we're not prepared for it. We don't have any warning, and so we have to make room for them, because we can't put them in with our other animals because of either compatibility issues or for medical reasons, like we don't want to expose our existing animal sea turtle collection to diseases that could be coming in with a sick sea turtle. And we also don't want to expose the wild turtle that's going to go back out into the wild to any diseases that our animals might be carrying but not showing any symptoms of. And so we don't want to have that cross contamination at all. And. Avoid that. So, you know, we have to juggle things around and make space for those animals. And sea turtles don't always rehabilitate very quickly. Since they are cool, cold blooded, they do take a long time to heal and recover. So we might, I'd say, on average, a sea turtle rehab for us when they come in can be anywhere from like two to four months, and then a long one might be a year or more in recovery. So that ties up a system for a long time. And also, our tanks are designed for other purposes, different types of animals, not specifically for working on sea turtles, which can get quite heavy. You know, 140 150 pounds easily. And so we just received a grant in 2023 and started working on the project in 2024 from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and NOAA, and they had funds set aside to support grant funding to support projects that involve building capacity or helping care for sea turtles that strand on the West Coast of the United States. So we applied for that grant, and were accepted. We got a grant to help put in a dedicated sea turtle rehabilitation tank pool here at the Aquarium of the Pacific, and so that'll be set there for turtles. Whenever they come in, we'll have a space. We can immediately say, Yes, of course, we can take that animal. We have space. It'll about double our capacity.

(01:06:16):
Nice if,
if we still have more sea turtles than that tank will hold, we still have the capacity of the rest of the aquarium that we can still try and bring them in. So it doesn't exclusively mean we can only put turtles in that tank. We can still keep doing what we have been doing, but it definitely gives us more resources and more ability. And sometimes the turtles management can be quite expensive, so the program is a lot to maintain. Not only do we have to have the place to keep them in the habitat and the water and the food, but their medical care could range anything from a small surgery to, like, remove a hook from their mouth or from their throat, all the way to going to get a CT scan or an MRI to check to see if they have pneumonia, because we can't see inside their lungs, or a surgery, we had a turtle that came in this year that was hit by a boat and had an injury to its head and some skull fractures, and we took it in to have a board certified surgeon do the repair of that. So the program, yeah, it's really nice now that we're going to have a program and a tank all together that supports sea turtle rehabilitation. Specifically, yeah, instead of us just trying to have to scramble and make do with what we have

(01:07:28):
amazing. I forgot one more question I wanted to ask you, and it was, have you ever had to stay overnight at the aquarium to either do a procedure or come in overnight, anything like that?
Yeah, there's been a couple of instances. It doesn't happen a lot. We also don't get called in on emergencies all that often, but when we do, we're available. And my office is set up with a makeshift reclining chair slash cot that can be pulled out, and we stay overnight if we need to, but we had to manage patamelline, if you don't know what that is, it's a little type of Wallaby creature that we had here many, many years ago, and he had injured his arm and required round the clock management and care to keep him safe and protected while he was healing. And so we had shifts around the clock for that. And so we definitely had to be here overnight. Some of the sea otters that we get in the little orphan sea otters, require 24 hour monitoring and care, feeding all through the night, drying, cleaning, that sort of thing. So far, that hasn't necessarily been a veterinary thing, because those luckily have been pretty healthy and managed well. So we haven't had to come in for them yet, but it will happen. And then I also remember I came in and was here a lot the first night after Shelby, the harbor seal we were talking about, before she had her eye surgery, she needed pretty much constant monitoring to make sure that her condition was okay. And so, yeah, I mean, I was here all night. Actually didn't sleep that much that night here on call, but, you know, checking on her frequently and going in and administering her medicine. It just happened to be a cool, cold night, and we had the heater on out there and it was raining. It was not an ideal situation for us as humans, but, but Shelby did really good. Yeah, she's a champ.

(01:09:15):
She can see now and she can see rain or shine, Morning or night. You're always here for the animals.
Amazing. Well, thank you, Dr Adams, for doing our podcast again, our second time, just the first time anyone else is hearing it, so maybe we'll come back on one day. Yeah.
Thank you very much for having me. And I just wanted to say it's I have a lot of gratitude, and I'm very grateful for being able to work with these really cool animals and have a job here at the Aquarium. It's been a real treat. Thank you.

(01:09:48):
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(01:10:17):
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