The Pumpkinseed Sunfish Dance Again- Clearing the Dance Floor

Once again our sunfishes are beginning their annual spring ritual in our 3rd floor Upper River tank.  It started today with two male pumpkinseed sunfish establishing their nesting territories, keeping other fish away and sweeping the gravel bottom of their nests:

This happens each year.  To find out why check out this post from last year, or better yet come visit and see it for yourself!

OUR BODY: Questions, Curiosity and Controversy

The day finally arrived! Saturday, April 14 the doors to ECHO opened to welcome our guests to the world class exhibit, OUR BODY: The Universe Within. Hard to believe, but the idea to host this exhibit began in 2008 when we embarked upon an expansion of ECHO that was completed this year. The expansion provided us the opportunity to present a larger, more involved and extensive exhibit that had exceptional education value.  

Notes from ECHO guests

Reaction from visitors has been amazing. The thoughts from guests collected and shared on Post-it® notes each day have filled us with inspiration and joy, tears and laughter. Many emotions, many deep and heartfelt, many full of thanks, and many questions as well.

We’ve received phone calls and emails from folks too. Some curious, some worried, some wondering why an Aquarium and Science Center would host an exhibit about the human body. Some confused about the up-charge on the usual ECHO admission fee, others wondering if they can visit and enjoy ECHO without accidentally “bumping into” a body from the exhibit (don’t worry, you can’t as the exhibit hall is sectioned off from the rest of ECHO).

Thoughtful questions. Relevant questions. Welcomed questions. And we are grateful for them. 

Our goal is to provide a unique and powerful experience for the community so they can engage in a conversation about the wonders of the human body and how best to keep their own body healthy. We also recognize that hosting this exhibition comes with some controversy. While we can definitively answer questions about the origin of the bodies and how they are preserved, we hope the wider conversation about ethics, aesthetics, and donating your body to science prompts discussion across the region.   

I thought I’d share some of the more common questions received and attempt to answer them assuming that many more people may be wondering or questioning the same thing.

Linda Bowden at the entrance to the exhibit. A rare quiet moment.

Here we go…

Where did the bodies come from? The specimens in this exhibition came from China via the Anatomical Science & Technologies Foundation (ASTF) through members of the Chinese Society for Anatomical Science. Members include accredited Chinese universities, medical schools, medical institutions, research centers and laboratories. The members share a collective goal “to promote and popularize knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the science of the human body, health care and disease prevention”, among other things. 

Did the individuals consent to be in this exhibit? According to the ASTF, all donors (or their immediate family members or authorized proxy) are clearly told that the donated bodies will be used for medical research and educational purpose (including appropriate preservation and public education). In China, as in the U.S., donor wishes and family identities are kept private, and therefore we can never trace the exact journey an individual has taken to find its way into this exhibit.  We feel confident, however, that the specimens in the exhibition at ECHO were acquired via lawful means and means that are in compliance with methods that are also acceptable in the U.S. 

Dr. Stephen Leffler from UVM College of Medicine walks the crowd through the exhibit.

Why did you choose this exhibit over other exhibits such as Body Worlds or Bodies…the Exhibition? We felt this exhibition put forth the most scientific and anatomically based and respectful presentation of the specimens. This exhibition, in our opinion, presented an exceptional amount of science, biology and health messaging and allowed for a greater opportunity to partner with UVM College of Medicine to expand the learning/teaching potential of the exhibit. See photos from two of the OUR BODY Speaker Series events: Pipes and Tubes and In the Nick of Time where experts from UVM College of Medicine walk guests through the exhibit and speak about their area of expertise. 

Dr. Elizabeth Ezerman from UVM College of Medicine talks about the central nervous system

Isn’t there controversy surrounding this exhibit and others like it? Yes there is. And we were aware of these questions and controversies which actually helped us decide on this particular exhibit over the other ones. We called previous host sites of this exhibit such as The Orlando Science Center, Detroit Science Center, Rochester Museum & Science Center, Oklahoma Science Museum, Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center, Witte Museum, Mid America Science Museum, Whitaker Center, among others, and they, like us, felt confident in the validity and accuracy of the information provided. 

Why are they specimens so thin? When the body goes through the plastination process, the liquid in the body is replaced with a polymer, or plastic. Once the liquid is removed the body is much thinner since 70+ percent of the body is liquid. 

Do the specimens smell? No. There is no odor whatsoever.

Gerianne Smart, ECHO's Marketing Director, spoke about some of these issues recently on the Mark Johnson Show on WDEV Radio. To listen to the radio interview click here, you can hear her around the 2 minute mark.

Many generous people decide to donate their body or organs to science every day. This generosity has allowed medical science to advance our understanding of our “humanness” and create advances in medicine and technology that have helped millions of people to have longer, healthier lives. 

The questions asked, the thoughtful emails received and phone conversations are welcomed. Each one provides a new level of understanding, another avenue of research and education and, perhaps most importantly, an opportunity for dialogue around issues of great importance. 

We welcome the continued conversation around this exhibit and invite you to come and view the exhibit for yourself. It is our hope that you will obtain not only a greater understanding of your own human body, but a deeper appreciation of the importance of medical science and research in the advancement of the health of our species.

Phelan Fretz, Ph. D., Executive Director

ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center at the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain

Good Luck to Our Animal Care Graduates!

A number of our dedicated volunteers in the Animal Care Department are graduating and moving on with their careers. We hope that their experiences at ECHO have helped them to achieve their future goals because they have certainly helped us maintain an outstanding animal collection and we have had a lot of fun together!

Tyson with Winston on the floor

Claire giving her first demo

Claire Trotter and Tyson-Jerome White are graduating from Champlain Valley Union High School and plan on attending college in the fall. Besides contributing many hours of labor to our core Animal Care duties, both have gone beyond the call of duty by contributing to the daily public programs that we present.

Reinhart feeds brook trout

Emma cleans baby turtles

Emma Fox and Reinhart Meisenheimer are earning Bachelors of Science in Biology degrees from Saint Michael's College. Emma will be working for the Maine Conservation Corps as an Environmental Educator at Mount Desert Island Biological Labs in Bar Harbor, Maine. Reinhart will be working as an Farmyard Educator at Shelburne Farms.

Scott returning a mudpuppy

Alyssa feeding the American toad

 The University of Vermont provides a seemingly never-ending source of motivated students who study Animal Science, Biology, and Natural Resources. We tip our hats to Monica Beers, Boyd Carnal, Annabelle Bower, Alyssa Kircher, and Scott Carson who will all be receiving their degrees from UVM in several weeks.  Monica has been a long-time volunteer in both our Animal Care and Education departments and working next door in the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Lab; she is true representative of the Leahy Center's many facets.  She will be continue with us this summer and also manage a lab at UVM.  Boyd will be moving south to pursue a graduate degree in Coastal Environmental Management from Duke University. Annabelle hopes to return to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife's Atlantic salmon hatchery in her home state of New Hampshire, where she has worked summers during college. Alyssa plans to return to her home state of Colorado and continue to work in the field of wildlife biology. In addition to helping us, she and has been working with Keeping Track as a wildlife biologist. Scott hopes to stay in Vermont and will be continuing on with ECHO this summer as an Animal Care volunteer and as an Educator with our overnight education program.

Boyd returns the softshell turtle

While its always hard to see our volunteers move on, we wish them luck with all their future plans!

An Idea Blooms into a New Demo

One of the many perks of my job is getting to be an expert. Whether its training a new team of Animal Care volunteers or speaking to a crowd gathered for one of our Demos each day, I get to share what I know to people who are generally very interested in the natural world. More often than not, these experiences

Claire Trotter presenting

lead to many ideas, including prospects for bringing new information to our guests.  An exchange of ideas between myself and Claire Trotter, a seasoned Animal Care volunteer, culminated into an exciting new demo which she brought to ECHO for the first time this afternoon.

What looks like Claire sharing some recent mug shots is actually part of a new demo we call "Our Animals' Bodies: Male or Female?"  In it we talk about some of physical characteristics of some of ECHO's animal ambassadors that can be used to tell the sex of an animal.   Although the question of whether a particular animal is a boy or girl comes up all the time, its not always an easy one to answer.  Claire did research to find some of the most consistent and striking examples of sexual dimorphism (difference in appearance between guys and gals) that can be used any time of year, not just during breeding season.  The results are interesting and easy to practice while looking at our animals, but can be a bit of a dry topic.  So why not consider what it might look like if these same characteristics showed up on us?

You may just be surprised at the results! 

Brian and his "keel"

The carapace of a male map turtle has a ridged called a keel

Its no surprise that Claire did an awesome job developing and presenting this new demo.  What continues to strike me is how fun it can be help others create demos and watch them be the expert.

ECHO E-Team at the Intervale

What's a great way to spend an E-Team (Environmental Team) meeting on a perfect spring day? Go on a field trip to the Intervale Conservation Nursery! Julia VanderWoude (ECHO's Education Intern from UVM), reflects on her time leading  members of ECHO’s teen leadership and environmental science program at the  Intervale where they got a taste of a different aspect of environmental stewardship in Burlington.

By Julia VanderWoude

Even though all of our E-Teamers are from the Burlington area, only about half the group had been to the Intervale before last week to volunteer or explore. We received a quick tour of the property from Seth Gillim, the Intervale’s Assistant Manager, and got a chance to talk to him about the impacts of last spring’s flooding on the Winooski River and the Intervale’s farms, as well as the history of the area and some of the riparian species we were seeing. The E-Teamers had some great questions for him and were especially interested in the fact that the Intervale did much of their harvesting via canoe last year.

After the tour, the E-Teamers jumped right into the service task that had been given to them. They spent some time picking up branches in the recently tilled rows being prepped for tree seedling planting. A few E-Teamers also helped lay drip lines down the rows of new seedlings. Some of the E-Teamers commented that it was a chance to see the “manual labor” side of environmental stewardship, something that they don’t get a lot of while interacting with visitors inside ECHO. I enjoyed getting to have fun conversations with E-Teamers while we worked and enjoyed the spectacular blue skies.

To round out the field trip, we took a walk through the Intervale’s greenhouse, which gave the E-Team a chance to see the seedlings that would eventually be going into the ground in the field on which they had just worked. E-Teamers thoroughly enjoyed making that connection, and now they are looking forward to our upcoming field trips, including canoeing and sailing on Lake Champlain!
I can't wait either!

Giving Blood for Stewardship

Did you know the the "O" in ECHO stands for opportunity for stewardship? That is, looking for ways to act to help sustain our natural ecosystems? Whenever possible, I communicate to our guests what effects we humans have on the natural world around us, and suggest ways to look for opportunities to change our behavior. Sometimes opportunities to help a rare species may come from unexpected places and might require navigating uncomfortable challenges. Our Animal Care Department recent tackled a new challenge that just might help an endangered species that are a cornerstone of our popular Lake Tank exhibit.

Lake sturgeon are listed as as either threatened or endangered by 19 of the 20 states within its original range in the United States. This means that all of the populations of this large bottom-feeding fish are at risk of disappearing from the waters which they inhabit, including Lake Champlain. To be a threatened or endangered species means that the numbers of reproductively mature individuals in a population are low enough that stresses like habitat changes, a disease outbreak, the arrival of an invasive species, bouts of unfavorable weather, or increased levels of pollution can eliminate a population from an area over time. Often, more than one of these stresses act on a population at the same time. For the lake sturgeon, the use of our Basin's rivers to generate power- saw and grist mills in the past, hydroelectric nowadays- have disconnected these large fish from their riverine breeding habitat. The few fish that can still find silt-free gravel beds in which to spawn may produce fewer offspring due to the stresses like elevated pollutants have on their reproductive system.

We were recently contacted by Dr. Louis DiVincenti, a veterinarian for the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, New York to see if we might help with a study of lake sturgeon restoration in that he has been involved in for a number of years. Dr. DiVincenti's part of the study is to measure the levels of contaminants present in sturgeon that have been re-introduced to the Genesee River. To put the data from these wild fish into perspective, he asked if we (along with other aquariums) could provide blood samples from the captive lake sturgeon. Because our participation would mean performing some invasive procedures on our most charismatic animals, we decided with caution whether we would participate in the study. Is it worth taking blood from our healthy animals to help their wild cousins?

We decided that yes, we would participate with an appropriate level of caution. We'd carefully capture one sturgeon, coax it into a floating tub, put it under anesthesia, draw the necessary blood for the study, and recover the fish before quietly releasing back to the tank. If things didn't go smoothly, we'd reconsider putting our animal ambassadors at risk for the greater good.

After receiving our supplies and reviewing the protocols for taking the blood samples, we began our work:

A team of three people would work to capture the fish- two using nets to guide the fish into a plastic cattle trough held vertically by the third.

Once the fish was captured and contained inside the now floating cattle trough, we allowed it to acclimate to its short-term housing, then dissolved a carefully measured amount of fish anesthetic into the water. At this point, we must track time to prevent an overdose. The longer a fish is in the anesthetic bath, the larger dose it receives. The art and science to this is choosing a dosage that allow us adequate time to perform our procedure without the chance of accidental overdose. Lower amounts of anesthetic allow more time, but take more time to take effect. Since each fish responds differently to this, a lot of careful guesswork, observation, and patience pays off.

Then we wait until the fish become unresponsive to being manipulated, a sign that the anesthesia is working and we can perform the blood draw without injuring our friend. If we act too early, the fish could move and cause the needle to go into unwanted tissues (or us!). We measured the fish's length and girth during this time.

Once the fish is fully "under," we prepared to insert a needle through the muscles between anal pore and anal fin by locating an area of soft tissue between two of the bony scutes on the underside of the fish. As the needle passes into the muscle tissue, a vacuum tube is engaged to draw blood into it when the needle finds the vein. In this case we are seeking a vein that runs along the bottom of the fish's spine. The needle is pressed downward until it meets the spine, and then very slowly reversed until a "flash" of blood enters the vacuum tube from the vein. The trick is to move slowly enough to find the vein, see the flash, and then hold the needle in place to collect the samples needed for the project.

Once the samples were collected, they were processed and shipped overnight to the lab for analysis. The needle was removed from the fish and the process to recover the fish from anesthesia begins.

By carefully using these methods, we successfully collected samples from all three lake sturgeon that the study required.

Capitalizing on this particular stewardship opportunity was a collaborative effort. In addition to our dedicated animal care staff and volunteers, our friends Dr. J. Ellen Marsden and Susan Fuller at the the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory provided equipment without which we could have completed this project. Thank you to everyone involved!

Get Closer to the Lake Campaign Celebrated

Saturday evening the 24th of March proved a bit blustery and chilly outside, but inside the crowd warmed up to delicious hors d’oeuvres, good company, and a monumental chocolate fountain. 150 donors and supporters joined Senator and Mrs. Leahy to dedicate the Revision Lakeside Pavilion, Dealer.com Terrace, and the Omni Room. The highly anticipated expansion lived up to everyone’s expectations with music, multi-media slide shows, an impactful short film, and stunning views of the Adirondacks over the steel-grey, crashing waves of a stormy Lake Champlain.

Heartfelt remarks honored the vision of George Little, the philanthropy of Louis McClure, and the leadership of Senator Patrick Leahy. ECHO’s outgoing board member and Burlington’s incoming mayor, Miro Weinberger spoke to his role as co-chair of the campaign and his vision for a vital waterfront and strong partnership between ECHO and the city. ECHO’s closest friends gained insight into the vision that created ECHO and the love that Senator Leahy has for this lake and this institution. Lois McClure rounded out the remarks with a heartfelt account of her and her late husband’s passion for Lake Champlain and why ECHO is a vital institution for all residents and visitors to the Lake Champlain basin.

Now that the campaign has reached its $4.1 million goal, and the Revision Lakeside Pavilion and Dealer.com Terrace are a reality, ECHO looks ahead to developing programs, experiences, and resources that touch and impact our entire community. Next year we celebrate our 10th anniversary. Ten years of educating and delighting friends and neighbors with the Ecology, Culture, History, and Opportunity that our unique place in the world offers.

All it takes is one drop to change our world, to make a difference, to create a ripple that moves and rolls and merges with other ripples a perpetual motion of change and evolution. One building on the other, one dependent upon the other. All starting with one drop… to change an action, change direction, change a mind.