Evolution of fish training, started from show training move toward husbandry training.

2019年09月
IMATA & AZA Co-located Annual Conference in New Orleans(IMATA・AZA共同開催年次会議/ニューオーリンズ) Formal presentation(公式・口頭発表)
Yoshihiro Suzuki, Isao Ooshita, Masanao Karakame



Evolution of fish training, started from show training move toward husbandry training.

Yoshihiro Suzuki, Isao Ooshita, Masanao Karakame
 Enoshima Aqurium

[Abstract] The Enoshima aquarium opened its door in 1954 as one of Japan's origin of the modern public aquarium. After almost 50 years of operation, closed its door temporally then in 2004 opened new facility. Our facility is located at Katase kaigan beach where directly faces to the Sagami bay, known to abundance in marine life. At our new facility, we have the Sagami bay exhibit tank that contains 1,000,000L of sea water and 100 species, 20,000 fishes to represent under water scenery of the Sagami bay.
In order to maintain this exhibit tank, we need to operate SCUBA dive cleaning and hand feeding to some fish every day. During our maintenance diving, we noticed that some fish were accepting direct contact from divers. So we started training these fish using primary reinforcer.
At same time, we were revisiting and redeveloping our dive show performed at the Sagami bay exhibit tank. We used this fish-diver interaction and established behavior by training then started as new show “UOGOKORO” (fish's mind) in April, 2006.
At “UOGOKORO” show, trained fish that represent each species comes to the diver one after another and show friendly relationship with human. This way, we were able to show our visitors how fish and human could have respectable relationship.
This training for “UOGOKORO” lead us to develop husbandry behavior for fish. One of good example is that desensitization training made a dolphin fish (Coryphaena hippurus) to accept stretcher and eventually slowly swam into stretcher. With this training, we successfully administrated sedative to this dolphin fish and transferred it to the Sagami bay exhibit tank safely. Because the fish did not damage itself during transfer, this dolphin fish renewed our live display record for this species by far. The fact that we were able to train various species of fish impacted on our vision and way to manage display fish substantially.
Knowing that we are able to establish husbandry behavior on fish through training as well as desensitizing to objects, we now have new tools to handling and maintaining display fishes.

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