July 13, 2002

It's the eye of the sawfish!

Today started off as a pretty usual day. I fed the sharks again, which is always much fun. I'm doing pretty well with it, and getting better at giving the squid to the sharks before the other fish have a chance to grab it. Some of those fish are amazingly fast though, so it's tricky. The cute little stingray came up too and she even managed to give me a good soaking once. The Napoleon wrasse also came up and I gave him a squid. Man, that's one huge fish.

After the food for the divers was prepared, Tony informed Crystal and myself that the sawfish had come in last night from Australia, so we went out to see her. She's huge! I was quite impressed with her - I've never seen a sawfish before. She looks half shark, half ray, and half who knows what. (Okay, maybe that should be a third of everything.) Her body is like a shark, but her head is like a ray. Her body is robust with a tail like a shark, and several dorsal fins. Her head is more flat, with sphericles (water intake holes on top of the head) and gills underneath her like a ray, and a mouth like a ray. And then she has this thing sticking out of her head with teeth on it that looks somewhat like a chainsaw.

Quite an amazing animal.

A diagram of me feeding a shark.

After that we just did some cleaning stuff and finished pretty early. Tony said he'd show me how to clean the canister filter for the moray eel tank. He went through it and told me how to put it back together and what to do when I turned it on.

He then prepared to leave, but I was somewhat nervous and said I'd rather have him be there while I turned it all back on. He said he trusted me. I told him I didn't. =P He went out to show some other people the sawfish.

So I screwed some parts back together and fitted the thing the way it's supposed to be. There's a little valve that screws off at the top to let air bleed out the top of the canister. The it's a yellow plastic thing, about the size of a quarter. It was already opened up so I just decided to plug the pump in.

Well, I hadn't quite realized it was *that* open, and the thing ended up shooting into the air. Crystal and I looked all over for it and climbed all around the tank searching. We couldn't find it, so we went and found Tony and I told him that I screwed up just like I thought I would. I think he thought I was joking at first. Unfortunately, no.

A nice profile of the sawfish. She weighs about 120 lbs.

We spent an hour looking for that thing, crawling in places were the nasty stuff lived. Ick. Finally I turned around and looked at some pipes that came out of the wall and went into the floor. We had all looked there at least twice, but suddenly that stupid little thing showed up there. Gah. We put it back in the filter and turned everything on and all was well.

Before I left Tony told me about two part-time positions that were coming up. I really really wish I could take them, but it's coming too late for me. =\ I mean, the aquarium is the only really thing I have going for me right now, and more than anything I want to work there, but it's just not going to work out.

I also realized that I only have a few more weekends there and that's it. I wish I could pack up the whole aquarium and take it with me. I cried all the way home today. =(