OKLAHOMA CITY — Amanda Seide trains seahorses to swim on command.
Animal training is part of daily life at the Oklahoma City Zoo, but many visitors only notice zookeepers who work with large mammals, such as apes and bears.
But keepers like Seide work with the smaller creatures, patiently teaching skills that improve animal health.
“A lot of people think fish can’t be trained,” said Seide, a zookeeper and biology student at the University of Central Oklahoma. “A fish can learn.”
Seide has proven that. She has trained a small school of seahorses to swim to the end of a thin tube that releases frozen food.
Seahorses are natural hunters, she said, so they weren’t very interested in the frozen food they were given.
But they needed extra nutrition, even if it was frozen.
So Seide came up with a plan: Wrap red electrical tape on the end of a tube.
Put the tube into the water and release the frozen shrimp in tiny bites.
“At first they shied away from it,” she said. “Over time they really associated that target with food.”
Also in the aquatic center, Nichelle VanZandt is experimenting with the same idea.
She tends the archerfish tank. Archerfish are also a predatory fish. They shoot a stream of water out of their mouths and into the air, knocking crickets, worms and other small prey into the water.
“They’re really good shots,” VanZandt said.
She is taking advantage of their unusual hunting methods and conducting an experiment to see if color affects the archerfish’s interest in prey.
Van Zandt built a tube to hold crickets that she hangs from the top of the archerfish exhibit. The crickets crawl out of the bottom, and the fish shoot them down.
She varies the color of the bottom of the tube to see what interests the fish the most. So far blue is winning.
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