June 29, 2002

Today was a pretty exciting day.

I did something new today - feeding the black tipped reef sharks. They live in the Coral Reef exhibit, and I've fed the zebra sharks in there before, but the reef sharks were pretty new. They get pole fed, which means their food gets stuck on a pointy bit of a pole and lowered into the water.

I learned that feeding them is a bit of a trick because there are 30 fish hanging around to grab the food meant for the sharks. And those fish are lightening fast. I'm not very good at feeding them yet.

Leo the green sea turtle at his old home with the other turtles.

Leonardo, the sea turtle that was moved in last week, kept coming over to investigate. His way of "exploring" is to mouth things, and he doesn't do this very gently. He attempted to mouth the zebra sharks I was feeding, but I shoved him off before he did anything. The southern sting ray usually plasters herself up against the rockwork and squirts water everywhere, hoping for a handout. Leo went towards her eye with the intent of "mouthing" her, but I shoved him off again there too. He got fed later, and it looks like he's caught onto the system pretty well.

I did other routine things - preparing food for divers, preparing food for tanks I take care of, feeding, stuff like that. Crystal popped in for a bit today and hydrocleaned.

Every week I change out the filter bags on one tank, and there's usually a few brittle stars in the filter bag. I pull them out and pop them back into the tank because I don't really want to kill them. But they're called brittle stars for a reason. They're a big different than your typical sea star. There's a central disc and five spindly legs sticking out. These stars have a tendancy to embed themselves rather well within the filter bag, and it's really hard to get them out. Today there were fifty or so of them. They're quite tiny, about the size of a thumbnail.

It was a long process getting all those little buggers out. I end up breaking off a lot of legs when I deal with them, and this always makes me feel horribly guilty. They grow back and all, but still... And it's pretty nasy having brittle star leg bits all over your fingers. Ew.

I did other stuff - water changes and things like that. I suddenly realized I forgot to feed a tank, so I did that really quickly.

Glen, the GPO at the aquarium before Gollum.

I came back and checked on the water again, and then I ran off to feed Gollum, the Giant Pacific Octopus (GPO).

I had told Crystal to meet me at a certain time because she had wanted to see him get fed again. She was there, working the touch tank that resides next to the GPO tank, so I hung around there for a bit while she waited for the other volunteer to come cover her.

He arrived a bit later, and I lured Gollum out of his cave. He was pretty friendly today, but very slimey. I've never felt him so slick before, and it left a mucus coating on my hands. So nasty. =P I gave him some clam and squid, and hid one of the squid inside one of his toys. He grabbed that and pulled it in close and let us play with him a bit. After awhile, he went back into his cave, taking the toy with him. That should be fun to try and recover later.

I left the exhibit and went down the back stairs towards the kitchen to clean out the dish. That's when things got really exciting.

A quarter of the way down the stairs I slipped. I started falling foward and did my best to try to keep up with my forward motion - essentially, I was running down the stairs. My feet finally fell behind about three quarters of the way down and I pitched forward, slammed my hands into the ground and my knees onto the steps and slid the rest of the way down.

My body was muttering obsceneties at me, so I decided the best thing to do was lay as I had fallen and wait a bit. A couple people ran up and asked if I was okay and I said "No." Obviously, I had just slid down stairs here. Somebody was saying to call 911 and get an ambulance and I told them no, don't do that. (I needed to spare myself the embarassment.)

Security was called and this guy showed up and had me move my arms and push my hands against his hands to make sure nothing was broken and stuff. I told him I was fine, just bruised. He had to fill out a report anyway and clean up my skinned up knees. (Which he did by ripping open the holes I had torn into the knees of my pants.)

Gah. I kept trying to tell him not to bother, because I hadn't shaved my legs in several days and y'know, this is not good. He said he had to. =P So he put band-aids on my knees (they weren't even bleeding) and wrote down the report.

So the lesson here is - always shave your legs. You'll never know what will happen.

I went home after that, even though I hadn't gotten around to cleaning the protein skimmers yet. That was kind of disappointing. I really like cleaning them for some reason. ::shrugs::