Yes, Your Wish Came True...

As you probably all know, I have worked at the Indianapolis Zoo for a number of years, both as a paid dirt-monkey and as a volunteer in animal care--specifically, in Fish Care. We had three good-sized aquaria containing (respectively) a nurse shark, a blacktip reef shark, and 5 Yellow jacks; an assortment of Caribbean reef fish and two green moray eels; and an assortment of Indo-Pacific reef fish, a blue-spotted ray, and some carpet sharks. I say "had," because in 2006 we are undergoing a much-needed renovation of the Waters building. Unfortunately, this renovation includes the dismantling of nearly every exhibit I work with; when it comes back up, it'll be species tanks (to which I say, boo) and a touch tank (to which I say yay, but not at the expense of the amazon exhibit which is being removed to make room for it.) I was out of town last week during the move; so this week, I came back, and the several hundred fish I fed and cared for every Thursday for the past year were, with few exceptions, gone. Some went to the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans, which lost all its fish in Hurricaine Katrina; most went to the Mall of America, which apparently has an aquarium among all its other featured attractions. The puffer we called "Spud" went there. Smooth and Wrinkle, the morays, went to Audubon. The tiny boxfish we'd had in a back hall tank because he was too small to go on exhibit for the last 6 months went to Minnesota. I know it's probably hard to understand how a person can get attached to fish, if you're not an aquarist; they're sure a lot lower on the personality scale than dogs and cats, they're not cuddly or affectionate or, really, all that smart. Fish are subtle, though. They do have personalities, which you learn when you work with them each week, and you miss them when they go. At least, you do if you're me. So I'm sad this week.

But the whole upshot of this is, what does a Fish Care volunteer do when there aren't any actual fish to care for? Wait for it.......

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......If you guessed "Penguin Care," then we have a winner! Yes. Now that my beloved sharks are gone, I am available at 10:30 to assist in the penguin feed. Which I did this week, much to my dismay. (And if you're not sure why half the people reading this post are currently laughing til they pee, you'd better go here for a recap.) I'd like to point out that I've done this a few times since 2003 without incident (if you don't count getting bitten as an incident, and believe me penguin keepers don't) so you can just stop waiting for me to give you this week's accident punchline. Nothing happened. Nothing other than my cussing a blue streak as the kings and gentoos waddled away from me like my bucket was radioactive, causing me to beg them, "Come on! Come up out of the water and eat this fish! Please? It's a great fish, look! Please? Pretty please?"

For anyone who has romantic notions about the cuteness of penguins, let me tell you a couple things up front--one, they do bite. Hard. On purpose. Two, they're really really loud. You'll be standing there feeding them and all of a sudden one of them 2 feet away will start going off like an air raid siren for no apparent reason, shattering your eardrums and any sense of control you might have had. Three, they bite. Did I mention that? They know where your rubber boot stops, and they aim for the leg right above the top of the boot. One thing I can say without reserve, though, is that they ARE hilariously funny when they run around on land. We had a few in the holding area during the feed this week, and they run around on the wet concrete and their feet make these little slappy sounds--slip slap slip slap slip slap--as they run back and forth trying to decide if they really want to be back here or out on exhibit. Some of them went down a few stairs in the holding area, and that was hilarious too, watching these little bowling pins hop down the stairs--slip! slap! slip! slap!--and then back up as we herded them back out into the exhibit area. So they're not all bad. But they're sure no sharks, either.