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OUR RESIDENT ANIMALS
Currently, the project includes four resident animals, two female California sea lions, Rocky and Rio, one female Northern elephant seal, Burnyce, and a male harbor seal, Sprouts. Because much of our research is comparative, we are fortunate to work with representatives of three pinniped species, allowing us to look at adaptations with respect to evolution (the two seal species vs. the more distantly related sea lions) and ecology (the shallow diving seal lions and harbor seal vs. the deep diving elephant seal). Each of our animals is involved in an intensive training program that prepares them to participate in different behavioral experiments, allows their health to be carefully monitored, and keeps them in good physical and mental condition.
Click on the pictures of the animals to hear their distinctive voices and read about their individual histories below...
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ROCKY
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RIO
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SPROUTS
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BURNYCE
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California
sea lion Rocky is a female, born in the wild and stranded in 1976. She's been with Ron Schusterman's research program since 1978 and has participated in landmark studies of acoustic perception, artificial language comprehension, associative learning, concept formation, and memory. As Rocky gets older, we have the unique opportunity to study age-related changes in her perceptual and cognitive skills. |
California
sea lion Rio is a female, born in captivity in 1985 and reared by a human surrogate mother. She's lived at LML all her life and has participated in a wide range of studies relating to imprinting, visual and acoustic perception, associative learning, concept formation, and memory. Rio is well known for being the first nonhuman animal to demonstrate equivalence classification, a complex cognitive skill once thought to be limited to humans. |
Harbor
seal Sprouts is a male, born into captivity in 1988. He came to LML from Sea World, San Diego, in 1989 to participate in cognitive studies; his most recent experiments have involved visual and acoustic perception and signal detection tasks. In addition to his participation in various research projects, Sprouts also helps educate children about marine life through his participation in LML's "Ocean Explorers" program. |
Northern
elephant seal Burnyce is a female, born in the wild in 1993. She was stranded and rehabilitated before coming to LML from Sea World in 1994. Northern elephant seals have rarely been kept successfully in captivity due to their extreme lifestyle in the wild. While at LML, She has completed revolutionary studies on vision and hearing that have provided new and unexpected insights into the sensory capabilities of these deep diving pinnipeds. |
ANIMAL TRAINING FOR RESEARCH AND HUSBANDRY
Conducting noninvasive, interactive, behavioral research with marine mammals requires that trainers have a clear way of communicating information to their animals. Much of animal training consists of linking up a trainer's signals, an animal's movements or responses, and carefully timed outcomes or rewards. Our training program accomplishes this through the use of classical and operant conditioning techniques that reinforce desired behaviors with fish rewards. The animals learn quickly to respond to the trainer's tools, which include targets that the animals touch and track and cues such as whistles that tell them they've earned a reward. In this way, teaching various behaviors for research and husbandry can be broken down into simple steps and establishing new behaviors becomes a fun and rewarding process for the animal as well as the trainer.
The animals are active participants in the training process, meaning they must make choices about how to respond in different situations. Their decision making relies on their current motivational state, their memory of past experiences, and their expectancies about the future. Because of this, the behaviors that an animal is trained to perform can illuminate internal processes like sensory events, associative learning, the formation of concepts, and short- and long-term memory. We design experiments that engage the animals in active problem solving and they develop and use strategies that allow us to measure their discriminative and cognitive abilities. An additional benefit of this research is the stimulating and challenging environment created for our animals during the testing process. In some ways, the testing protocols simulate the wild environment because the animals encounter new situations and successfully solve novel problems on a daily basis.
VETERINARY CARE AT LONG MARINE LAB
Caring for the health needs of our animals is a joint effort between our project staff and our veterinarian, Dr. Dave Casper. Together, we work to plan and maintain a training program that meets the individual needs of each animal. This involves establishing and practicing behaviors that allow us to monitor health and treat ailments, such as training the animals for physical examinations, blood draws, diagnostic ultrasounds and X-rays, collection of tissues and fluids, and even tooth brushing. We invest a great deal of deal of time in caring for our animals and keep detailed records on their health and behavior in order to provide them with the best possible long term care.
EXTERNAL OVERSIGHT OF ANIMAL CARE
We are required by law to work with several regulatory agencies. The Office of Protected Resources, which is part of the National Marine Fisheries Service, provides us with our Marine Mammal Permit and regulates our research activities. The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service regularly visits our lab to review animal care protocols, health and water quality records, and animal and food preparation facilities. Our government funding agencies have their own animal care and research protocol approval process which includes mandatory review of all research protocols and site inspections. Finally, each of the University of California's campuses have an animal care and use committee, which conducts site visits and reviews approves research proposals prior to the release of funding. We work closely with all of these agencies to maintain the highest standards of animal care.