Support
During my time at Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo (CBZ), I had several different forms of responsibility. I was responsible for providing animal care to the zoo's brook trout and eastern hellbenders. Additionally, I participated in several field research projects like horseshoe crab tagging as a part of Project Limulus, Candian goose banding with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), and trolling the Long Island Sound with Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo CDC corp students and the Sound School. With DEEP, we banned different populations of Candian geese in order to make estimates about population size. We also sexted the individuals to have a greater understanding of the population dynamics. In project Limulus, we tagged horseshoe crabs and we were interested in determining their health based on the presence of parasites like barnacles. This served to keep tabs on the species conservation status. With the CDC corp students and the Sound School, we surveyed the bottom of Long Island Sound to keep tabs on the number of different species and individuals within the different species and their populations.
Furthermore, I joined the education department and helped to give live animal programs to various schools and libraries as well as presenting a weekly Colors of Conservation program on zoo grounds. The Colors of Conservation program showcased the various conservation efforts that are being used at CBZ and nationwide. For every color in the rainbow, I talked about different conservation efforts all while making a friendly learning environment for the different generations of people in the audience. Lastly, I also helped conduct research in partnership with The Sloth Conservation Foundation which focused on human-sloth interactions by tabling on zoo grounds to have guests complete a survey. CBZ worked in partnership with The Sloth Conservation Foundation and its founder Dr. Rebecca Cliffe who I was fortunate enough to meet during the last week of my internship. Additionally, Dr. Cliffe and members of the CBZ staff filmed a couple of segments for the Today Show in hopes of educating more people about sloths and human-sloth interactions.