As you know, we have been doing a lot of work with lobsters the last few months. Justin even posted a video of one of his lobsters molting. Just this week, Anita taped another lobster molting, but you'll notice this lobster is a surprising color.







The old shell is a light blue color, and the lobster itself is white. At the start of the video, the lobster is trying to get its claws, abdomen and tail out of the old shell. The lobster definitely looks like it is having a difficult time. Although the molting process only takes a few minutes, a lobster spends much of its life preparing to molt or recovering from molting. After molting, the lobster will bring water into its tissues and increase in size – sometimes it will gain up to 50% of its previous weight. The new shell hardens over the next couple days and the lobster will eat its old shell for nutrition.

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In an earlier post, I tried napping like Smoke. Lately, I've noticed Smoke seems very comfortable laying out at the surface of the water for Belinda, so I thought I would give it a shot. Pretty comfortable!



-Erin

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When she did participate I took advantage of working a new behavior with her; a flipper presentation. We teach this behavior to our seals so I figured it was worth a try with a turtle. Plus it kept me from dragging all of the taining tools to the platform that mostly went unused while Myrtle snoozed. The following video shows some of the beginning steps of getting Myrtle to place her right flipper onto my hand. She needed a bit of prompting with some of her reinforcement to guide her head in the other direction but you can see her flipper raising to go to my arm.

-Rochelle

After Smoke and I mastered her invertedbottle, I had to find a new behavior to train. It turned out that she was the only harbor seal at the Aquarium that didn't know how to wave. Not anymore! To get her waving I first had to get her to lift and lower her flipper. Over time we worked on increasing the number of waves and the speed of them. Here's the video:



Notice that I started off by rolling her over onto her side before she started waving. Soon, the act of rolling over became her cue to wave which was not my desired signal. Right now I'm working on getting her to wave by just saying the word "wave". Watch this video to see some of the steps we took to get Smokey waving like the queen she is.

Someone asked this question after watching one of Blondie's videos and I thought that this video may help explain. As with our seals, training can make medical tests easier to do. In this video, Blondie is getting a routine skin scrape. Dr. Keiko Hirokawa, our vet, takes a microscope slide and lightly scrapes Blondie's side to check for parasites. Since I had trained Blondie to sit in my hand, this was a piece of cake!

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Skip targets his object for an audience


To train the spin behavior, I used the target to lead him in a circle. After many repetitions, I substituted my finger for the target and moved it in a circular motion to encourage a spin. Here's a video showing this behavior:



After many more repetitions I was able to fade the circular motion of my finger to just one small circle. Now Skip spins on a signal!

- Cheryl

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Back in February Rochelle and I showed you some of the training we were doing with our two juvenile anacondas, Marion and Wilson. It's been tremendous fun working with them and hopefully as enriching for them as it has been for us.







-Paul

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