Things Your Forget While You're Away

            I am back at the Iceberg Lodge after spending a whirlwind three days in the bustling metropolis that is Seward during the summer.   I went in for a friend’s wedding, and was planning to do some shopping in town; this plan was complicated by the fact that I forgot my wallet back at the Lodge.   My friend’s reception was at a local watering hole; fortunately I wasn’t carded.   I borrowed money from a friend to buy food and to pick up some things around town – essentials such as toothpaste, soap, hand cream, and used books.   I feel like forgetting my wallet is a sign of how easily one adapts to living off the grid - it never occurred to me that I would actually need cash, credit cards, and ID until I was back into the gift-shop laden heart of Seward’s downtown.

  

            I visited the aquarium, and happened to run into a co-worker who very kindly invited me upstairs to see the new seal pup.    Atuun, one of the aquarium’s resident seals gave birth last week – last I heard mom and pup are doing well, though they are still off-exhibit for the time being.   (The seal pup is tentatively thought to be female; her name hasn’t been formally announced.)   The pup looked frisky; she was lying on her back, waving her flippers in the air, and chewing on anything in reach – fence, foam mat, Mom, own flipper.   Atuun looked very tired; but she was definitely keeping an eye on her pup – and us. The pup is tiny; her flippers look disproportionately large to the rest of her.   She’s grey mostly; I can see a bit of her dad Snapper in her coloring.   Huge thanks to the Mammal staff for letting me take a look at her.   I think she’s going to be charming the pants off of aquarium visitors as soon as she goes out into the seal tank.    

            There is also new art in front of the aquarium, which was nice to finally see – though it was neither as pretty nor as exciting as seeing the baby seal.   I also saw Woody, the aquarium’s 2000 pound male Steller sea lion – who saw me approach his tank, and immediately jumped onto his rock and started looking around for his trainers.   I don’t know if it was coincidence, or if he actually recognized me as the person who interprets some of his feeding sessions.   It’s touching to think he might remember me – even if he only associates me as a person tangentially connected with his fish buckets.   

            Also in town, I tracked down two packages – one of which was a package of two pairs of new Helly Hansen rain pants, which turned out to be too large.   I would figure that if the medium size were small, the natural solution would be to order a large?   In fact, no – the large is enormous.   And because I purchased them through a pro purchase program, I can’t return or exchange them, which is a little disappointing.  I might end up giving them to my mom – which you also are not supposed to do with a pro purchase program.   Unfortunately, since I can’t return them, my options are to sell them, give them away, or let them mildew in my triplex room for the rest of the summer.   And, I’ll probably be placing another order with Helly Hansen to try and get rain pants that are the right size.  Yes, it’s worth the hassle.   Here in the Alaskan rain forest, you live and die by the quality of your waterproof gear.   At last count, I have five different pairs of rain pants (counting the two that don’t fit), and three different rain jackets.   I will probably be buying at least one more of each before the end of the summer.   And that’s not counting the various waterproof backpack covers, dry bags, pelican cases, XtraTuff boots, neoprene gloves, and rain hats.   

Other things in Seward don't change - there are still retired couples with giant RVs double parked in the Safeway parking lot, boat trailers on the highway swinging into the oncoming lane, and feral rabbits devouring my friend's garden.   (He's trying to eradicate/relocate them; they, in retaliation, have given birth under his porch.)   Woody the sea lion still bites his girlfriends; and emergency calls about stranded seal pups still interrupt plans to visit with friends.     Also, my cousins are still remodeling their kitchen - the only appreciable difference between the kitchen last month and the kitchen last week is that the water is back on in their house.  

Humpback Whales Joined Our Tour

            The Iceberg Lodge has been opened now for three days, and we’re seeing our first group of guests departing.   It is sad to see them go; they are all from a environmental organization, and have been some of the most easily-managed guests we will see all season.   They like each other, for one thing, and they show up for tours with their own rain gear.   This is always a good sign.  The group also had a knack for finding dead things on our property.   First, it was a Leather starfish on our beach, then a weird broken bird egg on the glacier moraine, and then bits of a dead bird on the beach.   Later, one of the guests spotted some sort of dead bug frozen inside a piece of glacial ice.   It looked weird enough that they tried to lasso the ice chunk to their kayak and tow it back to the Lodge.   They discovered really quickly that glacial ice is very, very dense – and this makes it very, very heavy. 

            The group also had good wildlife encounters.   The black bears are back around the lagoon in even greater numbers than last summer – about two hours after the first guests of the season arrived, we spotted a black bear twenty feet in front of the lodge, chewing on a downed tree.   And during the staff kayak training a few weeks ago, we had another bear swim out into the lagoon, right through our group of boats.   He didn’t seem upset in the slightest that there were boats heading towards him when he jumped in the water.   I suppose he figured that he had the right-of-way.   And there have been the usual number of bears wandering through the staff camp, checking on the progress of various construction projects, and looking for unattended piles of insulation to chew up.   Two days ago, I was on the return leg of a half-day hike with guests, and we were discussing  why we yell ‘Hey Bear’ as we’re hiking.   Basically, we make noise so that any bears in the area know that we’re coming, and aren’t suddenly surprised by our presence.    We aren’t actually yelling to scare them off – in fact, I don’t think yelling could scare these bears off.   Noise doesn’t seem to faze them.   For example, in camp, we have generators running, power tools yowling, six-wheeled ATVs running around, plus a lot of foot traffic and human chatter.  Despite all of the noise and bustle, bears regularly wander through camp.   

            I witnessed a great example of our bear’s tolerance of noise during a hike the other day.   I was walking back to the lodge with a group of eight, who were all being fairly noisy.   We come around a corner, and the guest directly behind me yells, Bear!   About fifteen feet off to the right, I see a furry rear end, placidly waddling off the trail and into the alder thicket.   He stops about thirty feet away and turns and watches us gawking at him, apparently waiting for us to keep going past him so that he can get back on the trail and continue his hike.    I think that the bear had been on our trail heading towards us, and had moved to a safer distance when he heard us coming.   Which is great – that is totally what we’d like the bears to do.   What is not so great is that the bear’s idea of what constitutes a safe distance from the people – is not what the people consider a safe distance from the bear.   This is the bad part of having really tolerant bears around – they just aren’t motivated to get out of your way.   

            This particular bear encounter was the closest I have ever (knowingly) been to a bear while guiding guests.   But in another few weeks, when the alders and willows leaf out, I will probably be passing more bears at even closer distances without even knowing they’re around. We yell ‘hey bear’, so that the bears know where we are.   Unfortunately, the bears don’t reciprocate this.  

       A humpback whale has moved into Aialik Bay, and apparently wants to join the Iceberg Lodge staff.   We’ve seem him frequently right off of our landing beach – and so close to shore that it seems impossible for there to be enough water for him to submerge.   He’s a very small whale; and has been in the bay constantly for over three weeks.   It’s unusual for us to see whales close to the head of the bay; usually they prefer more open water towards the Gulf of Alaska.   Last summer, we had a mother and calf who were in the Bay off and on; we’re speculating that our little whale might be that calf, who has grown up, returned from migration and is revisiting his boyhood haunts.   We’ve named him Humphrey.

            Humphrey made his first appearance when the guide staff were running our first training trip to Aialik Glacier.   We had launched our kayaks into the water, and had been paddling for maybe twenty minutes, when a whale surfaces about fifty feet away.   He surfaced three times in succession, and then swam off, but we kept seeing him spouting a half mile away.   He seemed to be matching our direction and speed.   We wondered if he wanted to join the trip.   Apparently, he did, because half an hour later, he showed up again, and swam right between our boats and the shore of Slate Island.   I estimate he was only two boat lengths from our group at his closest.

            Humphrey also met up with the guide staff on our other training trip in Abra Cove.   That time, he surfaced directly behind us, then dove and popped up again on the other side of our group – having probably swum underneath our kayaks to get there.   The Lodge water taxi saw him a few days later jumping out of the water, and a few staff who went out kayaking on their day off had him visit their boats, and then saw him head over to check out another group of kayakers at the other end of the Bay.

            So far Humphrey has not tried to join any of our guest trips; though as soon as he does, we’re going to need to figure out a way to get him included in the Iceberg Lodge tip-sharing pool.  It’s awesome that we have a whale who has apparently decided to move into the Bay for the summer – however, whales have been known to tip over kayaks, and Humphrey seems curious enough about our boats that he might actually try it one day.   I don’t really know of any good way to mitigate that.   Whale-watching handbooks recommend tapping on your hull to announce your presence to whales – the idea being that those whales who tip over boats did so accidentally, without knowing the boats were there.   In this instance, I think its obvious that Humphrey knows perfectly well where we are.   

            Do you know how scary it is to be in a room by yourself, and suddenly realize that something in the room is breathing?   That’s what it’s like to get surprised by whales.   You might think that a thirty ton animal would have a hard time being inconspicuous, but unless the whale surfaces directly in front of you, you won’t ever know it.   Instead, you’ll just hear the world’s loudest heavy breathing – one inhale, one exhale – and by the time you turn around, there’s only a ripple in the water, like a vanishing footprint.  

Predators of the Touch Tank

            We had a casualty in the touch tank this morning.   Sometime between around 9pm last night, and 10am this morning, one of the starfish in the touch tank ran afoul of a crimson anemone.   The anemone wasn’t even one of the large ones; in fact, it’s only about half the size of the sea star in question.   To be fair, the sea star wasn’t doing all that well to begin with; one of the aquarists had moved it into the anemone pool from the sea star tank because the larger sea stars seemed to be picking on it.   Possibly if it had been in better shape to begin with, it would have been able to extricate itself.   The first think I knew about it was when I uncovered the tank in the morning – and two starfish arms were sticking out of the anemone’s mouth.   I radioed the aquarist (he was amused that I used the euphemistic phrase ‘health check’, for what was pretty obviously a half-eaten animal); we were both of the opinion that at this point, it was really too late to do anything but let the anemone finish his meal.   The sea star was, unfortunately, still alive; for the next three hours I got to watch its tube feet flailing around as it was sucked all the way into the anemone.   

            Welcome to the touch tank, red in tooth and claw.   Although it isn’t always obvious to our guests, many of the touch tank animals are actually predators – for all that they are only a few inches long.  Also, most of them were collected from the wild.   Before coming to the aquarium, presumably these animals were surviving as predators just fine.  In the touch tank, our anemones no longer have to kill and eat other animals to survive, because we feed them what they need.   But that doesn’t mean they stop being predators.   That’s what they are.   

            With some animals, we even showcase their predatory talents for the edification of our guests.    Go ahead, touch the crimson anemone.    

              Do you feel the tentacle sticking to you?   It’s a little like touching a piece of scotch tape.   Believe it or not, that stickiness is actually the anemone’s stinging cells at work.   That little guy is trying to kill you and eat you.   Because humans are comparatively gigantic, and have very thick, multi-layered skin, the anemone’s chemical armament is woefully inadequate.   All they can do is stick.

            Regardless of their failure rate, the crimson anemones keep trying.  They’ll still be sticky for each one of the few hundred aquarium visitors that are going to touch them tomorrow.   They’re predators, and that’s what they do.   

The crimson anemone digesting his meal...

            Currently, the carnivorous anemone is swelled up to about three times its normal size.   I am guessing he has eaten enough food to last him for the next six months or so.   It’s interesting, but if the anemone had gotten ahold of the sea star a few hours earlier, or pulled him in a little quicker, we might never have known what had happened.   Someone would probably have noticed that one of the anemones had tripled in size overnight – but it might have taken a day or two for anyone to notice that we hadn’t seen the green starfish in a couple of days…

            Speaking of which, we are also missing two hermit crabs.  One was confirmed eaten by an anemone; all we found was part of a claw.   (The anemones are pretty serious predators.)   No idea what happened to the other one.   It might have been picked off by an anemone, or possibly it was done in by one of the larger crabs.   Of course, it could also be that the missing crabs expired of natural causes, and their tank mates simply took advantage of the free meal.  The touch tank hermit crabs, while uncannily passive towards people poking their shell, can be very aggressive towards other animals.   They steal food from the anemones, they snip the tube feet off of the sea cucumbers, and pull the opalescent bits off of the opalescent nudibranch.   One crab who used to live in the tank would occasionally snip arms off of the sunflower sea stars when he was feeling hungry.   

            But the hermit crabs seem to reserve their crabbiest behaviors especially for other hermit crabs.  When crabs molt their exoskeleton, it takes a day or so for the crab’s new exoskeleton to harden up (ever heard of soft shell crab?).   Some crabs take advantage of this temporary disability to rend the newly-molted crabs limb from limb.     It’s a recurrent problem with raising crab.   When crab first hatch, they are very small (about the size of the period at the end of this sentence), and very numerous – so to feed the crabs, you have to find food that is even smaller and even more numerous to add to their water.   When they’re still in their larvae stage, it can be difficult to get the crabs to eat anything at all.   Then they get larger, and they start eating each other.   The attrition rate can be high.   

            Given how crabbily our hermit crabs behave, I am continually surprised by the number of kids that visit the touch tank who used to have one as a pet.  I dimly recall my parents buying me a hermit crab as a child, being by turns interested and terrified of it, and that it died a few months after we bought it.   This also seems to be the experience of most of the small children who visit the touch tank.   I have yet to meet any kid who’s managed to keep a pet hermit crab alive for any length of time.   I sometimes wonder if this isn’t some sort of deliberate parental plan – that the first death of a pet that their child experiences will be a pet that isn’t all that loveable in the first place.          

            Since it can be almost impossible to raise some of these animals to adulthood in the safety of an aquarium tank, I have a lot of respect for all those crab living out in the wild.   For most crabs, just growing to the size of a penny is a major accomplishment considering that thousands of their siblings did not make it that far.   Have you ever seen the Discovery Channel show Deadliest Catch?   Some of those crab fishermen will make their fortune by the number of king crabs they catch each winter.   They’re the lottery winners in an industry that is statistically more deadly than almost any other occupation there is.   Now, think about all of those big king crab getting pulled out of crab pots and stuffed into the hold.   They were lottery winners, too.   Right up to the moment they wandered into the crab pot.

King Crab

'An Excellent Place to Observe the Habits of Human Beings'

            Evan Esar once called zoos an excellent place to observe the habits of human beings.   This is certainly true for the touch tank - especially when there are lots of families visiting.   At times, the touch tank is almost like a tree stand from which to observe various parenting strategies at work.

            The parents that are most successful at getting their kids interested in touching the animals are the ones who are interested in the animals themselves – or at least are willing to feign an interest long enough to convince Junior that the anemones aren’t going to eat his finger.   (Some small children don’t even want to come near the tank one they realize that there isn’t a lid on it.)    

            Then there are the parents who are benignly tolerant of whatever their youngster wants to do – they’ll stand back and take pictures, and let the kids pet the sea urchins if they want to, but they’re also totally fine if all the kid wants to do is splash the water around, or peer through the glass at the hermit crabs.   (Look, Mom - he's moving his claw...)   Really young kids just get a kick out of putting their hands in the water.  It’s a lot of fun to watch their faces when they find out that our 39-degree tank isn’t exactly bathwater temperature.   One kid just wanted to swim his hand through the anemone pool and pretend to be a sea lion.

            These also the parents who seem to be on a continual quest to keep up with their easily distractible offspring.   The family could have spent only 30 seconds at the touch tank, but as soon as the kid sees something else interesting, he’s off like a shot, and the parents grab the stroller and take off after him.   When my mother took my sister and me to museums, she had a rule that we couldn’t leave an exhibit until we had actually read the accompanying panel – thereby preventing us from bouncing around the gallery like blonde-haired ping-pong balls.   In nearly four years of sporadic interpretation at three different zoos and aquariums, I have never seen another parent duplicate this trick.

            Then you have the parents who don’t make any attempt to keep up with their kid, or who view the touch tank as some kind of on-premises babysitting service.   Which is absolutely, totally fine with some kids – like the teenage girl whose mom spent twenty minutes in the aviary photographing the puffins – you could almost see her ‘Uncool Parent’ meter ticking into the red zone.   Significantly less fine are the three unsupervised kids who want to climb on the fiberglass sea lion, or use the eider spotting scope to look down each other’s throats.

            What I absolutely can’t stand are the parents who actually call their own kids sissies for not wanting to touch a starfish.   Yes, some people do this, and it depresses me every time I see it happen.   I mean, it’s a starfish.  It’s only a damn starfish.   If your kid just wants to look at it, let him bloody look at it.  Or, you can grab his wrist, force your kid’s hand underwater, poke the starfish a couple of times, and tell your kid, see, that wasn’t scary at all.   I should ask the exhibits guys to make me a sign - “This aquarium encourages the use of positive reinforcement in the training of our guests.   Any parent using the words scardey-cat, sissy, or wimp will be asked to sit and look at the octopus while their child enjoys the touch tank at his or her own pace.”

            A man was at the touch tank with his son, who looked to be about seven years old.   The dad was calling his boy every name in the book trying to get him to touch one of the starfish, and the kid was standing there looking miserable.   Some kids, especially the younger ones, feel like they are perfectly justified in not wanting to touch something gooey with more tentacles than they can count.   This boy wasn’t one of those – he was very obviously scared of it, and just as obviously mortified that he was scared of it.   His dad says, if you’re going to be a pussy then we’re done here, and walks off to the other end of the gallery.    The boy is still standing there, staring at this giant purple sea star.   And I think, that bastard has set this up so that failing to touch a starfish is failing his dad.   

            So I stick my hand in the tank and start petting the starfish, and tell this boy every single comforting fact about starfish that I have learned in three years of being the touch tank lady.   He’s very soft, and because he’s so soft, we have to be gentle when we touch him.   He moves really slowly.   His mouth is on his belly, and he doesn’t have any teeth.   His favorite food is mussels.   He won’t crawl out of the tank because being out of the water isn’t good for him.   The boy asked a question (good sign) and dipped a finger in the water.   He touched the starfish, very gently, and looked at me, as though it was important that someone knew that he’d been brave.   And he had been brave – and his father wasn’t around to see it.

Silt, or the Aquarium meets Jaws

When the barge arrived, the touch tank got very scary for a few hours over the weekend.

The aquarium is in the middle of a major project to clean out our saltwater intake lines – these are two big pipes that take salt water out of the bay and into the tanks in our building.   So yesterday, the big barge, which is going to be the staging area for an upcoming phase of the pipe project, arrived in Resurrection Bay, and anchored itself directly over the intake pipes.   Unfortunately, the anchoring process apparently churned up quite a bit of muck off of the bottom of the bay - which was immediately sucked up by the pipes and fed into our tanks.   So, for a good portion of Sunday morning, the exhibit tanks looked… well, a little scary.   The water was very grey, and cloudy, and every so often, a silhouette of a fish would flicker by, or a few strands of kelp would wave in the current.    It was actually very cool seeing Woody swimming around in the sea lion exhibit – he looked like a monster-sized shadow drifting across the window.   All we needed to do was glue a shark fin onto his back, and we would have had an entirely different exhibit…   

Since there weren’t visible animals in all of our tanks, we discounted admission for the day, and people seemed happy enough with that – at least no one complained.   And the mammal husbandry staff made a point of radioing every time they were doing a feeding session, so the guests could congregate and watch.   (Woody does handstands.   No guest who sees one will depart unimpressed.)   

Some of our tanks actually looked pretty atmospheric - especially around mid-afternoon, when the water began to clear enough that the fish were visible, but the back walls of the tanks themselves were still very shadowy.   In some ways, the silty look is probably a little closer to what the water in Res Bay actually looks like – so full of glacial silt and plankton that you can’t see a whole lot else.   On good days in Aialik Bay, you could see down about eight feet.   At the aquarium, you can (usually) see all the way to the bottom of our deepest tanks, around 20 feet down.   

The Kelp Forest tank looking mysterious

The seabirds in the aviary certainly noticed that there was something going on with their water; they kept sticking their heads underwater and looking around.   And when Eden and Tasu came out into the habitat later that afternoon, they seemed even less happy than usual about getting in the water with Woody, their 2000-pound would-be boyfriend.   I don’t think they liked the idea of being in the water with him, but not being able to see where he was.   Eden jumped in eventually, and she and Woody spent a few minutes nuzzling and nipping, which seems to have become their standard way of saying hello.   (If Woody gets too rough with her, she’ll turn around and bite him on the lip; Eden may be our smallest sea lion, but she knows how to take care of herself.)

The touch tank, however, was just downright scary.   For the first few hours we were open, the water in the tank had the consistency of chocolate milk – this solid grey expanse of water, broken occasionally by gelatinous anemone tentacles, or prickly urchin spines waving above the surface.   Not a very inviting sight for the touch tank.   It was impossible to see any of the animals at the bottom of the tank – and even I did not want to stick my hand all the way to the bottom of the tank, for fear I would get too close to a pissed-off hermit crab.   (I’ve never seen any of our crabs pinch anyone, ever – but I have seen them try a couple of times.) 

By the end of the day, the debris kicked up by the barge seemed to have settled back down, and the water in most of the tanks looked noticeably clearer.   However, many of the touch tank animals looked two or three shades greyer than they normally did, from all of the silt that had settled out on their backs.   The sea cucumbers looked particularly dingy; it almost looked like I needed to go through the tank with a feather duster.

I do want to mention that having silt in our water – even in quantities large enough to cloud up a six-inch tank – is in no way harmful to the animals that actually live in the water.   Silt is naturally found in the water in Resurrection Bay, (after major rainstorms, the Bay can become very silty just from increased surface runoff), and the critters that live in the Bay deal with the silt just fine.   (Also, any bits of plankton or food particles that were sucked into the pipes will be eaten with relish by the anemones, barnacles, and other assorted filter feeders living in the building.)   The silt is really only an annoyance to the guests - and to the aquarium staff whose job it is to clean this stuff out of our tanks.