Caring for green sea turtles at the Monterey Bay Aquarium | Best Job Ever!

(upbeat music) Hello! (water splashes) (group laughs) Hi everyone, my name is Kayla and I help take care of the green sea turtles here at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Sometimes when you visit the Aquarium, you might not see the green sea turtles in the Open Sea exhibit, and you might be wondering where they go. So today we're gonna take you behind the scenes and show you a day in the life of our green sea turtles. Let's go! (upbeat music continues) Welcome to the Open Sea exhibit. This is the top of it. (light upbeat music) A few times a week, our green sea turtles leave the Open Sea exhibit and go outside to get some sunshine. (light music) To motivate the turtles to go outside, we use a pole with a buoy on it. We call this a target. A target is an object that an animal is trained to go to. You'll see I'm gonna start to move with the target and she will follow. (light upbeat music) Each of the turtles has their own target. This just kind of helps them to differentiate which target they are supposed to go to. So this is where the turtles go when they're not in the Open Sea exhibit. Two to three times a week, we do move the sea turtles out into this pool and it's good for the turtles to get some fresh air as well as some sunlight. Sunlight is really good for the turtles. It helps them to get that vitamin D that they need, which is good for their bone health. (uptempo music) Wild green sea turtles mostly eat algaes and seagrasses, but will also sometimes eat invertebrates such as jellyfish. Unfortunately, wild sea turtles will often mistake our plastic waste as their food. So a plastic bag might look similar to a jelly, and the turtle will eat that instead. So today our sea turtles are going to be getting some bok choy, some romaine lettuce and green bell peppers, which is kind of similar to the algaes and seagrasses that they would eat in the wild. It has kind of that same texture that they like and same nutritional content. We use a scale to weigh out the diets for each turtle. We have two green sea turtles on the Open Sea exhibit, and their names are 4-9 and 5-9. One is almost a hundred pounds larger than the other turtle. So we just wanna make sure that each of them is getting all the nutritional content that they need. It's a little too much. (light music) That's pretty good. So now all the food is ready and the green sea turtles are ready for their training and enrichment session. (light upbeat music) So right now I'm joined in the pool by my team, Christie, Melissa, and Hazel. We're gonna have two people per turtle. One person will be holding the target and reinforcing while the other is on the side, just kind of watching, making sure that everything's going smoothly. (light upbeat music) (taps target) Okay, let's go. (light upbeat music continues) (turtle chomps) Beautiful. So target training is a concept that teaches animals to go to a target and position in front of it or touch the target, and then we give them a food item as kind of a reward for that good behavior. And then we can use that to train other behaviors. They can kind of follow the targets wherever we want them to go, over a medical exam table, or into a crate for transport. You'll notice that each of the turtles has their own target. One is yellow with black stripes and the other one is red and white. And this just helps them to differentiate where we want them to go and keeps that training consistent so they always go to the target that they're supposed to. Hello! (uptempo music) So now that we've finished our training session, we are going to give them some scratches on their backs. (upbeat music) The turtles often shed the top layers of their shells and it can get pretty itchy. So often in the wild, they will actually scratch their shells on rocks and corals. So right now, we're just kind of giving them the scratches on their backs and it's a good enrichment for them. (water splashes) (group laughs) (gentle music) So unfortunately, wild sea turtles are mistaking our plastic waste as food. To help protect wild sea turtles, we can do our part by reducing the amount of plastic waste that we use as well as supporting legislation that reduces that plastic waste at the source. (gentle music continues) Thank you so much for watching. To learn more about green sea turtles and how you can help stop the flow of ocean plastic, please visit montereybayaquarium.org