Our Great Chengdu Adventure!

Name: Kelly Jackson

Class/Year: Class of 2017, Junior

Hometown: Waterford, Wisconsin

Location: Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China

Internship: Animal Behavior Research

Nî hâo! For those of you who don’t know that means “hello” in Chinese Mandarin. It’s been a crazy first week here in Chengdu, China! After a LONG trip here (roughly twenty hours in flying), we are finally settled into our home for the next two months. We are currently living just outside of Southwest Jiaotong University, in a hotel like complex. Macie and I share a room, where we have hot water, air conditioning, and (thankfully) a western toilet. 

            Since we have been here, a lot of the students have been very nice with showing us around and helping us with the language. Learning Chinese is much more difficult than any other language, because there are four different tones you have to use. If you say a word using the wrong tone, it could mean a completely different word. So far we have learned a lot of phrases, such as how to order food and basic conversational words. We have also started to cover numbers, which will be very helpful for us when we buy things. Macie and I also got Chinese names. Macie’s Chinese name is very similar to her name. It is spoken as “may shi” which means something along the lines of “beautiful flower.” My Chinese name is the word for “butterfly,” which is ‘hú dié.’ We also asked the Chinese students to write out our names, which I’ll try to post later! (this website is actually blocked in China which makes posting pictures a tad bit difficult)

            Not only are the toilets and the language different, but the food is too. In Chengdu, they like things that are VERY spicy! From noodles to meat, they like things that have a kick to it. Next to where we live is a little restaurant Macie and I have been to a couple times. There they have a chicken we really like that is a bit more on the spicy side, but very delicious! We also live about a ten to fifteen minute walk from a mall, which has a Walmart, Starbucks, and KFC in it. Next to the mall is also a very delicious place we have eaten at a few times. There we get steamed and fried dumplings, which have lettuce and pork in them, and are smothered in spicy sauce. We’ve also had a wide variety of drinks, from soy milk to tea. Hot but still very good!

            In addition to the students, our research advisor, James, has also been a huge help at getting us accustomed to the lifestyle here. He has shown us a few places around the city, in addition to the panda base. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been too. The whole base itself is giant, at least three times the size of Otterbein’s campus, if not bigger. The people that we have been introduced to here are very friendly, and speak English well! And obviously, the pandas are absolutely adorable. During our time here, Macie and I will be studying the one year old panda cubs, specifically looking at their behavior. The past few days we have been working with James on developing our ethogram and the layout of the study. We will be conducting an instantaneous scan sampling, which means we will be looking at all nine of the panda cubs within their enclosure and recording their behavior at certain time intervals. As of now, we are going to be watching the pandas both outside and inside, depending on how hot it is. It is very difficult to tell the panda cubs apart, so hopefully next week we will be able to better tell who is who. :)

            Aside from food and some culture aspects, China is basically like America. People have dogs and cats, and love to go shopping. They play sports like tennis and basketball (they adore Lebron James for all you Cleveland fans). And they especially love pandas, which I mean who doesn’t? For now Macie and I will continue to appreciate our fame here, getting pictures taken of us everywhere we go, and enjoy our time here in the wonderful city of Chengdu! :)

Panda mid fall! :o

Selfie with the pandas! :P

Xing Yu posing :)

First day at the panda base! :D

The first panda I've ever seen! :)

Our Chinese names! Macie's is on the top and mine is on the bottom. :)

Ni hao from China!

Name: Macie Smith

Year: Zoo and Conservation Science, class of 2016

Location: Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China 

Internship: the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding; animal behavior research 

Ni hao from China! Kelly and I are the two lucky students interning with the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. We have only been in China for about a week but we have already seen and learned a lot! From learning how to order food to trying to use chopsticks to identifying the different panda cubs to figuring out how the heck one uses the toilets here, everything is a new adventure and a great learning experience!

We are staying just outside of the Southwest Jiaotong University from which several English translation students have taken it upon themselves to attempt to teach us Chinese. My Chinese name (ignore the spelling) sounds like “may-shi.” In translation; “may” is a type of flower and “shi” means beauty. I guess this means my Chinese name is “flower beauty.”  I don’t remember how to say Kelly’s Chinese name, but hers translates to “butterfly.” I find it interesting that the same word can have a different meaning based on the inflexion of your voice. This makes the language difficult to learn, so we may not be fluent by the end of our trip but hopefully we will be able to get around on our own a little more easily. So far we have made excellent use of gestures and pictures. 

For the most part, Kelly and I have spent the past few days at the panda base getting to know our research advisor, James, meeting people, building our ethogram, and practicing using this ethogram to observe the behaviors of one year old panda cubs. We have also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out which panda is which. I’m hopeful that by this time next week, we will be able to identify each cub fairly quickly. 

With this study, we will be using scan sampling to observe the behaviors and proximities of all nine panda cubs at one minute time intervals. So far it has been relatively cool in the mornings, so all nine cubs have been together in their outdoor enclosure for our morning observations. After our two hour lunch break, which I can definitely get used to, it is generally much warmer so the pandas go into two or three separate indoor enclosures. The animal care staff has been kind enough to allocate two positions from which we can observe the pandas in their indoor enclosures without having to worry about the crowd obscuring our view or interrupting us to try and take our pictures, which happens surprisingly frequently.

Monday morning (now this morning) will be our first day collecting data that will potentially be used. I’m excited to see what we will be able to figure out through this study!

 Here's a few of the little one year old cubs Kelly and I are observing this summer! 

Hello from The Wilds!

Name: Courtney Dover
Class Year: 2018
Hometown: Springfield, Ohio
Internship: The Wilds Scholar Internship
Location: Cumberland, Ohio

Hey everybody! I'm Courtney Dover, a sophomore in the zoo and conservation science program at Otterbein. This summer, I will be spending 10 weeks living at The Wilds as a wildlife ecology intern. All of the wildlife ecology interns got to pick a project to work on this summer. I am very excited to start my project because I will be doing predator avoidance training with head-started hellbenders! Now, let me explain what this means.

Eastern hellbenders (Cryptobranchus allegiensis) are a giant species of salamander native to the Eastern United States. They are completely aquatic and exchange gases through their skin. The Wilds is one of the few facilities dedicated to conservation of the species. We have hundreds of young hellbenders at the Wilds, and one of my tasks this summer is to help care for these little guys as well as researching them. The hellbenders at The Wilds are "head-started", meaning they have been cared for from eggs to larvae and to juveniles. Many of these animals would have been prey when they were young in the wild. We are giving them a head start to help ensure survival.

Photo courtesy of Purdue~Help the Hellbenders

When any animal is raised in human care, there is concern that it will not know how to behave in the Wild or that the behavior will differ from an animal raised in the wild. This applies to hellbenders as well. Larval and even juvenile hellbenders can fall prey to many different animals in the wild. When hellbenders are released into the wild, a big concern is that the young have not been exposed to these natural predators and will not know how to behave when a predator comes near them. It has been hypothesized that the larval hellbenders lack of predator avoidance skills is one of the main reasons for death in individuals released into the wild.

This is where I come in! Apprentice Tucker and I will be conducting research on predator avoidance training of the larval hellbenders at The Wilds. I will give more details on the procedure later, but for now I can say that we will be using a combination of mink gland secretions and an otter puppet to train the hellbenders.

Another cool aspect of the internship is that the wildlife ecology interns get to venture out into the world and survey for wild hellbenders! I was in the first group that got to go all the way out to West Virginia to search for these awesome salamanders under the giant rocks in creeks and streams. The site that we went to was not promising, as a hellbender had not been found there for over 50 years. But, Joe Greathouse, my advisor, was able to do eDNA testing to see if hellbender DNA could be found in the water of the site we were surveying. His test was positive, which meant hellbenders were in the creek, but we could not find any. We were lucky to find a mudpuppy, which is another species of large salamander similar to hellbenders. Enjoy some pictures of our trip!

Searching for hellbenders under rocks and using nets to block their escape routes.

Me holding the mudpuppy we caught. Since I was the one who caught him, we named him Courtney.

A close up of this cutie. After we took a few pictures and measurements, we released Courtney back under his rock.

Also, here are some cool pictures of the other animals housed at The Wilds.

Budgies!

Przewalski's wild horses

Sichuan takin

Ostrich

Reticulated giraffe

Pere David's deer

Bactrian Camel. The babies name is Wednesday (its a hump day joke). Also this is a great picture of her mother shaking drool everywhere. How graceful and majestic. 

A Day in the Life of an Elephant

Name: Mara Eisenbarth
Class Year: 2017
Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA
Internship: Animal Care Intern, Perth Zoo
Location: Perth, Western Australia

Hello again! 

So last time, I said I was going to talk about my experience with the elephants here at the Perth Zoo.  I want to talk only about the elephants in this post because Perth Zoo has a rare approach to elephant husbandry in this day and age.  First though, I'll introduce you to the Ellies! 

To start, there's Tricia.

As you can see from the birthday cake, she is 58 years old.  Tricia came from Singapore to the Perth Zoo in 1963 and is one of the oldest elephants being cared for by zoos in Australia.  

Then, there's Siput who is half Tricia's age at 25.  The two girls are best buds and just adorable together.  

What's special about the Ellies here in Perth, is that they are cared for through free contact. Free contact (in zoo terms) means that there is no protective barrier between you and the animal.  Obviously with an animal the size of an Asian elephant there has to be a fence between them and people right? Well, a lot of zoos (if not all) used to be free, or semi-free contact, until recently.  As safety risks are realized and fatal accidents occur, there is more and more pressure to have protected contact where the keeper and elephant interact through a barrier.  Either way can work, if the right procedures are followed.  

At Perth Zoo, they are fortunately able to take the two female elephants on a walk through the zoo a few mornings a week.  These walks are vital to the animals' health and just natural behavior of walking for most of the day.  The keepers use positive reinforcement to train the elephants and make sure they can perform most behaviors needed to care for them like foot checks and other procedures.  

So they have two female elephants, but they also have a male.  The bull elephant is under semi-free contact.  This means that most of the keepers (except one) never share the same space as the ellie, but they do interact with him through a barrier and can hand feed him.  Watching the keeper practice behaviors with the bull elephant was just amazing.  With just a few phrases she could have this elephant go across the yard, hold water in his trunk, stand on his back legs, and spray the water into the crowd.  And then he would happily come back to grab a few apples for his hard work.  

Before this bull elephant reached sexual maturity, they had free contact with him as well as the other girls.  But once bulls reach maturity, it's dangerous to continue to have free contact with them.  Unfortunately for the younger female, there won't be anymore elephant walks once Tricia passes away.  The young female is just a little too nervous to safely walk through the zoo without Tricia to keep her calm.  The 30 to 45 minute walks are just so beneficial for these amazing creatures who can walk 50 miles a day or more.  There are other ways to ensure captive elephants get enough exercise, but none that are practical for a zoo that is landlocked in a city.  

Anyway, my day with the Perth elephants was an amazing opportunity that I will always remember.  I learned so much from the dedicated keepers and who knows, maybe someday I can give that experience to another hopeful zookeeper. :) Thanks for reading. 

  

(Silup the male in the left picture; then me with Tricia on the left and Siput on the right) 

   

OWC hospital

Name: Victoria Turbyfill
Class Year: 2017
Internship: Ohio Wildlife Center
Location: Columbus, OH

I have known for a long time that I wanted to work with animals but I have debated going in a veterinary direction since coming to Otterbein. I loved my internship at the Columbus Zoo last summer but after working at OWC the past year I learned that having veterinary knowledge would benefit me no matter where I work with animals.  I have considered going into vet teching so I thought OWC hospital would be the perfect place to start. I enjoyed my time there as a student and quickly decided interning would give me the experience I need. I spend two wonderful weeks in Belize with the coral reef ecology class and experienced some of the most beautiful nature and animals. When I got back to Ohio I jumped right into the internship. I have spent most of my time there so far feeding babies (of course). There is one experience that I found particularly funny (and annoying). There is a red squirrel there that is an escape artist. While we tried to catch him, he climbed up my jeans, back and shoulders and eventually came to resting spot on top of my head. Only at OWC can I say I had a squirrel on top of my head and fed baby bunnies for 8 hours straight. I think this internship has started off well and will steer me in the right direction.

The Detroit ...Bears?

Name: Rachel Williams
Class Year: 2017
Hometown: Rochester Hills, MI
Internship: Animal Care Intern (Mammal Department), the Detroit Zoo
Location: Detroit, MI

Hello everyone!

Like many other zoo majors, I will be spending my summer interning at an AZA accredited zoo-- the Detroit Zoo to be exact. My familiarity with the zoo and its proximity to my house in metro-Detroit make it the perfect place to be this summer.

(Unfortunately, their policies prohibit posting any behind-the-scenes pictures, so all of my photos will be either taken from the front of the exhibits or found online.)

My area assignment for the first third of the summer is the Arctic Ring of Life and includes all of the bears (polar, brown, grizzly, and black) as well as the arctic foxes and the seals. Today, my first day, I got to experience working with all of these except the foxes.

We started off the morning by calling all the bears inside so we could clean and place food in their outdoor areas. That took a while, but once we were done we let them out and cleaned their inside stalls. Afterwards, the doors between inside and outside were opened so they could move as they pleased. I then moved on to seals, where I was taught how to prepare diets (basically just weighing fish) and got to observe the keepers feeding the seals. The feeding was really cool because the keepers use it as a time to practice trained behaviors, such as touching a target and opening their mouths. I got to see this again later on in the day, as the seals are fed around 11 am and 2 pm, but before that I was able to observe some really cool research being done on the black bear, Migwan. A researcher from Oakland University is using her to study how animals think. Her research includes placing a touch screen computer directly outside of a door to the inside stall and rewarding Migwan when she sticks her nose through the bars and touches the correct shape on the screen. The second part of the study is asking her to do the same thing but to touch a pink toy ball on one end of a pvc pipe instead of the plastic yellow shovel on the other end. She got it right for every trial on this part!

For those of you who haven't been to the Detroit Zoo, I included some pictures I've taken from my previous visits. (The Arctic Ring of Life has a really cool tunnel that you can walk through to see the seals and polar bears!)

Thanks for reading!

-Rachel

Lions, Tigers, and Bears OH MY! (and other equally as awesome animals)

Name: Mara Eisenbarth
Class Year: 2017
Hometown: Pittsburgh, PA
Internship: Animal Care Intern, Perth Zoo
Location: Perth, Western Australia

Hey Everyone!

Since I last posted on here, I've done a couple weeks on different rounds in the exotic animal section of the zoo! So I was able to experience the African Savannah round, the bear round (Sun bears, lions, hamadryas baboons), the tiger round (Tigers, red pandas, otters), and the Elephant round (only includes Ellies, because who needs more than that!).  I've had such positive experiences on all of them...but Ellies was my favorite! Each round has taught me something different, but some things remain the same too.  Cleaning nightquarters, washing dishes, and scooping up poo are all the same no matter what round you are doing.  You might not think so, but hosing and raking are aquired skills.  There is definitely a right and wrong way to do both of those things, and practice just makes perfect! So here's a quick rundown of what I learned on each round.

1. Tiger round
1. Animal Husbandry for a dangerous animal involves a lot of locking and unlocking.  And making sure every lock that should be locked is locked....and every lock that should be unlocked is unlocked.  And then triple checking that! Obviously you don't want a tiger roaming the zoo....
2. Really knowing the animal as an individual is so important for their welfare.  Two of the tigers get really stressed when there are two keepers in the back while they are being fed in the morning, so I waited outside until they were done, since I looked like a keeper to them.  If you don't know the animals, you wouldn't know specific things that stress them out. 
3. Red pandas are amazing and are generally aboreal.  Their exhibit was expanded 100% by a large fig tree in the very middle that rose up a few stories high.  They don't jump from branch to branch, so this is a good way to give them a more natural enclosure while also not taking up too much land.  Thinking outside the box for enclosure design is so necessary

1. Bear round
1. Hamadryas Baboons are quite possibly the most interesting animal I've encountered.  Their social structure is so complex and intricate.  A group of baboons that consists of a male and his harem of females is called a family.  Two or more families that have grouped together for whatever reason (food, safety..etc..) is called a clan.  Multiple clans can come together to form a band of around 200 individuals.  This band will come together to travel and sleep (safety in numbers).  Each male controls and disciplines his own females and is very protective of his dominance, especially when there is a lower ranking male in the family.  What's different about hamadryas compared to other baboons is that they follow the "possession is 9/10 of the law" rule.  So if an individual can get possession of food (i.e. put it in their cheek pouch) then it is rightfully theirs! Other species of baboon actually reach into subordinates mouths to grab food if the dominate member really wants it.  In Perth Zoo's collection of baboons, there are two geriatric females who need arthritus medicine.  Currently, one of them will take food from the keeper (Jess), but the other is too fearful of people.  Since sneaking food to a subordinate really upsets the hierarchy, Jess is trying to start a cooperative feeding program.  This is a long, time, consuming road that will hopefully end in Chad (the dominant male) allowing the keepers to give the subordinate geriatric baboons extra food.  It's been really interesting to watch the process in its beginning stages! 

1. Jess is also taking on another project with the fennec foxes who are fairly new to the zoo and are having a hard time adjusting to zoo life.  Since they will be living their lives out in the zoo, she wants to desinsitize them to the keepers coming in and out of their exhibit.  What she's trying currently is putting some food in a little bowl attached to a long stick and having them feel comfortable enough to take the food right out of that little bowl with her sitting there.  One of them caught on pretty fast, but the other hasn't really made much progress...until this morning! I was the lookout from outside the exhibit while Jess went in to try and do some feeding.  When she first walked in, they both ran and hid, but then the braver one came out ready to get some food from the stick.  Then right after that the other one came out and actually took food off of the stick for the first time! Jess and I were trying to contain our excitement, but it was so hard not to make too many sounds.  Long story short...don't give up! Never kno when you're gonna have a breakthrough. 

alright.....well I could go on and on forever and ever just about the last few weeks, but I think I'll pause for now.  Hopefully I can talk about the amazing elephants I got the opportunity to work with in my next post!