Emily, Daire, Luigi, Glenn, Liliana, Christine and Keith

Christmas underwater

Photographer Keith Ellenbogen also came by with one of his nifty cameras. Hopefully we'll get to see his 360˚ pictures of the Giant Ocean Tank soon!

Photographer Keith Ellenbogen brings a spherical underwater camera into the big tank to snag some 360˚ photos of the reef and its residents.

Hope you enjoyed the day, whether you spent it with family by a Christmas tree, enjoying this unseasonably warm weather or underwater! Happy Holidays!

Don't forget that the Aquarium will be open again tomorrow morning, so you can see all the Giant Ocean Tank residents for yourself starting at 9 a.m. School vacation times can be busy, so here are our top five tips so you can plan a trip to Central Wharf like a pro!

See the turtles in person! Plan a visit to the New England Aquarium. Buy tickets now.

Recently photographer Esther Horvath slipped into the Giant Ocean Tank with her camera to meet our loggerhead sea turtles, Retread and Carolina. Esther has been working on a long-term project documenting sea turtle rescue, which included spending a lot of time with our rescue and rehabilitation team.

Sherrie with one of the loggerheads

Since Retread and Carolina also came through our rescue and rehab program and were deemed unable to be released, Esther wanted to include them in her rescue and rehab documentary.

Sherrie gently redirecting our blind loggerhead Retread

Most of the time her photo focus was on them. But then she met Myrtle. Of course she fell in love with the stage stealer, and her focus changed. She was really interested in how Myrtle interacts with the staff, so she took a lot of photos of me and Myrtle hanging out.

The stage stealer

Lettuce, lettuce all the time

Queen Myrtle

Through the course of two days and many dives, Esther managed to capture some lovely images of our beloved reptiles. She even found time to connect with visitors through the glass, including this charming moment shared with a young person, which was also documented from the other perspective and shared on Facebook.

From the inside looking out, remember this post?

Esther's work has appeared in Hungary's National Geographic. While we cannot read the article it is a thrill to see the Giant Ocean Tank sea turtles and the team that keeps them healthy get some international attention. We are grateful to her that she shared her images so that we can share them with you, too. See more pictures of Esther's time at the Aquarium on her website.

— Sherrie

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM THE DIVE TEAM!

Here's a glimpse into a day in the life of Thanksgiving at the Aquarium (we are closed today).

The gang, watching a...

Like them or not, many families will sit down to a big bowl of Brussels sprouts at their Thanksgiving feast this week. That's a dish right up Myrtle's alley. Brussels sprouts are her favorite vegetable!
Since the Aquarium is closed to visitors this Thursday, we treated the 550-pound green sea turtle to a pre-Thanksgiving feast of a stalk of Brussels sprouts, along with another favorite—squid.

 

Myrtle normally isn't served sprouts on the stalk so this experience must have been interesting for her. Fortunately, I was in the water to help her when she seemed to have a bit of trouble with it. But even sprouts on a stalk weren't intriguing enough to keep her interest once the squid was introduced!



Myrtle has been celebrating Thanksgiving at the Aquarium since 1970. And like every year before, the divers will be at the empty Aquarium taking care of the animals and making sure they get their own Thanksgiving feasts, too. Hope you and your families enjoy a delicious and happy Thanksgiving!

— Chris

Following up on my last post, I wanted to introduce Toby, our smallest trunkfish, who is a very curious little fellow. Toby was very nervous during his first couple weeks in the big Giant Ocean Tank, but is settling in nicely and has gotten comfortable with the mammals in the tank: the divers!



— Chris

Our annual census is right around the corner, so I thought some fish ID would be fun.  In this post I want to introduce our boxfishes (family Ostraciidae) which includes 4 species in the Giant Ocean Tank.  These guys are unique because of their bony box of armour - you may also see one of these species in the "armoured tank" in the Tropical Gallery on the 1st floor.

In our GOT, our boxfishes get their own special feeding station which helps them eat without competition from some of our more aggressive species.  More on that station in a later post.

The boxfishes are divided up into 2 groups: cowfishes, which have a spine over each eye; and trunkfishes, which lack these spines.

Lactophrys trigonus, (common) trunkfish

Lactophrys triqueter, smooth trunkfish

Acanthostracion polygonia, honeycomb cowfish

Acanthostracion quadricornis, scrawled cowfish

And here's a pic of some of them harassing a diver for some food!

Can you spot the boxfishes?

-Chris

We posted about boxfish feedings a while back, and it's adorable. Here's a peek at the feeding, more video soon!

Lynne Mailhot wrotes, "My 3-year old had an amazing time at the New England Aquarium today!" Photo: Lynne Mailhot via Facebook

3 year-old Gabriella is in awe of a scuba diver seen through the GOT glass Photo: Esther Horvath

The diver was professional photographer Esther Horvath, who is working on a long term documentary project called Baby Giants about the conservation efforts for endangered sea turtles. You can see some of her work on our Rescue Blog. She was in the tank to photograph our loggerhead sea turtles, both rescues that came through our Rescue and Rehabilitation Dept.

From the perspective inside the tank, Esther writes, "She was so-so cute, looking at me for a long time, and we touched each other's hands through the glass window."
These two images tell a story of a special moment shared on both sides of the glass. It's connections like these that inspire us here at the Aquarium. Maybe a young visitor connects with a diver and will grow up to be a scuba diver, advocating for the protection of wild reefs where they dive. Or maybe a visitor is captivated by an animal and will go on to study marine science in school. Whatever the path, we hope to engage visitors—young and old—and motivate them to become future ocean protectors.

Thank you for exploring our blue planet with us, Lynne and Gabriella! And thanks for sharing your picture, Esther!

Aquarium fans may have noticed our most famous resident on TV recently. Myrtle's photo shoot happened last spring with photographer Keith Ellenbogen, and she was a willing model because we had some delicious leafy greens to keep her interested. Here are a couple outtakes from that shoot.

 

So about that lettuce... A lot of people ask about Myrtle's food. What does a 550-pound sea turtle eat? Mostly vegetables, believe it or not. As a green sea turtle, she would normally eat a large quantity of sea grasses and algae (she'd also get an occasional crab or fish while foraging). So we give her a wide variety of greens—like lettuce, some protein (shrimp, clam, squid, or small fish) as well as an assortment broccoli, cabbage, bok choy, green pepper zucchini and Brussels sprouts (her favorite). Daily vitamins are also on the menu. What a healthy gal—even on Thanksgiving! (See how Myrtle's healthy eating is helping the planet, too.)

A glimpse of the variety in Myrtle's diet

If you want to see Myrtle eat her healthy smorgasbord, visit the Aquarium and grab one of our daily schedules. Pretty much every time divers are in the water Myrtle gets a meal. Otherwise, she's constantly hounding the divers during every feeding! This gives the divers time to feed all the other animals in the tank—like the loggerheads, the parrotfish, the boxfishes and other schooling fishes.

Buy your timed ticket online! Take advantage of waived online ticketing fees right now.

We recently added a few new fish to the exhibit, including needlefish. These fish were collected during our spring expedition to the Bahamas and have undergone a routine quarantine in the meantime. But they look spectacular schooling at the surface. Here's the school from our perspective.



Visitors can climb to the top of the Giant Ocean Tank to take a look at these fish, too. It's not a stretch to see why they're called needlefish! These are some of the fish that we've collected eggs from before. See what larval needlefish look like.

Skinny little needlefish stick to the top of the tank.

Come by and see them sometime!

Meet Ari our Kemp's ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) sea turtle. Ari - formerly known as Kate - arrived at the New England Aquarium on 9/9/09, after a rehabilitation stint in New Orleans at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas (AAOA).


In June of 2007, Kate was found injured (suspected boat strike) on Rutherford Beach, Louisiana, and transferred to Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and the following day to AAOA.  Her injuries were assessed: fractured skull from eye to eye, left eye with missing tissue around the socket, an exposed salt gland, and a deep 5cm long dorsal scute laceration. In October she was transported to an orthopedic surgeon for an operation using rods and plates to pull the skull and scales up and together, in addition to have the laceration to her shell wired together.  By January of 2008, Kate was swimming and eating on her own!

The damage to her left eye was severe and permanent, and in the end she lost sight in that eye, making it very difficult for her to hunt live crab and capture it. Therefore, it was deemed she was non-releasable due to the fact that she could not fend for herself in the wild.

Word of this sea turtle needing a home made it to Boston, and before long she was on a flight to Logan airport for her introduction into the GOT!  So that's how we came to acquire Kate, whom we renamed Ari which is short for arribada: large-scale nesting of some species of sea turtles including Kemp's ridleys.

"During an arribada, hundreds of thousands of these 2-foot-long turtles (the smallest [sea turtles] in the world) gather off certain beaches, and over several days, come ashore to dig holes in the sand and lay eggs." — Susan Scott, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 28 Sept. 2009

Come see her swimming around the Giant Ocean Tank... if she's not napping of course ;-)



Kemp's ridley sea turtles are the smallest and most endangered species of sea turtle in the world. They are also the species of sea turtle our marine animal Rescue and Rehabilitation team treats most frequently during cold-stun stranding season. That's why it's great to be able to show visitors what this species looks like! They are much more petite than the other species on exhibit—loggerhead and green sea turtles. And Ari definitely has a personality.

Come meet Ari and learn what it takes to rescue sea turtles during our Turtle Rescue Team program this summer!

-Chris

In our Giant Ocean Tank we currently have two species of sea turtles — green and loggerheads. Each species gets their own feeding station, and our loggerheads — Carolina and Retread — are fed at the bottom of the tank, in what we GOT divers call "turtle alley".  Each morning at 10:00 AM we feed them a specified amount of "squid tacos", our jargon for squid stuffed with fish, usually capelin.

Come along on a snapshot journey of a feeding I did just this week.

The squid tacos are prepared and put in red bags, one for each turtle.  Other tools needed are... 1 pair of gloves (for safety), 1 feeding stick and 1 rattle - a PVC pipe filled with nuts and bolts and capped on both ends to make it waterproof.



Then it's time to head underwater and down to the feeding station in "turtle alley".  As soon as I break the surface and look down, I see that both girls are awake and likely hungry.



As I descend to the bottom I begin shaking the rattle... while clearing my ears and staying aware of my surroundings.


Carolina is the first to arrive, and she looks hungry!  I continue to shake the PVC rattle.



I get my 2 red bags situated in the sand, ready to feed the turtles.


But oops, Carolina gets confused and goes the wrong direction.  I shake the rattle some more.


After a minute of her not understanding where she's supposed to go, I lend a hand and pull her in.


One squid taco for you!


Both sea turtles get vitamins along with their meal - I use my hands to guard the squid taco from getting stolen by a thieving fish.


Though as soon as I turn my head, an Atlantic spadefish swoops in and steals one of the capelin, argh!


Retread still hasn't shown up by the time Carolina has finished her meal, but I look up and see her above me so I head up in the water column to help her down to the feeding station.


Carolina doesn't think her meal is over though.  She gets in my face for more squid tacos please!


Retread is certainly hungry and she eats her whole meal.  She is completely blind so in order to feed her you must tap her on the chin and then present the taco in front of her mouth.  Sometimes, she'll just bite at the water hoping to snag something.


Success - feeding is over and I head back up to the surface... [Watch video of loggerhead feeding time here!]


...And wave at some kids on the way up of course.


As I said we feed our loggerheads daily at 10:00 AM, so for your next visit come early and look for us through the GOT windows on the first floor.

-Chris