Hello! My name is Sarah Ireland and I am on my third week interning at the Tybee Island Marine Science Center located near Savanah Georgia. With an amazing team of people behind me, I have been able to learn tons about aquatic animals, caring for them, and teaching the general public about the animals.
This week, I got a closer look into the actual preparation of feeding all of the animals. Each week the animals are weighed so they we can give them the proper amount of food. I got to work with Chantel to pre-pair all of the animals food for the entire week. 
To do this, I started off by setting up and labeling all of the different containers. Each of the different tanks in the center has a container dedicated to it. I them weighed out x amount of shrimp puree, fish, shrimp chunks, ect, and put them int each container. I repeated this process three times seeing as we feed most of the animals three times a week. There are some tanks that also get a bit of extra food such as fish flakes, pellets, or fiddler crabs, we add this as necessary. There are some animals in the center that eat every day, including Ike. Ike gets a special sea turtle brownie that consists of fruits, veggies, and vitamins to keep him healthy. Learning how to pre-pair everyones food was really cool because the process is a lot more similar to what we do than one would think. Other than feeding the animals, I also got to do shell therapy for all the turtles again.
This is by far my favorite thing to do! We are now up to 15 baby turtles, along with Zelda and Charlie, out box turtles. Charlie and Zelda look forward to their shell therapy, so when I grab them, they know what time it is! Our newest baby turtle only has three legs and needs a little extra love so I made sure to be extra careful with him! Later in the week I got the chance to take another trip into the marsh with sea camp which was a ton of fun! We took the kiddos and showed them tons of plants and animals in their natural setting. They also got the chance to catch their own fiddler crabs and periwinkle snails that they would later on feed to rube and Pearl, our diamond back terrapins at the center. Exploring the marsh was a really effective way for them to out all of their knowledge to the test while trying to identify new plants and animals on the walk. I got lucky enough to become Ms.Sarah for the day and bonded with the kids as well! Later in the week, I got to follow Phillip around and learned a ton about our two baby American Alligators. The coolest thing I learned was that they have three eyelid, and that they, similar to turtles, have their sexes determined by the temperature of the nest they are in! Overall, it was an incredible week and I got to learn a ton!
Outside of the center it was also an incredibly week. I got the change to take a deeper look into historic Savanah. I took a late night ghost tour and heard all of the spooky stories that date back centuries.
With the amazing Sonchia, I got to see where the first bit of forest Gump was filmed along with the notorious “life is like a box of chocolates” scene. That was incredible to say the least! Luckily there were no tropical storms this week, but there is always next week! While my time in Georgia is coming to a close, I have had an incredible time and can’t wait to see what my last week brings!
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