Creatures Caves

So! As many of you may know, I recently got a job as an educator and exhibit guide at the zoo! It's an amazing job - filled with animal interactions, enriching teaching experiences and unexpected twists - and so every day thus far has been packed with awesome experiences. So, I wanted to share my adventure with you guys by keeping a day-to-day journal of what I do!

EDIT: As per Malkin's suggestion, I'll also take some time at the end of each day's entry to share some of the knowledge I've gained and/or some cool facts pertaining to that day's entry! That way, I can educate all of you, which in turn will help me learn!

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DAY 1:

Just finished my first official day of work at the zoo! It was so cool... I learned the ropes of the job, worked the aviary for a while, and got to feed stingrays!

While at the aviary, a lorikeet landed on my shoulder and started licking rain off of my hoodie. There is also one bird with a prosthetic leg - he's a cape thick-knee, a cute little cream and brown bird with long legs and a body shaped somewhat like a gull. the keepers had found him with a shattered leg near the front of the exhibit, and were able to amputate it from the knee down and fit him with a replacement. No one knows what happened, but my guess is that somebody accidentally stepped on the poor guy. He's taking it very well, though! Even saw him start to walk around on his new leg after laying down all morning, which made me happy.

At the stingray exhibit, I learned to identify the five different types of rays we have and helped to feed them! The exhibit is a shallow pool, and guests and staff can just reach right in. I took pieces of fish and shrimp and curled them up in my fist, then held them deep underwater and let the rays suck the food from my hand! They're like little vacuums. They don't have sharp teeth - they're just like flat little rasps - so it wasn't painful at all. Two of the rays were cutely clumsy and accidentally touched me with this plate, but it just felt like something hard.

I also got to see the stingray keeper train them! It's amazing how intelligent they are. She's trained individual rays to come to different shapes and line up if they're next, and one of the rays - she's a Southern stingray - is trained to accept an ultrasound. This is because the zoo is participating in a nationwide study; they're keeping one female Southern ray with no male of her species and seeing if the absence of a male affects her reproductive development. I'm really excited to read the results of that.

Tomorrow, I'll be working with giraffes and great apes! On top of all of this, I'll get to enrich people's minds by educating them about animals. This is a dream job, man.

FACTS:

* Lorikeets' tongues are really strange! They are long, with a little fuzzy ball on the end. It's shaped like this to help the lorikeet collect nectar and pollen from flowers, as these foods contitute most of what they eat. Because of this strange body part, their genus name is Trichoglossus, meaning "hairy tongue."

* Grey-winged trumpeters are indigenous to South America's Amazon Rainforest. Native tribes traditionally keep them as guard birds; whenever a snake approaches, the little trumpeter utters a surprisingly deep call to warn the villagers of the snake's presence. They are beautiful birds, too - like tiny black cranes with a metallic blue splash across their chests and a grey shadow over their wings and back.

* Some kinds of fish - for instance, clownfish - can change their gender to even out gender ratios of a group. If the other fish in their group are mostly male, for instance, some individuals will change into females to even the field. Most of these gender-changing fish are reef dwellers.

* Stingrays are most closely related to sharks. However, unlike sharks, stingrays do not have skin that is rough in one direction - instead, it's smooth and slick.

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DAY 2:

Today was awesome too! During the first half of the day, I worked at the giraffe exhibit. I fed the giraffes, helped guests feed them, and answered any questions guests had about the animals. But here was my favorite part - I was given a cart with a giraffe skull and cervical vertebra and two life-sized footprint models, and used these things to give small educational speeches to groups of children! I let them put their hands against the footprints for comparison and lightly touch the bones as I explained, and they looked fascinated! I loved seeing how affected they looked by it. The parents and teachers bringing the kids in were really happy, too. ^^

Then, after lunch, I moved to the great apes loop - silverback gorillas, bonobos, mandrills, siamangs, colobus monkeys, and two species of lemur are located here, and it's flanked by a panther exhibit. I walked around this loop monitoring the condition and behavior of animals, making sure that nobody was throwing stuff into the exhibits or sitting their children on the railing, and answering guests' questions about the animals in each of the exhibits.

There's one gorilla who's super pregnant and should have her baby any day - her due date was last week. So I'm really excited about that. Maybe I'll get to see it happen! Lol. There's also a baby giraffe who was born just last week and seems to be premature - I saw him way in the back behind the fence, and he's so tiny and cute. Shorter than me and 110 pounds. But they say he's doing well! ^^ Anyway, that was such a fun day! I really like this.

FACTS:

* Giraffes only have seven vertebrae in their necks, despite it being so long.

* They share a common ancestor with deer; this is actually the reason why giraffes have seven vertebrae. The ancestor had seven, and its vertebrae were individually elongated over time instead of multiplied.

* A giraffe's "antlers" are called ossicones; they differ from true antlers in that they are permanently covered with skin and fur instead of temporary velvet (which, in deer, is sloughed off occasionally to reveal the bone) and in that they are made from ossified cartilage instead of bone.

* The reticulated giraffe gets its name from the Latin word reticulum, which means "net." If you look at a giraffe, its pattern looks netted.

* Unlike the depiction of "King Kong," gorillas are generally gentle creatures. While dangerous if overly provoked, they are not needlessly vicious and prefer to be left alone.

*Chimpanzees are many times stronger than humans - this is because they have a huge number of fast-twitch muscle fibers in their muscles. We have them, too, just in a much, much smaller amount. Fast-twitch fibers allow for fast movements and "spring" actions. An interesting fact pertaining to humans is that people hailing from Africa have a slightly higher number of fast-twitch muscle fibers than do people of other descent; this gives them a small advantage in base speed and strength over people from a different line.

*The most noticeable difference between apes and monkeys is that monkeys have tails and apes do not. Therefore, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, siamangs, and orangutans, for instance, are all apes, whereas mandrills, even though they may look like apes because of their size, are monkeys, because they have a tail.

*Lemurs are neither monkeys nor apes; they are prosimians, meaning "Before simians (which refers to monkeys and apes)." This is because their features are much more primitive than either of these two groups of animals. For instance, unlike most monkeys, lemurs' tails are not prehensile (meaning that they cannot use their tail to hold on to branches).

* Most apes and monkeys percieve a smile to be a sign of anger, because when these animals express anger or fear, they bare their teeth. When they see a human smile, they percieve it the way we would a frown. On the other hand, a frown to them looks normal and happy.

*One animal which does share our perception of smiles is the common dog. Their facial expressions are very similar to ours; when happy, a dog will relax the corners of his mouth and they will naturally elevate, his mouth may hang slightly open and his eyes will look happy. When upset, dogs' mouths droop and their eyes look hurt, just like in humans.

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I'll post more as I keep working!

My third day is coming up on Sunday, so I'll keep you posted! I love this job so much <3