This morning at check in, we were pleased to discover that our male lined seahorse (Hippocampus erectus) on exhibit gave birth! Now there are hundreds of newborn seahorses swimming freely in the Seahorse exhibit. It is very common for our seahorses to give birth in…
Front Street, Beaufort, NC Shrimp Trawlers, Beaufort Trawl gear off an old shrimp boat Duke’s Nicholas School for the Environment across the water from Beaufort The deck of the R/V Susan B Hudson Sorting through the product of a box dredge from the…
The Aquarium staff here at the Virginia Living Museum recently chartered a boat to obtain a shark for our Chesapeake Bay Aquarium. We were looking for a single small – around 2-3 feet long – coastal shark that is common in our area, preferably either…
This is a video of our jelly exhibit after I installed new lighting. These are Chrysaora quinquecirrha collected locally. Although swimmers may not appreciate them, as they do have an irritating sting, they are beautiful to watch. We hand feed them cut shrimp, fish, squid…
Above is a juvenile striped burrfish Chilomycterus schoepfi, a relatively common type of porcupinefish of the Family Diodontidae, meaning “two teeth” found in the Bay. They have the ability to inflate their bodies like “puffers” Family Tetradontidae or “four teeth” also found in the…
The third and final session of our turtle trapping program was full of wonderful information and more turtles! We began our morning visiting Linda Addison, the Museum’s vet tech who told us much about caring for injured turtles. She showed us examples of the types…
Above is a video of our Mountain Stream exhibit from a fish’s viewpoint. I hope you enjoy a unique look some of the over 20 species we display in this exhibit. Most prominent are: the mountain redbelly dace (in post-breeding splendor), blacknose and rosyside dace,…
The second session began with a talk from Travis Land, our Herpetology Curator, who spoke about turtle husbandry. He talked about what it means to have a turtle in your care and what they need to survive. Committing to having a turtle for a pet…
The VLM displays only native fishes and invertebrates – with a few exceptions in the coral reef exhibit – so I exert a great deal of effort to maximize the number of interesting species we display. Fortunately, Virginia has one of the greatest number of…
The Virginia Living Museum turtle census for 2012 has officially begun! For the past two years, the Museum has conducted a census of the basking turtles in Lake Maury (behind the Museum) in order to determine what the status is of the native turtles that…