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By Woodrow J. Hinton
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Crystal Phillips is glad to be out of quarantine. Not that she didn't have all the comforts of home, more or less, from a cot to a portable toilet. Very cozy, especially when considering her 16 bunkmates: king penguins making the move from Japan to the Newport Aquarium.
In addition to penguins, sharks, alligators and approximately 600 varieties of fish and other sea life, the latest tourist attraction to the Tristate seems to have become home for Phillips and her fellow senior aquatic biologist Linda Hanna. Long hours needed to be put in to get everything ready for the May 15 opening. For Phillips, that meant her round-the-clock quarantine with her feathered friends from the Kingdom of Penguins exhibit.
Whenever animals are brought into the country, they must undergo a standard quarantine per orders of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Birds are particularly subjected to the confined quarters to ensure that no unknown diseases are brought into the states that might affect other animals, such as poultry.
So for a month Phillips cohabited with the penguins in their new residence. Not easy when the birds preferred to keep the temperature at 35 degrees. Nothing could enter or leave the area, so Phillips had to have enough supplies to last the 30 days. When she did leave the quarantined area (a rare occurrence), she had to shower on the way in and out.
"I pretty much didn't want to do it," she admits.
In comparison, Hanna, who oversees the Surrounded by Sharks exhibit, had it relatively easy. Not that she didn't suffer her fair share of anxiety in welcoming the predators. "It's a long, tedious, nerve-wracking transport," Hanna explains.
The 11 nurse sharks, five sandbar sharks and three sandtigers were shipped in oxygenated boxes via trucks from as far away as the Florida Keys. The big concerns were proper circulation and water quality. The sandbars needed to have water pumped directly into their gills to make sure they would breathe. It's no longer an issue, now that the sharks have arrived and are living in a tank filled with 385,000 gallons of water.
Hanna feels at ease with one of man's most feared enemies. It's a fascination she's had since the sixth grade. She never bought into the deadly image of the shark, in many ways a misconception.
"I have never feared them," she says. "I don't know in the long run if that will cause me some injury. The main thing is just awareness. You don't want to approach them. They're not the most intelligent animals. If there's some blood in the water, they don't come right away like people think. If they're startled, they may thrash."
So Hanna will regularly be seen in the tank helping keep it clean with only her scuba gear separating her from the sharks. She stays mindful of the sharks, careful not to bump into them.
"It just depends on the interaction you have with them. Just give them the respect that they need," she says.
Phillips has less to worry about with her penguins, but she still wears appropriate gear, most of which is designed to keep her warm and prevent her clothes from getting soaked. Gloves help her hands from getting dry and cracked. She also wears goggles, though she's not underwater. It's protection against the birds' 3-inch beaks.
"If I bend over too fast, it will spook them," Phillips explains.
The penguins seem comfortable with Phillips in their surroundings, aside from the fact that she often has a mixture of caplin and herring to feed them. It wasn't that way when Phillips traveled to Adventure World in Shirahama, Japan, one of the few facilities in the world to have a surplus of penguins.
"In Japan, before they figured out who I was, they went to their Japanese caretaker," she says.
But as animals get attached to their caretakers, Phillips and Hanna admit it's a two-way street. Phillips doesn't always realize her closeness to the penguins until she goes away. "You get fairly attached to them," she says.
Though to the unknowing public the penguins all look alike, Phillips can tell them apart often without the aid of the ID bands on their wings. Phillips, who has spent so much time with them, knows that each one has his or her own personality and different facial expressions. Each animal throughout the aquarium is given a number that serves as its name, though Hanna allows that she eventually gives her own names to the sharks. The numbers represent the genus, species and order they came in.
With three different varieties under her watch, Hanna has fewer sharks to tell apart. Their basic characteristics help. Nurse sharks tend to stay near the bottom, while sandbars are curious and love to zip around. The sandtigers are the more noted with their open mouths and gaping teeth. The specimens on display average 7 years old, but their life span is 20-30 years. There are no pups in the future.
"There's very few instances of captive breeding," Hanna comments.
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By Woodrow J. Hinton
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But the same is not true for the king penguins. Eight males and eight females were purposely chosen in the hopes of receiving chicks. One couple has been laying eggs the last two years. Since penguins -- who mate for life -- breed only once a year, in either September or October, there's a chance of chicks in time for Christmas. But Phillips isn't expecting that, as this is the birds' first year in a new habitat.
In many ways, Newport is a new habitat for an attraction of this stature. But it's been an eagerly anticipated one -- one where it makes sense to have both penguins and sharks on nearby display. To include penguins is logical, according to Phillips.
"It's an animal that interacts with oceans. It's a different habitat. We were trying to represent all the different habitats," she says.
And as their years of experience show, Phillips and Hanna can adjust to new habitats as well. Phillips spent three years as a zoo keeper at the Indianapolis Zoo, while Hanna began as a volunteer at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Both came to Newport as a matter of opportunity, working their ways up the seafood chain.
It's been an equal opportunity world for them. Hanna says gender has never been an issue "as long as you can handle your own and you need to." Even if it is feeding some hungry penguins or swimming with the sharks. ©
