On a gray Wednesday morning in November, in the marine mammal auditorium at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Lyssa McGurren stood in a wetsuit, leaning against the glass partition and polished aluminum railing surrounding the ocean habitat. It was the day before Thanksgiving, not exactly the aquarium’s busy season, and she was fielding questions from the crowd as they filed out following the daily dolphin presentation. Her feet planted on a concrete ledge facing the pool, one of the aquarium’s Pacific white-sided dolphins streaked through the water beneath her. Growing up in the nearby suburb of Northbrook, she always wanted to be a dolphin trainer. She was a strong swimmer and diver from an early age, and fell in love with the ocean and dolphins while spending vacation time with her grandparents in Florida. She resolved to make working with marine animals her career. “I couldn’t see myself not doing it,” she says. “It’s my dream job.”
During the question and answer session, a wide-eyed little boy approached her and said, “Are you the one that gets to play with the dolphins?” “Yes I am,” she answered, then explained to the boy how she got so lucky. Indeed all the questions that morning centered on how one gets to play with dolphins for a living. It’s a dream job for many children just like McGurren, but it’s a tough field to crack. Since aquariums and zoos only have a few job openings for animal trainers per year, competition is stiff. Would-be trainers can stand out by demonstrating a range of skills. Shedd looks for someone with a bachelor’s degree in at least one of the sciences, experience working with animals, public speaking skills, and a SCUBA certification. Many job seekers take unpaid internships or volunteer for months at these facilities to gain experience; in fact, Shedd has a waiting list of people who want to volunteer in their marine mammal programs.
Heading down a long road like this with an uncertain outcome could have discouraged McGurren, but she had planned her education specifically for it. She went to Indiana University, majoring in psychology to learn about behaviors that all animals exhibit, and Spanish so she could work in a foreign country. She added a minor in biology with a certificate in animal behavior. During college she interned in a marine biology field study in the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean before graduating in 2000, then interned and volunteered at Shedd after graduation. She says she’s lucky to have had the support of her family during those months of unpaid work. She lived with her parents while she volunteered, but says she never thought about quitting. “I knew this was going to be my career,” she says, and after a brief internship in Hawaii, Shedd made it so by offering her a full-time job in August of 2001.
Marine mammal training at Shedd is focused on building a bond of trust between the trainers and the animals, teaching them to live in their new habitat. The trick jumps may get the biggest cheers from the crowd during Shedd’s daily dolphin presentation, but most of the training is focused on facilitating healthcare for the aquarium’s dolphins, Beluga whales, sea lions, penguins, and sea otters. While some of the senior trainers at Shedd specialize in the care of a particular group of animals, most of them work with all the animals based on resources and staffing needs. It just so happened that McGurren’s name was next on the list at the end of April when Shedd was contacted by the Alaska SeaLife Center about helping them rehabilitate an abandoned otter pup.
Finding a New Home
On March 27, 2005, Easter Day, Tim Lebling got a call from the US Fish and Wildlife Service about an otter pup that was stranded on a beach near Valdez. Lebling is the stranding coordinator at the ASLC, a research and rehabilitation facility located in Seward that treats distressed marine mammals. A recreational boater had seen the pup at the high tide mark early in the day, and when he came back later it was still there, crying for its mother. If the pup were stranded on the beach much longer she would have starved, being dependent on her mother to find food and nurse her. No one knows for sure what happened to her mother, but Lebling speculated that she could have been killed by a predator like an orca whale or died while giving birth. She also could have been killed by humans, struck by a boat or killed by one of the local Native American tribes that are licensed to subsistence hunt otters.
Lebling advised a Fish and Wildlife trooper in Valdez to observe the pup for a few more hours to make sure it was truly abandoned, then, once this was confirmed, to pick it up and fly it to Anchorage. Meanwhile, he made the 120-mile drive up from Seward through a snowstorm to meet them there. Once Lebling finally stabilized the pup and got it back to Seward, he knew he’d have to find her a permanent home.
The ASLC works with aquariums and zoos worldwide to place rehabilitated animals, but they chose Shedd this time because of past success with its five adult otters, one of which Lebling placed with Shedd in 2003. Shedd would also be able to send a trainer to Alaska and begin the process of getting the pup, named Kiana, ready for her ultimate home. McGurren flew to Seward on a few days’ notice, with no set timeline for bringing the otter home. She would stay as long as it took, she says, for Kiana “to learn how to be an otter.” Sea otters are entirely dependent on their mothers for the first five to eight months of their lives, and while much of their behavior is instinctual, they perfect their hunting and grooming skills at the encouragement of their mothers. The team worked around the clock in shifts to care for Kiana, with McGurren providing surrogate encouragement to help her develop survival skills. They constantly monitored her temperature and fed her a high-fat, high-protein formula every two to three hours. Shortly after eating, Kiana took a dip in the pool to keep her coat clean, then after each swim the team dried her with towels and blow dryers, carefully combing out the fur to keep it from getting matted. This grooming process, normally done by the mother until a pup learns to groom itself, is critical because unlike seals or walruses, otters have no blubber to keep them warm. They rely on their dense fur to survive in water that is typically 70 to 100 degrees below their core body temperature. They brush their paws over the coat repeatedly to clean it and keep the millions of hairs separated, trapping layers of insulating air between them. The whole process took the team over an hour and a half, finishing not long before it was time to start again.
McGurren spent up to 10 hours a day with Kiana, bonding with her and gaining her trust through simple cognition exercises. She helped strengthen her swimming and foraging skills, and pushed Kiana to groom herself until instinct took over. Eventually after a month of training, McGurren, Lebling, and the rest of the team stepped back and watched Kiana perfect these habits on her own. “Every day is something new,” Lebling says, “like ‘Oh she picked up a clam today’ or ‘she’s grooming herself today’.” Once she showed enough signs of independence, she was ready to move on to Chicago.
Kiana required the same rigorous feeding and grooming routine on the trip to Shedd. Everything in the nursery at the ASLC had to be replicated in the private plane Shedd sent to bring McGurren and her charge home: food, jugs of the same salt water she had been swimming in from Alaska, and ice in a kennel to keep her cool. The air temperature in the plane had to stay below 60 degrees Fahrenheit so she wouldn’t overheat when out of the water. Kiana slept for a good portion of the drive from Seward to Anchorage and the flight to Chicago, but spent her waking hours eating, playing about the inside of the cabin, or, having secured that all-important bond, sitting in McGurren’s lap. After eight hours of flying and a few quick stops for the humans to rest, Shedd Aquarium welcomed its newest arrival on May 23rd.
Eat, Train, and Eat Some More
“Hi sweetie,” McGurren said to Kiana, as she watched her swim on her back in a small pool in the bowels of the aquarium. The pool is housed in a room resembling a high school locker room, with cream-colored walls and floors lit by harsh fluorescent lighting. Kiana, turned over on her belly and swam toward the end of the pool. She scampered up an access ramp, hauled out of the water, and ran up to the door enclosing the habitat. She pawed around the edges of the door made out of PVC pipe and clear plastic, screeching and sniffing the air while standing on her hind flippers.
“She’s looking for food,” McGurren said. “They always are.” The aquarium has six otters in all: four adult females, one adult male, and Kiana, the youngest. Despite their cuddly appearance and playful grooming and feeding habits, the adult otters are the most dangerous mammals at the aquarium, both to their human trainers and immature newcomers like Kiana alike. Their looks belie muscular bodies and powerful jaws perfectly adapted for hunting in the coldest waters of the northern Pacific. Otters, like any other mammals, develop their own social hierarchies, and though Kiana is big enough to defend herself now, she could be picked on by the adults if left to socialize freely. Instead, she spent most of her adolescence after arriving at Shedd in this pool, separated from the adults but able to see them on the other side of her pen through the plastic windows. The trainers have begun introducing her to some of the females in the main otter habitat, but they are taking things slowly. Kiana has overcome a lot to this live this life.
Shedd was the first facility in the world to attempt training sea otters; previously, they had been thought too difficult to train because they are precocious and independent, comfortable with humans to the point of being insolent. The trainers work on behaviors to help feed the otters, move them around to their various habitats, and condition them to being handled for medical care. Without this training, McGurren says it would be difficult to do anything besides feed the otters in an indoor facility like Shedd.
The otters have daily training sessions in the hallway next to Kiana’s pool. Five of the trainers kneel down holding “targets,” poles with different colored shapes attached to the end that each otter identifies as its own. The otters file into the hallway and shuffle over to tap their respective targets. The trainers reinforce each correct response, tossing whole shrimp and pieces of clam to them out of plastic buckets strapped to their hips. The otters gobble up the treats, shucking the shrimp out of their shells and discarding the tails just like people do. The trainers coax the otters to roll over and hold still using another pole with an oblong rubber cylinder resembling a dog’s chew toy attached to the end. The otters paw at the rubber toy and let the trainers manipulate their flippers, an important maneuver for taking their temperature, all the while receiving more treats and encouragement. The whole session is rapid-fire. McGurren says they have to work with the otters quickly because unlike the Beluga whales, who have more patience for humans, the otters “have the attention span of a two-year old.”
As the session ends, the trainers back away from the otters, tossing food at them rapidly as they exit through the service door. They want the otters to understand that the humans’ leaving is a good thing, McGurren explains, but also to keep them occupied so they won’t follow the trainers—now with empty food pails—into the corridor outside. This is where her respect for the otters’ strength and ferocity becomes apparent. “The last thing we want is to be alone in the hallway with them without any food,” she says.
While watching another otter training session staged for the public in the auditorium, McGurren talked about the similarities between training animals at Shedd and how people train pets. There’s no difference with any of the animals, she says; otters, dolphins, and Belugas respond to the same stimuli and encouragement that dogs or cats do. Successful training is a matter of developing trust and anticipating behavior. McGurren says working with the animals has helped her better interact with people, the most useful skill being patience. “I can’t get frustrated with an animal if they aren’t behaving,” she says. “I can’t just take it out on them because it will really harm the relationship.” Reacting this way to misbehavior would jeopardize the trust she had worked so hard to establish, and it also might reinforce negative behavior in the animal. This, McGurren says, is useful to understand when dealing with people. “If someone says something I don’t like, instead of letting them know it, I’ve learned to let it go and not reinforce the wrong thing,” she says. But it’s not all about walking on eggshells. “It’s positive conditioning too,” she says. “I can never go over the top thanking people for doing something nice. Not that I didn’t try to be a good person before, but now I really know how that response works.” Correlating basic animal behavior to people isn’t always an exact science though. “The hardest animal to train is my husband,” she says.
Special Ties
The trainers develop bonds with the animals that go beyond those people make with house pets because they spend so much time with them, working and learning from each other. Whereas people tend to think of dogs and cats as children or kid sisters and brothers, the dolphins, whales, and otters become children, siblings, friends, co-workers, and companions all in one to the trainers. McGurren responds to the animals’ behavior in the same way she might her human friends. As she and the other trainers watched Jump, a male dolphin at the aquarium on breeding loan from the San Antonio Sea World, chase after one of the females, they gossiped about it as if he were a bachelor hitting on one of their friends at a bar. She talks to the animals at every turn, laughing as if they were sharing inside jokes, anticipating their quirks and idiosyncrasies. But despite the fun and camaraderie, McGurren has learned the consequences of this kind of attachment.
When each trainer starts working at Shedd, they are assigned to be the primary caretaker for one animal so they learn the value of bonding. McGurren worked with Sira, a female Pacific white-sided dolphin, for almost three years until she died in December of 2004 from a stomach disorder. Sira battled the sickness for months and had even shown some progress before dying. She stayed in a medical pool behind the scenes at Shedd while the trainers brought the other dolphins back to the pool to keep her company. McGurren spent long hours at the aquarium observing Sira and just being there to comfort her. “It was really hard,” she says. “You like to say you know what’s going to happen, but it’s hard to go through losing an animal, especially one you were so attached to.” After watching a video about the training methods at Shedd that showed footage of Sira, McGurren said she still has trouble looking at pictures of her. Despite the loss, she says she probably gets more attached to the animals now knowing that their time together could be so short.
After their first assignment, Shedd’s trainers split their time caring for all the animals. McGurren says they develop different relationships with each animal based on its personality and history. As Kiana grows older and more independent, McGurren’s relationship with her has changed. Kiana lives with three of the adult females now, but doesn’t spend much time on public display yet. She has integrated with her new mates normally though, which doesn’t surprise McGurren. Despite her rough start, she says Kiana was always relatively independent and never demanded much from her handlers. She still trains Kiana with the other otters, concentrating on eye contact and quick response to commands, but the tactile relationship, the day-in, day-out grooming and handling is gone. “I don’t know if she can recognize me now because she was so young when I started with her,” she says. But, she says, “It’s hard not to look at her and bring back memories. It’s different raising an otter like that.” After watching Kiana playing and chattering away in her private pool, McGurren put it more succinctly. “She’s a special story,” she said.
Images from sheddaquarium.org