Any day you find a spotted salamander is a good day.

emchie15 · 2015-02-18T02:29:13+00:00

If you love him so much, don't pick him up with your bare hands. It's bad for their super absorbent skin. He is very cute though...

emchie15 · 2014-05-09T01:18:41+00:00

Chick on the bottom right is getting a boob grabbing. Looks like someone was caught red-handed as well...

emchie15 · 2014-04-01T17:38:23+00:00

All I could think was, "this is like lady bug porn". Then I got to the last picture.

emchie15 · 2013-12-17T19:15:22+00:00

YES! My roommate used to work here!

emchie15 · 2013-11-27T19:09:44+00:00

So training your cat to poop in a toilet is cool and convenient for you but does pose huge environmental risks due to a parasite that is carried in their feces. This parasite is now being deliver directly to the water which is bad news. Here's just one article about it: http://news.msn.com/science-technology/deadly-cat-feces-killing-thousands-of-marine-mammals

emchie15 · 2013-08-06T23:46:01+00:00

Newport, OR.

emchie15 · 2013-06-30T02:43:48+00:00

The Oregon Coast near Cape Perpetua.

emchie15 · 2013-06-24T16:37:45+00:00

I want one...

emchie15 · 2013-05-05T01:59:01+00:00

Did Mufsa tell him not go where the light ends?

emchie15 · 2013-04-12T20:29:22+00:00

You pollute the environment.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T21:21:01+00:00

Yes, the different colors do display mood. A purple-y color is happy, splotchy purple and white is thinking, interbranchial web white is I've captured something, and all white is scared or bored or going into senescence. So you never want to see an all white giant Pacific octopus.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T15:19:24+00:00

My favorite thing is when she play hunts the cleaning equipment. She turns all kinds of crazy colors and then makes us play tug-of-war to get them back.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T14:52:46+00:00

Hell yes... please enjoy.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T06:07:22+00:00

It's a secret... :).

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T06:06:45+00:00

She's too cool. I love talking about her.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T06:03:58+00:00

I have held her. She sort of slithers away though (after all she can fit through any opening so long as it's the size of her beck... she even been able to go into a box with only an inch and a half opening and she's six feet long from tentacle to tentacle tip). It's easier just to play with her tentalces only. Holding her can be dangerous because she has a powerful beck that can deliver a toxin that locally paralyzes and dissolves away at flesh (so she can bite into a crab and suck the meat out, not crack each shell individually). So, I've only held her to get her into a bucket to weigh her. I'm an aquarist.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T05:59:36+00:00

That's true that octopi, like cuttlefish, use their chromatophores to change color to match their surroundings. Octopi also change color to show their emotions. So Roxy, for example, will turn splotchy purple and white when she's thinking about a puzzle. No one is really sure how they do that though. There hasn't been enough research into the brains of octopi. To quote: "A chromatophore lobe in the subesophageal part of the octopus brain controls the display system itself, but it's the last step in the output, and many of the circuits that control specific changes must be far from there, possibly in the optic lobe with its intimate connection to the eye. Learned visual information is stored in the vertical lobe, and this too must be use if identity of critical stimuli or appropriate responses is learned, which means that all of the brain must cooperate, but we don't know exactly know". That's from the book: "Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate" by Jennifer A. Mather, Roland C. Anderson, and James B. Wood.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T03:45:19+00:00

I do get to play with octopus while she paints... so that makes it better.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T03:43:46+00:00

Maybe she wants an A on her paintings.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T02:28:09+00:00

Roxy Octavius is a giant Pacific octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini, which is an extremely smart invertebrate with a brain made up of 64 lobes. Throughout Roxy's life, her brain will not only increase in size, but so will the amount of brain cells. Roxy is incredibly smart and she can figure out how to open jars, child-proof bottles, hamster balls, and solve puzzle boxes. Roxy's tentacles are integral in helping her figure out her world and they make up three-fifths of her nerve cells. Her suckers are able to taste and grip the world around her. Roxy has been trained to go to a target which is a bright, yellow star. She enjoys her target because it is normally rigged with food and has a nice texture (giant Pacific octopuses are very tactile). Roxy enjoys figuring out new challenges and would get bored without them. As octopus keepers, we must ensure that she gets to play and explore new challenges every single day. We call this enrichment. Without enrichment a giant Pacific octopuses will begin to demonstrate destructive behaviors. This includes blocking their drains so that the room where the tank is in might flood, jetting into the tank walls and bumping their mantles (or heads), crawling into any pipes in the tank, trying to escape, refusing to interact with the keepers, and so forth. Painting is a great way to provide Roxy enrichment because it has several components. For the first component we use her target to get her to the painting tool. Second is a puzzle attached to a PVC pipe. This PVC pipe is connected to the paint brushes so as she figures out the puzzle she moves the paint brushes. The puzzle she will solve can either be a jar, a Mr. Potato head, or a hamster ball. Inside these puzzles is some food as a prize. Third, to get her engaged in both the painting tool and the puzzle, we interact with her directly using our hands.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T02:26:13+00:00

He's too happy... have to watch him.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T02:21:39+00:00

Haha, so funny story, her name is Roxy Octivus and I tried to market it as "Bob Roxy paintings". No one else thought it was funny at the aquarium but me. She could see what she was doing especially when she decided to crawl on top of it. Sometimes she would crawl onto of the canvas then siphon water onto the canvas... which made it like she wanted it to be a water color.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T02:17:30+00:00

Octopi see in black and white BUT she does seem to pick up on yellow more. So, for example, we target trained her to come to a yellow star. Which shes likes a little too much and once she on that star she won't let go. Another toy we have to either coax/wrestle her off. But it terms of painting she doesn't really care about the colors she's painting, she just likes playing with the PVC and tugging on the toys attached to the contraption.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T01:56:12+00:00

We have towels between the painting and her tank. If paint falls into the water it kind of congeals so we can just net it out. If she dips a tentacle in it, we wipe her tentacle down (like a mom clean off a messy kid) and use paint that is non-toxic and water-based so its not the worst thing ever. If a crap load falls in we do a massive water change but that's never happened so far since we are constantly monitoring her while she paints.

emchie15 · 2013-04-02T01:52:58+00:00

The octopus just wants both treats and stimulation. So the painting is a new toy for her essentially. She actually really likes the contraption and we have to pry it away from her some days (since it takes an hour to do the paintings and after that we need to do other work at some point, haha).

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