Seattle Aquarium

I've seen some massive ones at the

Seattle Aquarium before.

Yeah, but it is going to be interesting to get to know them and to figure out how I can decrease their deprivation is what I'm hoping.

Yes.

And what else? The rhinoceros, holy cow.

And also we're going to, I'm going to the Seattle Aquarium like today.

That's what I'm doing today.

So this is early in the morning, by the way, if I sound tired, but I'm just, I'm very excited about this stuff.

Hello, and welcome to Lightning Strikes Twice, the Seattle Aquarium's podcast where we get to spend a little extra time with the experts who appear during our Lightning Talks broadcasts.

My name is Amy Olson.

My pronouns are she, her, and I'm a research scientist at the Seattle Aquarium.

And I'm joined today with...

Keri Garand.

Hi, everyone.

My name is Keri Garand.

My pronouns are she, her, and I'm an interpretation supervisor as well as a diver at the Seattle Aquarium.

And I would volunteer, and I helped clean the fish tanks.

Then we'd go to the Seattle Aquarium together.

He would drive me there, and we'd go to the tropical fish auctions at the Seattle Aquarium.

Wow.

And we'd look at all the new fish species.

Um, and so, you know, from these conversations with Mark, he'd also been working with aquarium, um, folks on different projects and had noticed that they-- at, at that time, Singapore Aquarium had a lot of pups, and they were sort of asking the question, "Well, can we release them into the wild?" Um, and so, you know, this was sort of the concept, uh, where Star Project started, where we started thinking about, well, how would that work? You know, what would be needed to, to do something like that? What would we need to know about these animals, about where we're releasing them? You know, how would you go about it, et cetera.

And so we sort of discussed this, um, you know, sort of d- started digging into it for a few years and then, um, in 2019, the project got some interest from some big aquariums in the US, so the Shedd Aquarium, Georgia Aquarium, um, uh, Seattle Aquarium, uh, came on board and others.

And so there was a big, um, meeting to be held about, um, you know, is this something that, you know, we can do? Is it something we should do? Um, and because this is a species that is in aquariums around the world, and it also breeds quite well in aquariums around the world.

Um, and there's been quite a big shift in terrestrial, you know, in zoos into more, you know, sort of active conservation efforts of, of rewilding.