On Monday (my day off) I spent a few hours helping out with a “fish cutting party” that was be hosted in the NOAA building.
On Tuesday the aquarists took nearly all of the steelhead out of the “Open ocean” exhibit to see if that would stop the herring mortality’s. There has not been a herring mortality since then. We mostly worked on our projects that day and finally opened one of the wave tanks (the erosion tank) to the public. The exhibit seems to be quite popular. I got the idea for testing how a large sand dune might be able to dampen the effect of a tsunami. To test this i created an artificial sand dune (made of 50% sand and 50% glue) that i plan to coat with a varnish (for water proofness) for the tank.
On Wednesday I did an estuary walk at 11AM and later me and Brian tag teamed the Ocean Quest presentation. I also got to spend a lot of time manning the touch tank on Wednesday. We also attempted to get a video that i had downloaded (of Mt. St Helen’s erupting) to run on the ocean quest. For some reason it runs so slow that it just looks like a still picture (oh well). The day before we switched Squirt (our octopus) with Aurora. Aurora is much more shy than Squirt was and seems to be having trouble acclimating.
On Thursday I did another estuary walk . Later on i talked to mark about some of the building materials that i would like to have (ie. legos) for the tsunami tank and if there was a good place in town to buy them in bulk. Instead he just told me that i could buy whatever i needed off of the Lego website as long as I kept it under $100 (Alright). The tsunami tank has recently been having endless computer glitches that we are still trying to work out.
On Friday I did my first solo ocean quest. Fortunately (or unfortunately) only two people showed up for it. Aurora finally came out from hiding in the corner (which was exciting for people) and explored the rest of the tank. The erosion tank while popular as proven to cause quite a mess when kids end up spilling sand and water on the floor. We are think of making some modifications to prevent this. I decided that i did not want to run all the way back to my dorm to get a quick snack so I ended up buying some “astronaut ice cream” from the gift shop (or as what most people refer to it as, “chalk”).
On Saturday I did the estuary walk again in addition to Ocean Quest in exchange for taking a longer lunch break. Saturday was not as busy as it has been in the past (likely due to the county and country fairs). We also had to cover up the octopus tank due to the high amounts of stress that Aurora seemed to be under going. We will probably have to take her off of the exhibit and put Squirt back instead. We were able to get off at 4:15 that day in order to attend a barbecue for all of the visitor center volunteers. Good food, good time.
