Good
afternoon everyone and welcome to the aquarium! My name is (insert your name
here) and today you are going to be meeting Guthrie! Guthrie is one of four
California sea lions we house here at the aquarium. Today you'll also
be learning a little bit about how we train.
Guthrie is 16 years old.
Fully grown, adult males can weigh between 600 and 900 pounds, depending on
the season, and they can live into their 30s. Right now, Guthrie is going
to give everyone a nice big "hello" and we'll see if you can figure out
why he's called a sea "lion."
As you can see, Guthrie has a very
long and streamlined body. He is very large and well adapted to his life in
the water. He is covered in a coat of hair that shines when it's wet.
Underneath that hair is a thick layer of blubber that helps keep him warm
in cold water.
He has a small tail and two sets of flippers that he
uses to get around. It is the set of flippers in the rear, along with his
neck and head that help him steer through the water. It's the very large
and powerful flippers in the front that he uses to pull himself through the
water. In short bursts, sea lions can reach speeds of up to 15 miles per hour.
These front flippers are so incredibly strong that Guthrie can actually use
them to support his entire body weight.
Sea lions have a lot of curiosity.
Unfortunately, this curiosity can get them into trouble out in the open ocean.
Because they are very curious, they like to investigate new objects. Lately,
a lot of the objects they've been finding more and more are our plastic
trash. If an animal like Guthrie were to come across this, take even a small
piece of it into his mouth and swallow it, it could be a fatal mistake.
One
of the ways we establish a trusting relationship with the animals is through
training. Most of the behaviors you are seeing in the show today were trained
using a method called operant conditioning. What this means is the trainer
comes up with a new behavior, and breaks that behavior down into a series
of small steps called approximations. Each one of these new approximations
is reinforced along the way until the final behavior is achieved.
Ladies
and gentlemen, that's our show for today. We certainly hope
you enjoyed it and learned a little more about sea lions. Thanks once again
for visiting us.
"It's good to start a presentation
by talking about the environment where the animals live, how the animals got
into that facility, why the animals are at that particular place, the biology
of the animal, what makes them special, and specifically why and how animals
are trained," says Clint Wright. He is a marine mammal curator.
"Use
libraries and the Internet to find out about the different animals. It's
important to keep current by reading scientific magazines and Internet sites."