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.  

The Inadvertent Booze Cruise

A story from last summer - the very worst trip of the 2010 season at the Iceberg Lodge.

Halfway through last summer season, I was convinced that the Iceberg Lodge epitome of dangerously reckless guest behavior was going to be something involving a bear. In fact, no bears were involved in the incident in question; instead I had to contend with the alcohol-fueled judgments of one of the oddest clients I have ever had the misfortune to be in charge of. We’ll call him Bob.

Bob had already made something of an impression on lodge staff because of his habit of wearing bright orange earbud headphones all over camp. So when Bob showed up for my full-day kayaking tour, I debated whether I should ask him to leave his iPod behind. I eventually decided against saying anything, as I didn’t want to start the tour out on a bad note, and I figured that as long as Bob’s kayak buddy (Harry) could hear what I was saying, I could keep them reasonably in line.

I was the only guide for the tour that day, going out with six guests in three double kayaks - Bob, Harry and two older couples. The trip up to the glacier went fairly smoothly, the group stayed together, the visibility was good, and the forecasted 35-knot north wind was conspicuously absent. After two hours of paddling, we got to the Aialik moraine (the spit of land jutting out in front of the glacier), which was to be our lunch spot.

When assisting clients in landing their kayaks, I generally put my boat ashore first, and then help the guests land one boat at a time - which helps prevent clients from tipping their own boats over when they stand up. This has the unfortunate drawback of leaving me on shore while my guests are still in the water. Occasionally a client will get bored enough waiting for their turn to land that they will be tempted to do something ill-advised - so I usually land the most troublesome clients first. I had never (prior to this tour) had a client that had already landed do something that might get them into trouble; usually all it takes is one reminder about bears, and they don’t wander off. In fact, clients on the moraine are very predictable in their behavior once they are out of their boats. The women in the group begin unpacking their lunch bags and their cameras; the men walk off to a respectable distance and take a pee.

Bob and Harry’s boat was the first to land, and as usual, as soon as their boat was out of the water, they started wandering down the beach. I figured I knew what they were doing, so I wasn’t concerned until after unloading the third and final guest kayak, I looked over my shoulder and realized that although Harry had come back, Bob was still wandering away. He was by this point at least 75 yards down the beach from where we had landed the boats. I hollered at him, but he was either too far away to hear me, or he had turned his iPod back on.

I needed to go after the guy, but I was reluctant to leave the other five, obedient clients by themselves.  I decided to gather up the remaining guests as quickly as possible and go after the stray as a group, to keep the tour from becoming more fragmented than it already was. Unfortunately, getting five novice kayakers unpacked and ready to walk is not an instantaneous process; by the time we actually started after Bob, I estimate he had a ten-minute head start.

Soon he was completely out of sight; at no point had he turned around to even check on where the rest of the group was, or what we were doing. Fortunately, Bob was walking along a fairly open portion of the moraine - if he’d decided to take the direct route to the glacier by crashing through the alders, I would never have been able to figure out which direction he’d gone. I did not catch sight of my lost client for another ten minutes, when I left the five obedient guests on a small bluff to unpack their lunches, and descended to the lower part of the moraine to collar my wayward client.

One reason that tourists to Alaska are willing to subject themselves to six hours in a kayak to see a tidewater glacier, is that when glaciers calve, it is damned impressive. It is especially impressive when you can view such calving from a little spit of land that juts out in front of the glacier. And if the calving is especially impressive, after the ice hits the water, you can watch the giant tidal waves crashing into that little spit of land that juts out in front of the glacier. It's kind of like an ice tsunami. Needless to say, all of the lodge guides are very careful about where on the moraine we take guests.

By the time I finally caught up with Bob, he had gone all the way to the very tip of the moraine - drawn by some unfailing instinct to the dodgiest area he could possibly have wandered into. As I got closer, I could see that in addition to the orange ear buds, he was also holding a flask with a suspiciously amber-colored liquid. The flask was closed when I got out there, so I wasn’t able to get a whiff.   I figured that I shouldn’t  give him grief about drinking liquor in a completely inappropriate setting unless I had more definitive proof that that really was what was in the flask - but I did chew him out about completely ditching the tour.

I hauled an unrepentant Bob back to the rest of the group, explained to everyone why we do not go down to certain areas of the moraine, and then sat back to eat my sandwich. I figured that if I could manage to not talk to Bob for the rest of the tour, I could get through the day without murdering him.

Bob began passing the flask around to the other clients. At this point, I was terrified to say very much about it, as I had just had one acrimonious encounter with the guy, and I didn’t want to do anything that would provoke him into becoming hostile or belligerent. Fortunately, neither of the women took any of the whisky, nor did Bob’s friend, so I could count on having at least one sober client per boat.

It had not escaped the notice of the other five clients that I was quietly furious with Bob, and that I had been legitimately worried about him when he’d wandered out of sight. So when he returned to the lunch spot and pulled out the booze, the other guests on the tour very quietly... turned on him.

It takes a lot of unwarranted abuse before tourists will turn on one of their own, but I have had the privilege of witnessing such incidents a handful of times. Consider a customer-service counter at an airport; now imagine how irate a customer would have to get before the other passengers in line would rally themselves in support of the ticketing agent. You now have a general idea of what these scenes usually look like.

For the next hour, the five other clients gleefully pointed out to Bob the calving events that would have necessitated him running for his life, had he still been standing at the edge of the moraine. And in fact, there was a huge amount of calving that day - which I completely failed to appreciate myself because I was too busy coming up with contingency plans in case Bob became too intoxicated to safely paddle his own boat. Not an idle speculation - the forecasted 35-knot wind finally made its appearance while we were having lunch, and was whipping up a fairly boisterous following sea. During the walk back to the boats, neither Bob nor his drinking buddies seemed to be in any way impaired, although Bob’s paddling buddy, without any suggestion from me, insisted on taking over the rudder. Which was probably a good call - I wouldn't have wanted Bob steering my boat, either. And to make matters worse, one of the kayak’s neoprene hatch covers had blown off - in my hurry to rally the group together and charge after my wayward client, I had neglected to make sure that all of our gear was properly tied down.

With the swell at our backs, we made extremely good time getting back to the beach, where I roundly turned down Bob’s apologetic offer to help me stow the kayaks. By that point, I couldn’t wait to get him out of my sight so that I could vent about the tour to my boss.

I think Harry must have further chewed out his friend at some point that afternoon, as I was the recipient of a heartfelt, and very tipsy, apology later that evening. Both Bob and Harry went out with me the next day on a different tour (I was not pleased with my boss for assigning me to guide them two days in a row) and they surprised the socks off of me by being extremely well behaved the entire time. I came away with the general impression that the guy wasn’t deliberately troublesome; he was just really, really oblivious to things.

The pattern with most of my guiding jobs has been that the worst tour for any given season usually happens right at the end. In Ireland, this happened when the seabird colony I worked at suffered a breeding failure, so by the end of our season the only birds left to show tourists were dead kittiwake chicks. At the aquarium I work for, the last behind-the-scenes tour I gave as an intern nearly ended in disaster when two rambunctious twelve-year-olds tried to tip over a large tank of research fish. So I’m not surprised in the least that my last trip to Aialik Glacier turned into a inadvertent booze cruise. And just as a recommendation, if you too would like to experience both the thrills of seeing a tidewater glacier calve, and the effects of moderate alcohol consumption, I would recommend doing so on a boat that someone else is driving.

Aluminum Blankets and Tiny Tsunamis

           I now have a new category of winter visitors to Alaska – tourists who were supposed to be going to Japan.   On Monday, we had a coach of 40 high-school students from Toronto, Canada, who had gotten stranded in Anchorage on Friday while en route to Tokyo.   Instead of turning around and going home, they apparently just decided to make the best of a bad situation, and stay in Alaska for a week.   The kids appeared to have packed for a slightly warmer climate; everyone was huddled in gift-shop Alaska sweatshirts that all look like they were bought at the Anchorage airport.   (In fact, so many of them were wearing gift shop shirts that I wonder if perhaps their luggage was sent on without them.   I hope not, but I didn't ask.)   Premier Alaska Tours is shuttling the group around; one tiny bit of good news about their trip is that in March, there is plenty of space for last-minute bookings anywhere in the state. The kids certainly improved our headcount for a Monday; I'm just sorry that it took a horrific natural disaster to get a group to visit on a weekday in March.

            There is perhaps one encouraging thing to come out of the Japanese nuclear disaster: it is now very, very obvious that nuclear power is not just an issue for the individual nations that choose to employ it – everyone has a stake in nuclear power, because everyone is affected if something goes wrong.   We need to address this issue as a global community – and maybe, just maybe, if we act like a global community to deal with one global issue, perhaps we can act as a global community to deal with others.   You know – war, hunger, climate change, and all those other issues that are guaranteed to make me want to crawl under a blanket if I think about them for too long…

           

            Another thought: the fact that small amounts of radiation have been released into the environment over in Japan has triggered a certain amount of concern about health risks for humans living here in the USA.   The radiation arriving here is minuscule, poses absolutely no known health risks and coming from very, very, very far away.   People in California are still buying iodine.   So my question is this: have we gotten to the point where a government (our own, for example) would be politically unable to use an atomic weapon, because their citizens would be too concerned about their own welfare to tolerate such an act?   Somehow, I find that an optimistic notion, even though the scientific illiteracy inherent in the assumption is still depressing.   Now, where's that blanket?   Maybe I should line it with aluminium, just in case the wind starts blowing in from the west...

              If anyone is curious, we did get some small tidal disturbances here in Seward, which were part of the tsunami wave generated in Japan.   There was NO actual tsunami here in Seward, although the town's tsunami siren was set off by mistake shortly before midnight on Thursday.   (Because a tsunami was predicted for part of the Aleutians, every single tsunami alarm in Alaska was triggered automatically, even for areas with no predicted waves.   They tell us they're going to fix that now.)   At around noon on Friday, near low tide, we got a foot and a half of water rushing into the boat harbor, slacking for a few minutes, and then rushing back out.   There wasn't very much of a height different, but the current it generated was very impressive, strong enough to uproot kelp all over the bay, and nearly pull the aquarium's harbor-monitoring fish trap off of its anchor.   Small-scale tidal disturbances were happening intermittently for the rest of the weekend.   It's hard to imagine the power of an event that can send waves bouncing around the Pacific Ocean the way I can send waves bouncing around a bathtub.

And just in case you haven't heard it anywhere else, you can donate to help with relief efforts in Japan through the Red Cross, or through the iTunes store.    Be someone's hero - donate!