New England Aquarium Day 2: Galleries with Bill Murphy

I met up with Bill Murphy who is a Senior Aquarist for Galleries at the New England Aquarium. He showed me around from the public’s point of view, and then we went behind the scenes to see how the aquarists and their interns run the Galleries. Bill is in charge of the species from New England (like this orange lobster on the left) and Olympia which is on the West Coast close to Canada. Bills coworker, Allison, has a Gallery which is the mirror image of his but she works with all freshwater species. When we were walking through this area, Bill stopped to help Allison clean the anaconda tank. The anaconda was 16 feet long! While in that area, I met Joe Masi who is my high school marine science teacher’s brother. Small world! Allison had an intern, Joseph, who showed me the electric eel. There were massive gloves that he had to wear when he would reach into the tank in order to protect himself.

Bill and I then walked back over to his gallery and I started food prep with his intern, Alex. We cut squid and other fish for chop, and Alex had already prepped the shrimp and clams before I got there. After cleaning up our space we brought all the food to the gallery and the task for the rest of the day was to feed all the animals. Some were easy to feed and some were being VERY difficult. In the first tank, we target fed certain fish by attaching the bits of food to the end of a pole and bringing the food right to the specific fish we wanted to feed.  We did this with anemones too. Then we threw in individual pieces of chop and whoever was the hungriest would scoop it up. In another tank we were feeding skates and halibut. There was one halibut that stayed at the bottom, and one that went all crazy and fed on the top and would often miss his food because he was trying so hard. The halibut who stayed on the bottom also was super far forward so we decided to come back and feed him later.

We moved on to the octopus, and I was so excited! We splashed the water and waved clams in the water to get her to come towards us and out of her corner. When she did, we stuck her food in her suckers. She got sucked onto my hand and it felt so cool, I didn’t know if she would come off since she was so strong. There was a sign with what to do if the octopus escapes right beside the tank, and I now know that is very possible for her to maneuver around and that sign is important to make sure she stays where she needs to be.

We checked on these baby sharks, and had to wake them up to feed them. We woke them up by dropping a little bit of chop on their head, it was very cute. Feeding took till about 3:30, and I had a great time doing it with Alex. He was so nice to me and we worked like a team. Bill toured me around the other Galleries that housed tropical and temperate fish. He had to help fix something in the freshwater area, so I toured around the aquarium and then headed out for the day. Working in Galleries was just wonderful, and the people really made it special. I didn’t feel like I was slowing their work down by being there, and Bill and Alex were some of the nicest people I have ever met. Tomorrow I will be working in the Aquarium Medical Center, and learning about what a normal day to them looks like.