Solo feeding

I am officially able to free feed the whales by myself, unsupervised! I was checked off today on the full feeds and did my first solo feeding session! It went really great and Inuk my buddy was a champ. I was able to keep pace with the other trainers during the session which happened to be a longer training session. Since I am strictly full feeding and the other trainers are working certain behaviors and feeding every so often, I have to be sure not to overfeed to quickly or run out of fish before everyone else. But it went really well and I was able to work on Inuks attention threshold a little bit. I was able to get him up to 10 seconds of waiting patiently for his fish and reinforcement. I think next week we are going to start incorporating toys into the feeding session :) I also got to help with an ultrasound on Naku today. Since its breeding season, a lot of ultrasounds are performed to look at the follicle developments in Naku and Kela.

The aquarium was hopin' today. There were a lot of people out and oodles of kid running about. There must have been an overnight sleepover with a boy scout troop last night. Lucky them they got to sleep right next to the shark lagoon!
My weekend is here and I will leave you with some exciting pictures from around Mystic Aquarium!

Stingray

Turtle

Clown Fish (Nemo's)