Ashley Chow dot Com

Wouldn’t you love to meet and feed a sea turtle? That’s just what I did last Monday @ the Vancouver Aquarium. It was all part of the Aquarium’s Animal Encounters, where you get to “go behind the scenes and find out what it’s like to feed and train the animals of the Vancouver Aquarium alongside their trainers.” Of course, you have to pay a hefty price, but it’s worth it.

Schoona (SKOO-na) is the resident sea turtle at the Aquarium. She has been there for a number of years now and is estimated to be between the ages of 10 and 20. She was brought to the Aquarium after being found along the coast of BC/Alaska, lost, alone, and starving. 6 of the 7 species of sea turtles out there are not meant to swim all the way up to places like BC as it is much too cold for them (considering they’re cold-blooded and all). A fisherman found her and rescued her, some other things happened, she was rehabilitated, and wound up at the Aquarium. She was unable to be released because nobody knew where she was from. They could’ve put her back out by, like, Mexico or something and for all they know, she could’ve gotten lost again.

That was the gist of the story of Schoona we were told during the Encounter. We also learned about sea turtles in general, their shell, and other facts about them. After that, we went up to an area behind the scenes to “make” Schoona’s lunch. Sea turtles are mainly vegetarians, so the trainers give her red peppers, string beans, broccoli, lettuce, some fishy/squid stuff, a gel diet (this block of dark green stuff), and a vitamin E capsule. She needs so many grams of everything so what we did was weigh everything out.

Then, off we went to the shark penthouse (basically the area above the shark habitat).

Yes, Schoona swims with the sharks. Stingrays and some fish too. In order to section Schoona off from everyone else swimming around and to feed her, a pair of really bright lights (which is supposed to have vitamin D for her shell) is turned on, a red paddle is dunked into the water, and a shaker is rattled. Schoona immediately swims into this little section and a clear plastic board is placed so she doesn’t get out.

I was on one side of this sectioned-off area and some others were on the other side, both with our bowl of food for Schoona. From there, she basically swam around in circles to get each piece of food put into the water for her. Of course, we didn’t plunk our hands into the water to put food in. She could easily bite a finger or more off, so instead, we used plastic tongs (the nicer ones that are used to pick up scraps of garbage) to put in a piece of food at a time into the water, making sure we released the food before she could get a bite of the tongs as well.

That went on for about 15 minutes, and I had the privilege of touching her shell, which is pretty smooth.

Here she is taking a breath. During the duration of the Encounter (which was 60 minutes long), she took about 4 breaths.

She’s reaching for a string bean here. From above the water, Schoona is enormous compared to when I usually see her swimming around (not above water).

She’s heading to the other side for some more food. The green plastic bowl clearly shows her food sitting in there. Look at that giant shell!

Schoona gets fed only once a day and usually, it is the people doing the Animal Encounter that feed her. Cute.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Photos, Reviews, Staycations, Summer, Van Aqua. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.