Target Training, Stick Feeding, and Enrichment at the Aquarium

How do you get a shark to stay still for a veterinary exam? How do you make sure a small stingray gets the nutrients it needs to grow? These aren’t setups for punchlines, they are the kind of real questions the animal care team at the Aquarium addresses to ensure optimal physical and mental well-being for the animals in our care!

Aquarists use a variety of methods and exercises to encourage animals to participate in their own care — and to be able to lend a hand when an animal needs a little extra help. Hannah Cutting, a senior aquarist at the Aquarium who works with the animals in the Aquarium’s Trust Family Foundation Shark and Ray Touch Tank, shares some of the techniques her team uses:

Target Training

Target training refers to teaching animals to approach specific objects. This is done by offering particularly tasty food (the sharks really like squid, for instance) as a reward every time the animal gets closer to the “target,” a visually distinct object like a striped square or a circle with an actual target on it.

The purpose of target training is to enable the animal care team to guide animals to a specific spot. For example, some animals prefer to hang out in the back of exhibits, which can be a challenge when it’s time for a veterinary exam. If they’re fully target trained, the animal can be guided with a target into a stretcher-like contraption for the exam. This is also helpful for larger animals that are more challenging to handle. For example, two brownbanded bamboo sharks—which are about double the size of the Aquarium’s other sharks—are target trained for this reason.

“The idea is to make it more comfortable for them,” Cutting explained. “Getting them to come up to us and follow the target and go into that stretcher just makes it much less of a stressful process.”

Target training is also used with animals big and small to make sure they get the amount of food they need. Cutting and her team guide the smaller cownose rays to food to make sure they get the nutrients they need to grow to a healthy weight. Once they’ve reached a certain threshold, they tend to be better at getting food on their own during regular feedings. The same is done for leopard whiptail rays, the largest rays in the Touch Tank exhibit, to make sure they get the extra food and vitamins they require because of their size.

Stick Feeding

Another feeding exercise used at the Aquarium is known as stick feeding. During stick feeding, the staff brings food directly to an animal rather than the usual scatter feeding technique, in which food is dispersed throughout an exhibit for the animals to find. Stick feeding is used to make sure that every animal, especially the ones who can be shy at meal times, gets all of the food and multivitamins they need to grow and stay healthy. Using an ID guide—a map of the unique spot patterns on each shark and ray, for example—to help identify who is who, staff can be assured that each animal has its dietary needs met.

The stick in question here is a small pole with a zip tie on the end. Food is skewered onto this and presented to animals. The process is sometimes also done by gripping food with tongs. These tools allow us to avoid feeding animals by hand, which is especially important in the Touch Tank environment, where visitors can gently interact with the sharks and rays that choose to engage with them.

“One of the key things we do with the Touch Tank is we make sure not to use food to encourage the animals to come up and be touched,” Cutting said. “We want it to be fully the animal’s choice to come to the front versus persuading them to go up there with a handful of food.”

Stick feeding can be done with pretty much any animal. Unlike scatter feeding, where three regular meals per day happen morning, lunch, and 90 minutes before closing, stick feedings and target training are not done at a consistent time. Next time you are at the Aquarium though, keep an eye out for staff wearing waders in an exhibit; you might be about to witness target training or stick feeding in person.

Enrichment

Both target training and stick feeding are considered enrichment, care that goes beyond meeting an animal’s basic needs to ensure the best possible mental and physical well-being. Enrichment activities often provide mental stimulation by encouraging an animal to problem-solve, navigate changes in their environment, or obtain food in unfamiliar ways like they would in the wild, for example using toys that make food slightly harder to get so the animal has to forage a little.

An Enrichment Committee at the Aquarium, made up of staff from across the organization, is constantly brainstorming new methods of enrichment specific to different animals. After all, what constitutes enrichment for a seal or other mammal might not work the same for a shark or ray.

Much like for humans, training and learning new things are very mentally stimulating and an excellent form of enrichment. Consider adding some learning and enrichment to your day by visiting the Aquarium!