Dolphin Education: A day in the life of a dolphin trainer

Good morning everyone. My name is Mallory. I'm one of the dolphin trainers here at Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. We are located in Las Vegas at the Mirage. What you're going to learn about today is how to be a dolphin trainer. What do we do? How do we care for our animals? So we're going to go through a typical day of a dolphin trainer. We're going to go over some key facts about these animals and you're going to learn so much and I'm so excited to share this with you. Let's get started. So the first thing that we do when we arrive to work is we check on the animals. We want to make sure they're healthy and safe. That is the most important thing. So we walk around the habitat. We have three large pools and right now we're going to just check on them to make sure they're doing just fine. All right so we just checked on our animals. They look fantastic. What we're going to do now is we're going to go inside. We're going to prep everything for fish prep. So fish prep is where we take all of the fish out of the freezer. We let it thaw overnight. So this morning I'm going to prepare all of the animals' diets by thawing out that fish, putting the appropriate amount in all of the animals' buckets so we can be ready for the day. All right, we'll see you in there. All right guys, here we are in our fish kitchen. This is where the magic happens. This is where we prepare the diets for our dolphins every single morning. It takes about an hour. It's a little chilly in here. We have to keep it nice and cool to prevent bacteria from growing on our fish. So behind me... You can see I've got some fish already starting to thaw. So what we're going to do now is we're going to sort through it and we're going to place it in these buckets here. You can see all of the dolphins have initials and they are all labeled. So let's get started. First session is the most important. This gives us a chance to look over the animals thoroughly. We look them over and make sure they don't have any scratches or scrapes on them and that they look good. We also look inside of their mouths to make sure their teeth and gums look healthy. Hydrations are another way we can provide fresh water for our animals. In the wild, dolphins get fresh water from the fish that they consume. However, since we have to flash freeze our fish, it does lose some of that water content. So here you're going to see us give Duchess, our 46-year-old female dolphin, a hydration. How we do that is we insert a plastic funnel onto a tube, we fill it with water, And then Jacob here is going to insert it into her throat all the way down to her stomach. Now this is a voluntary behavior so Duchess is allowing us to do this for her. We're all done. Duchess just got two whole liters of fresh water. She did a fantastic job so Jacob blew his whistle and now she's going to receive her reinforcement. One of the best ways to make sure our animals are healthy is to check their blood. So here you're watching Jacob do a practice blood draw with K2, one of our male bottlenose dolphins. Good job K2. All right everyone we're gonna head on back inside and see what needs to be done in that fish kitchen. Okay so some of you may have noticed during fish prep that I was tossing fish into the trash can. Here's why I'm about to show you. So here we have some bad Fish like this, we do not want to feed to our animals. So there's a cut in the skin. This opening right here allows for bacteria to grow in the fish. So we don't want to take any chances of our dolphins eating a bad fish. This is another example. You've got a piece of gill right here that's missing and you've got open flesh. So we don't want this one either. That is bad. This fish right here, it's not too bad, but you've got a little bit of the surface skin missing. Not terrible. But this is also an open area where bacteria can enter and infect the fish. So we don't want that at all. So just some examples of what a bad fish looks like. Tony! What we're going to do now is we're going to clean this kitchen. So fish prep can be very messy. There's scales falling off, guts and everything. You saw it. Now we have to clean this kitchen. Everything has to be super sanitized. so we've got some trash we have to take out we have to clean some dishes here we're gonna scrub the entire surface of this kitchen make sure it's super clean and bacteria free so i'm gonna go ahead and get started with that and we'll see you guys after so i'm gonna go out break out i'll explain in a few facts about these dolphins this is duchess she's 46 She is our oldest dolphin at the facility. So we're going to go over the five characteristics of what makes her a mammal. The first thing is hair. You can come closer. So dolphins don't have hair for their entire life but they do for the first few days when they're born. And I'm going to show you where they are. So they have little hair follicles right here on the end of their rostrum. And they have hair for a couple days and then it falls out. So that's one way that makes them a mammal. Another way is they breathe air just like we do. But they don't breathe through their mouth. They breathe through their blowhole, which is located on the top of their head. So I'm going to have her take a really strong breath for you. So that's how they breathe. That's also where you'll hear all the noises and sounds that they may come from as well. So another thing that makes them a mammal is they give live birth. So whenever their babies are born, they come out live. So no eggs or anything. So they give birth just like humans. Good job Duchess. Another thing that makes them mammals is the fact that they're warm-blooded. But dolphins can regulate their body temperature on their own. which is kind of cool. And the last thing that makes them a mammal is the fact that they nurse their young. So just like moms, they feed their babies milk until they can learn to hunt on their own. So on female dolphins they have mammary slits right down here so they're going to be on either side there and there and that's where they get all their milk from. Good girl Nachos! All right something else really cool about dolphins. is they shed their skin just like we do. We get ashy and have skin flakes. These guys shed every two hours. So that's how they're able to stay nice and soft and smooth and it helps them be hydrodynamic when swimming through the water so they can swim super fast. All right we're going to go over some dolphin anatomy. So this is their rostrum. This is called their melon. Then we have Their eyes which you can see right here they can see really well under the water and above water and then if you get even closer they have a little bitty hole right here that's their ear it's so tiny you can barely see it but they have great hearing. Yeah you're getting excited huh? Are you excited? Yeah! This piece here is called their dorsal fin. So you can kind of look at duchesses. It's got some notches in the back of it. So this is one way we can tell them apart. All dolphins dorsal fins are like fingerprints. So your fingerprints are different from everyone else in your class. These guys dorsal fins are very unique and different from each other. Another way we can tell them apart is by their flukes, also known as their tail. So these are Duchess's flukes. She's got little notches here. So this makes her tail different from all the other dolphins in the pool. Cool. Another cool fact is dolphins do not chew their food. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to feed her a fish. Have Duchess go out for a little bit of exercise. Going out! Well, thank you for this experience. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Clearly Duchess does not let her age keep her down. Session time is over so we're going to head back inside and complete breakout. All right guys, welcome to the freezer. It is cold in here. It is about zero degrees. This is where we keep all of our, for the animals, all the fish and squid that we feed. It has to stay very frozen, that way no bacteria can grow on these fish, so very important. So what we're going to do right now, I'm going to go through and take out all the food, all the fish that we need for tomorrow. We're going to put it in the fish kitchen where it's only about 40 degrees so it can start to slowly defrost and it won't take so long to defrost it in the morning when we need to prep it. So we're going to go ahead and take all these boxes out. I'll see you after. Alright, everything's on the shelf. It's ready to thaw. It's good to go for tomorrow. So what we're going to do is we're going to see what else needs to be done for the day. We're going to go hang out with some dolphins and I'll see you guys later. One of the ways that we can entertain our dolphins and get them exercising and using their brain is with what we call EEDs. That's an environmental enrichment device. We have a huge shelf full of them. They're all very different and they can exercise in different ways with them. So I'm going to show you just a few of what we have. All right, so in here we've got some wakeboards. These are for us to get in the pool with them and use. We've got a lot of basketballs. We have in here some frisbees, some rings. They love to go underwater and swim with these on their rostrums. We have some hoops here. Those are really fun. We use things like buoys. You might see these tied up at a dock somewhere. They're They're very durable and last a long time. We have some jolly balls. We also like to create our own, so this is something we put together with a bunch of tubing, some buoys, and a weighted buoy at the end so this part sinks while the rest of this floats. So it's just something fun and different for the animals. We've got something what we call a kelp forest. So we tied a bunch of this to a big plastic tube so it kind of flows in the water and they really find this fun. We've got some here with a bunch of buoys tied to it, we use large rope, got many different shapes and sizes so this part floats while this sinks. All different colors for the guests to enjoy. Could you imagine having this many toys in your bedroom? We switch them out all day long for the animals so they don't get tired of the same toy over and over. We swap them out throughout the day. We give them different ones overnight that are safe so they never get bored and we're constantly creating new ones for them to keep them happy. All right, kids, I hope you learned so much today about what it means to be an animal caretaker, whether it's a zoo, an aquarium, or a rehabilitation center. It's a lot of work, it takes a lot of dedication, but if that is something that you think you might wanna do when you get older, go for it. Dreams come true. This job is very tough, very hard work, but in the end, it is one of the best jobs I've ever had. It's so much fun and I've learned so much about these animals and also what it means to take care of them and how we can protect them in the wild. I hope you enjoyed this video and I look forward to talking to all of you very soon.