The rescued sea lions at the Aquarium are a curious and energetic pair. So the trainers are always finding new ways to engage and stimulate Zoe and Sierra. When St. Patrick's day rolled around, they found the perfect activity: fun with green-shamrock-shaped jello!
The jello was made by our stellar volunteers out of plain gelatin and a plant-based food supplement called spirulina (people eat this, too). Of course we don't know if the sea lions liked the flavor, but they did show lots of interest in this activity! Here's a look at the fun.
Patty slapped some of the shamrock-shaped gelatin pieces
on to the glass wall for the sea lions to find.
Visitors and fur seals alike were curious about the activity.
But the fur seals were decidedly "meh" about the jello.
The sea lions, however, got right in there to explore!
There was lots of sniffing and chewing and tossing and biting of the gelatin.
As you might have read in older posts, or seen first-hand during one of your trips to the Aquarium, we often do enrichment sessions throughout the day with our seals. These are outside of our regular training sessions and allow us to interact with the seals using different "puzzles" and toys.
We've recently been trying to brainstorm some new ways to enrich the seals, so we decided to bring back an old favorite - Jello! We set it up in a similar fashion to the ice piles (that you might have seen in Lindsay's post here). We filled different molds with unflavored gelatin, cut it up into small pieces to put in a pile, and even hid some pieces of smelt or squid in for an added bonus.
As you can see in the video below, Roxie really got into this, diving into the Jello piles like she was in a pie eating contest! Sometimes she even pushed the small pieces of fish away to get to larger pieces of Jello. Being one of our visually impaired animals, this is a really great way to do enrichment with her because she can use her vibrissae (whiskers) to search through the Jello to find the fish, or just to find bigger pieces of Jello to eat!
