Getting Creative as Enrichment: Painting with Our Animals

Here at the New England Aquarium, training and enrichment are a critical part of our animal welfare program. Training our animals to paint is just one of the many ways we can provide them with mental and physical stimulation—and a bit of fun!

Learn more about how we incorporate painting into training and enrichment for some of our Atlantic harbor seals, turtles, and African penguins and why these sessions are about more than making art.

Atlantic harbor seals

Behind the scenes of our Atlantic harbor seal exhibit, Patty Leonard, the Associate Curator of Pinnipeds at the Aquarium, collected a paint palette, canvas, and brush for an enrichment session. All five of our Atlantic harbor seals are trained to paint—a behavior that’s not just exciting to watch but also helps stimulate exploration, play, foraging, and more for our seal colony. These enrichment activities, from painting to participating in training sessions with our Animal Care staff, are important for the well-being of our animals.

“Enrichment allows us to interact with our animals and gives us a lens into their individual personalities,” Patty said. “We can gain insight into what foods they enjoy the most, what behaviors they find to be the most reinforcing, and which toys are their favorites.”

Out on exhibit, Trumpet, our 39-year-old harbor seal, was the artist of the day. To create her painting, Trumpet uses a mouthpiece, which she is able to safely hold with her teeth, and the mouthpiece acts as a holder for the brush. Our staff collaborates with the artist by choosing the paint color (harbor seals only see in shades of blue, green, gray, and black, and white), and Trumpet applies the paint to the canvas by moving her head back and forth in any pattern she chooses. Some of the other seals can spin around while holding the brush in their mouths or even hold the brush in their flippers!

According to her trainers, Trumpet seems to really enjoy the painting enrichment. “She’ll even try to jump in if another seal is participating,” Patty said.

While Trumpet responds quickly to Patty’s request to “paint” today, her journey to becoming an artist involved learning a number of smaller behaviors first. Opening her mouth, having her teeth touched, holding something in her mouth, and moving her head are all discrete behaviors that the trainers had to work on individually before adding them all up to painting on the canvas. These smaller behaviors are also beneficial for Trumpet and the other seals for participating in their own health care—such as when getting their teeth checked and brushed. Holding a mouthpiece is also very helpful for training a seal to allow our veterinarians to take dental X-rays.

Painting with the Atlantic harbor seals is one of the animal encounters we offer guests at the Aquarium. Artwork by the seals is also available in our gift shop, where purchases go back to supporting animal care at the Aquarium. It’s also just a “fun enrichment activity” that trainers will choose to do with the animals from time to time, Patty said.

Myrtle, the green sea turtle

Senior aquarist Lindsay Phenix helps Myrtle, the green sea turtle, channel her inner artist by occasionally setting up a canvas and paintbrush as a part of her feeding station. One end of the apparatus holds a paintbrush against a canvas, while the other extends below the water and holds snacks for Myrtle. As Myrtle interacts with her end of the setup—bumping it around as she figures out how to access her snacks or scratching her shell on it—the motion moves the paintbrush above the surface along the canvas.

Though she doesn’t realize she’s painting, Myrtle is a natural artist. “Myrtle is very curious and very motivated by people being on her platform, where her feeding typically happens,” Lindsay said. “Especially once there’s food in the water, she’s always very engaged with everything taking place, so it really wasn’t a big leap. It was just kind of a new object offering her the food.”

In the Giant Ocean Tank exhibit where Myrtle lives, animals get both passive and active forms of enrichment to engage their curiosity and encourage them to problem-solve. Passive enrichment includes changing the water current and shifting the layout of the exhibit, providing new spaces for the animals to explore and allowing them to see their environment in fresh ways. Active enrichment includes introducing new stimuli like frozen treats, specially designed toys, or activities like painting!

Enrichment activities also strengthen the trust between our animals and our Animal Care staff. As they grow accustomed to interacting with the staff in different ways and a wider variety of objects, they become more comfortable around equipment used for health exams or exhibit maintenance.

Like our other animal artists, Myrtle only paints when she’s inspired to do so. “With any form of enrichment that we do, it’s totally voluntary. There’s treats or food involved, but if she does a couple of brush strokes and decides she’s done, that’s her session for the day,” Lindsay said. “Other days, she’s really interested in it and really working hard to get the food.”

African penguins

For Bray, the one-year-old African penguin, her feet—and a little help from trainer Mia Luzietti—are all she needs to get painting. Like Myrtle and our Atlantic harbor seals, our African and southern rockhopper penguins participate in regular enrichment and training activities that help provide mental and physical stimulation, mimic natural behaviors, and better prepare them to receive necessary health care.

“Some penguins are prone to developing calluses on their feet, and to treat that we would train them for foot treatments, where we apply an ointment as part of that process,” Mia said. “Paint on their feet feels very similar to ointment, so not only is it a way for them to bond with us trainers, but we are also actively conditioning foot treatments to be more positive by doing so.”

At Bray’s first-ever painting session with two other adult penguins, she “stole the show” and was much more interactive and engaged with the activity than expected.

“We want our birds to have as much choice and control in their lives as possible, and every penguin is very different, so we look for things that individuals find reinforcing,” Mia added. “She made it clear to us from the beginning that she finds one-on-one time with her trainers extra reinforcing, so she became our star artist!”

Mia applies a bit of paint to Bray’s feet before setting her down for a quick stroll across the paper, which is laid out on the floor. There’s no such thing as perfection when it comes to penguins that paint (Bray even pooped on her artwork at one point). But, with each attempt, Bray receives lots of praise and reinforcement.

“After each pass over the canvas, we reinforce Bray by giving lots of words of encouragement. She is a very vocal bird, so she will typically call back to us!” Mia said.

By the end of the day, Bray had made several paintings with her footprints—and even took a few seconds to pose with her art.