It’s kind of long and convoluted, but the short story is that in college I focused on ecology because that was what I was interested in, and I finally figured out that I didn’t have to pick a major that directly related to a career like law or medicine. Then I decided to pursue a graduate degree, so I studied marine biology at UCLA (actually estuarine ecology, for those who like the specifics) and earned my master’s degree. At UCLA I’d started to be exposed to teaching, so I worked in a variety of jobs that had a mixture of teaching and biology/science - I taught science in classrooms, in National Parks, and for a non-profit association with the National Marine Sanctuaries. In the meantime, I’d been volunteering for the organization I work for now for about three years before the job became available. It was actually a stroke of luck - I took the summer off to get a Wilderness EMT certification and when I got back I checked my email to see my current job announcement in there. The rest is, or will be, history.
I saw some sort of marine mammal (either a sea lion or fur seal- it looked like a sea lion, with ear flaps and flippers like sea lions’, but I don’t know how to tell the difference between sea lions and fur seals) at the aquarium in Sydney, Australia, that seemed to understand thermodynamics. It was feeding time, and fish frozen in ice had been thrown into the water. The animal grabbed the fish in its mouth and swam back and forth in the water with it. I think it was doing something like what I do when I use running water to thaw frozen food. So maybe they are smart enough to take over the world- Pier 39 was just the beginning.
Yup. I’ve got a master’s degree - oddly enough, which had nothing to do with marine mammals. It was all work on invertebrates and fish, with the occasional salt-tolerant plant thrown in.
I don’t; rescues demand a somewhat more flexible schedule than I have. I feel deeply indebted to the volunteers who can take time almost whenever to go out and rescue a stranded animal, and to the employers generous enough to let them go.
Yup. Just as recently as Monday we released five sea lions, one of whom was tagged with a radio and a satellite tag. I think releases are incredible, it’s kind of the culmination of everything we’re working towards.
Burning.
Actually I have a set of slickers and boots that are for working with animals - these never enter the house. After close contact with animals I wash them down with diluted bleach, but it really isn’t enough. My car smells a bit fishy right now, and I don’t have to go in until the night shift today, so I’m going to give it a bit of a deep clean.
Very rarely can whale rescues involve any swimmers - only about 3% of whale rescues are safe for swimmers. More often the work is all done from land and/or boat for safety reasons. Really understandable - even a juvenile humpback could easily kill a person with an errant swish of its fluke. Mostly handling animals requires dedication and a cool head under pressure. I imagine rescues have the same requirements.
You’re right - cetacean rescues are rare. The organization rescued a humpback whale in 2005, and in the last 2 or 3 years has also rescued 1 harbor porpoise and 1 bottlenose dolphin (IIRC, my memory may be off) out of about 600-800 rescues per year. Our primary patients are the pinnipeds - seals and sea lions.
Yeah! I’d love to see them at the Fillmore opening for Charismatic Megafauna.
Depending on the injury or illness, the stay is most often between 3 and 6 months, with a lot of variability. We also rescue a lot of animals that cannot be safely released - we’ve treated blind and deaf sea lions. We place these animals with zoos or aquaria. I believe Brookhaven Zoo in Chicago has one of our deaf sea lions.
Did you figure that out just from the species mentioned? Cheers! Not too many people could do that. And cheers to Manatee too, I don’t see his/her conspecifics often, but I visited Mote Marine Lab in 2004 and got to see some up close, and they are amazing!
wevets, I keep reading your name as wetvets. Anyway, do you give any of the animals names? I used to work with a raptor program that didn’t give the birds names because we wanted it to be clear to the public that these were not tame animals or pets.
Usually we use boards (kind of like wooden shields) to keep the animals from getting a good view of us as we’re feeding them. We try to minimize the number of people that enter a pen and the amount of time they spend in that pen. If they’re capable of swimming and eating, animals must eat in their pool, which makes it easier to block their view of us as the fish are put in the pool. We can also jury-rig larger barriers between the animals and us if we need to. It’s a big problem with pups and with animals that live close to shore and are likely to come into contact with people.
All the pups go through what we call “fish school” - various stages of eating fish chunks, fish on a string that can be moved around (to simulate the movement of live fish), to free feeding on fish floating in the pool. If parts of that don’t work, we can also experiment with getting animals to eat squid or bring in live fish for them to eat (logistically, most of our patients are fed dead fish because it would be incredibly hard to maintain enough live fish for them all.) In order to be released back into the ocean, each animal must be able to independently catch fish while swimming, kind of like an exit exam.
Especially the harbor seal pups are really cute. I’ve met a lot of volunteers who work with the harbor seals (they’re a separate group because we wouldn’t want to transmit infectious agents from our other patients to pups who have a weak immune system), and they all feel some level of attachment to the pups, but they all also agree that the pups will be better off in the ocean. Losing animals also tears everyone up. People develop a kind of emotional shield or callus to keep working. As an EMT, I’ve also worked with people who didn’t make it in the ER, and the principle is the same - you do what you have to in order to keep working.
My identification may be off, but are you sure you’re not thinking of lizards and the word blowhard? :dubious:
Triage is handled in a couple of stages. When a stranded animal is reported one of our stranding volunteers goes to monitor the animal, which includes trying to determine the cause of injury and observing the animal if no injury is evident. We don’t want to, for example, ‘rescue’ a pup whose mom is swimming off the beach waiting for humans to get away from her pup. The assessment of that volunteer is passed on and used to figure out how high a priority the rescue would be.
After an animal is rescued, it will be given an entry exam, either by a vet or a trained volunteer, which will determine if it needs to go to our main hospital or to one of our satellite facilities (since we cover several hundred miles of coastline, a satellite facility is likely to be closer.) Treatment after that is organized and prioritized by the veterinarians. It looks very different from the triage situation that would be set up for human injuries.
I’ve never seen it, or heard of it happening, but I have pretended to work for Vandelay Industries. I could ask around to see if anyone’s heard of such a thing.
Many thanks!
A surprising number of people think we’re funded by the gov’t or are a gov’t agency instead of depending on the generous hearts of many donors.
I haven’t personally done any rescues, but a couple dramatic stories spring to mind:
Volunteers disentangled a humpback whale in 2005, I believe it was trapped in crab pot lines, and the whale was sedate enough that divers could enter the water to aid in the disentanglement.
An adult male sea lion (big! Like 400 pounds!) was rescued from a farmer’s field about 65 miles from the ocean. He had become disoriented and apparently swum up river and up irrigation canals. He eventually took a nap on a policeman’s car (not too unusual - the black hood and trunk absorb heat during the day and form a nice warm place to rest) so he was named “Chippy.”
A Steller’s sea lion pup was rescued from a wildlife reserve (we usually don’t rescue from reserves to prevent disturbance to other wildlife or habitats, but in this case Steller’s pups are so rare in our area that an exception was made.
A harbor seal pup with the umbilical cord still attached was rescued from a bike path. We know that since the umbilicus and the first fur coat, called a lanugo, was still present it can’t have been more than a couple days old. There’s also no way it crawled up onto a bike path by itself. RealityChuck and garygnu: Unless the Illuminati have set up their secret network of animal care centers before going on to Step 2, and profit! in Step 3, that’s probably us. Small world, huh?
… when come back, I’ll bring Herring Pie!
Great Fun. Before I had to leave Florida, I used to volunteer at a Marine Mammal Hospital. We didn’t have any seals or anything. Just dolphins and small whales. But it wa great! At one time I had 9 dolphins!! I would just go by there anytime to just pet them or play with them or splash around with them. It was a great experience!
I remember Chippy! (Here’s a picture of him on the CHP car.) I googled to see if they know what he’s up to these days, but it looks like he wriggled out of his collar at Pier 39. If he’s not still alive, I’m sure he’s been reincarnated as one of the Neville kitties…
Yeah, we force those ellies (elephant seals) up and down ramps to pools like you wouldn’t believe. And the big ones have to get down and give us twenty (ounces of fish eaten) at least three times a day.
Those navy seals are pretty tough, but they’ve limited their repetoire to just phocids, who cannot stand up on their flippers. Clearly a foolish choice when the mammal marines can draw from the talent pool of otariids, otobenids, cetaceans - and not even to mention the mustelids. Hands (paws/fins) down, marine mammal force recon wins every time.
Anne Neville, could it have been an Australian sea lion? The sea lions are pretty smart. We’ve had some smart enough to learn how to open up the gates in their pens using their nose. To forestall the revolution we use bungee cords in the gates now so you can’t easily lift the latch.
Chippy lost his satellite tag after only about a month, so we don’t know where he went after that, but he really made a great public sensation after TV crews filmed him on that CHP car. He had a gunshot wound to the head, so it was almost like he was begging the police to solve the crime - except, of course, that it anthropomorphizes him wayyy too much to say that.
There’s probably not a single reason for all whale beachings. Some can be traced to illnesses or trauma that we know about (e.g. whales and dolphins with burst eardrums have been found beached and they’re suspected of having had difficulty navigating and avoiding obstacles). Others are a complete mystery, especially when healthy whales beach themselves alongside sick ones, or where entire pods beach themselves. It’s fair to say that the beaching phenomenon, especially of apparently healthy animals, is more of a mystery than known quantity.
We do give the animals names - “Chippy,” “Humphrey,” and so on. You’ve got a great point - we try to be clear to the public that these are wild animals, but the organization has done it this way for 30 years, so there’s a lot of tradition there. I think we have more to worry from folks who have never heard of us making assumptions about these animals than from folks who have in some way learned about them through us. I always try to stress the wildness of our patients and what’s needed to keep them wild when working with the public.
Thanks for your work with the raptor organization!
I know that can be demanding and thankless, but valuable, work. My girlfriend volunteers with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory. Bear_Nenno: That’s pretty amazing - we hardly ever treat dolphins, and at least you don’t have to worry too much about dangerously acclimating them to humans. Plus, trust me, nobody wants to try to pet a wild sea lion (on land anyway). Thanks for your work with the dolphins!
Growing up watching “FLIIPER”. i had this idea that dolphins were like 5 year-old humans. Now people are saying that they are less intelligent than dogs-who is right…and can you understand dolphin calls? Do they make sense-or are the calls like dog barks?
Let’s just hope your gate-opening sea lions don’t learn from the man-eating sea lion at the Berkeley Marina. We’ll be in real trouble then, especially if they team up with Chippy- we won’t even be safe inland.
To me they just seemed to act like smart dogs. But I never really put them through any tests that would measure their intelligence. I will say though, that I would never get in cage with a 500 pound wild dog, but a 500 pound wild dolphin with hundreds of sharp pointy teeth never seemed dangerous.
The dolphins love to play with little toys and stuff, just like dogs. And one really seemed to like playing fetch. Either that, or she just really liked having her toys in one particular corner of the pool and I was just frustrating the hell out of her by throwing it toward the center of the lagoon everytime she brought it back… who knows.
The calls. First, the calls are NOTHING like tv would like you to believe. That Flipper sound effect never came from a dolphin. I doubt it even came from an animal, period.
The volcalizing is not on the same par with barking or purring. They do seem to understand each other and dont seem to be limited to just “I’m angry” or “I’m scared” or “I’m content” like cats and dogs. I think there’s been studies where they played certain dolphin recordings and were able to create complex dolphin instructions based on the sounds. And also I believe it’s been proven that dolphins will refer to each other by “name” assigning a specific sound to each individual.
I think dolphins can interact and understand each other better than other mammals like dogs. But it’s hard to get unbiased evidence because a lot of people in the dolphin business seem to project A LOT of emotion and intellect into every little thing a dolphin does.
“Wow, did you see how she just swam in a circle like that?? It’s because she misses her mom and she’s wondering what she’s going to do when she gets out of the tank and is concerned if she’ll ever have a family of her own and be a responsible productive pod memer.”
“Look at that! That dolphin just threw bumped that can with his nose and tossed it out of the tank because he knows the benefits of recycling and wants all humans to stop polluting the ocean…”
It’s also brought up a lot that dolphins have HUGE brains so they must be supersmart. But really, that huge brain is needed for the very, very complex sonar they use. The majority of that knoggin is used to process all that info so they can track multiple targest at once. They’ll know the speed, shape, distance, direction etc of several targets at once. Much better than anything the military can do with a single dish. I’d be interested to see how much of their brain is actually used for “thinking”. Probably the same or just a bit more than any other highly social predatorial mammals.
Hell, I had a dolphin that would try to eat anything in her tank. She would also swim around all day with a pine cone or pine needles in her mouth. I think she had the mental capacity of a large rock at best. A real sweetheart, but really stupid.
Bear_Nenno probably knows more about dolphins than I do because we rarely treat them here. From what I do know, dolphins have a remarkable system of communication, but their intelligence is often overestimated.
For the pinnipeds, they’re very much like dogs (I’ve even heard from Marine World trainers that they can be trained in the same way). Their vocalizations are pretty basic and don’t have anywhere near the versatility that dolphins have.
They’ve all got fairly bad breath, but surprisingly I’d have to choose “Blue Whale for $500, Alex.” A couple Septembers ago I was working on a boat that had a close encounter with a blue, and the blow was really stinky, far more powerful than anything the sea lions put out in terms of pungency. Then, as if to add the icing to the cake, it defecated directly in front of our path, maybe 30-40 meters from the bow.
Blue whales - not just the biggest, but the stinkiest too.
I could ask around to see if anyone’s heard of such a thing.
