What I do in California...the work segment

"another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults"

So you might be wondering “What has Jeff been up to? How is his job? What does he do all night? Does he sleep anymore?” I’ll attempt to answer those questions now.

I am an intern at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific. I work four shifts during the week. My shifts are 8 am to noon on Tuesday and Wednesday and 1 pm to 5 pm on Thursday and Friday. The aquarium consists of three main wings (Southern California and Baja, the Northern Pacific, and the Tropical Pacific.) and an outdoor portion consisting of Shark Lagoon and the Lorikeet Forest aviary. For this internship there is an intern assigned to each of the wings as well as an intern for shark lagoon. I have been tasked to the tropical Pacific portion.

Each day of the week I work I serve under one of the four different main aquarists who manage different sets of tanks that are all contained within the tropical wing. I spend my entire time back behind the scenes doing routine tank maintenance and animal care. Things like cleaning protein skimmers, changing filter bags, performing water changes, cleaning the insides of tanks and scraping algae, preparing food and feeding the animals, hydro-vacuuming tanks, and checking temperature gauges and observing animals to ensure health. I am still learning the more complicated portions of the job but everyone I work with has been really encouraging and helpful. They have even given me the opportunity to do a little bit of work in shark lagoon and suggested that I might be able to go with them the next time they go to the wholesaler to buy more fish for the aquarium. (The wholesale store is a vast warehouse filled with tanks of saltwater fish. It’s an aquarists toy store….I am so excited.) The job was stressful at first but as I have worked more into the habit of my activities I am feeling more comfortable. I like my job a lot. It’s great. The water quality testing and large scale maintenance (for the huge sand filters etc.) are farmed out to specialty portions of the aquarium staff. After I have learned more of the aquarist end of it I hope to be able to learn a little about their jobs. In my job I thankfully don’t have to deal with the public. Last week I ended up having to go into the public areas for a short time to observe a Bonnethead Shark to see if it was feeding. It went like this.

Visibly upset lady: “Are you a volunteer?”
Me: “Well, I’m an intern so not exactly...”
Lady interrupting: “Well you work here. Fine. I come here a lot and one of your seahorses over there is lying on its side. I think it’s sick.”
Me trying to talk to her and keep an eye on the shark: “Oh well thank you for telling me I’ll head over there in just one minute to check it out.”
Lady snorts in irritation and storms off.

That’s just one more reason why I am glad that I don’t work with the public on a regular basis. The sea horse was of course fine, when I got over there it was holding onto sea grass laying on the bottom looking around to see if there was anything interesting to eat.

On any given day it works like this:
1. Arrive and find the aquarist I am working with.
2. Change filter bags, clean protein skimmers
3. Prepare food and feed
4. Clean up after food prep
5. Hydro clean tanks, maybe algae scrub
Etc. etc.

Interesting things I have done at work:
1. Hand feeding Burrfish (a type of small puffer fish)
2. Standing in waders inside the Stinging Catfish tank to scrub algae
3. Feeding Stonefish
4. Helping move a sea turtle out of a tank so the vet could treat it.
5. Feeding Black Tip Reef Sharks and Zebra Sharks.