Mariel MacGowan

October 23, 2015

My Dual Internship

The Living Museum is a building that is used to house and display animal species, land-living and aquatic, that are native to Virginia. It functions as both a museum and a zoo, providing educational exhibits on the animals themselves as well as how they are being cared for. The Wild and Well module was created to teach children how the animals at the museum are cared for in a safe environment with pretend medical equipment, coats, and toy animals. There are four tanks for aquatic animals, eight for land-dwelling animals, and one large tank. Each tank holds a toy from a different species, such as a shark or an alligator. The children can pretend to feed the animals according to the foods listed on each cage that are appropriate to the species’ diet. For example, the butterfly is fed on fruits while the crow eats insects.  I worked there on Fridays from 3 to 5 along with another volunteer, a young man my age. Our job was mostly to pick up discarded toy animals and make sure they were in the correct cages, clean up and sort foods when the children were finished playing with them, and make sure that the permitted number of children, roughly twenty, were in the exhibit. There were several instances where children accidentally brought their own toy animals to the module, usually from the gift shop. Sometimes they would leave these toys in the cages or beside the floor, and we took them to the lost and found to turn them in. At other times, the children, especially toddlers, would lock themselves in the animal cages, which they weren’t allowed to do. We had to gently order them out and explain that it was unsafe for them to do that, sometimes with assistance from their parents. The children seemed the most interested in the pretend food – more of them pretended to make and serve meals for themselves and their families than prtended to make food for the animals. Pretending to give the animals check-ups and medical assistance was also a popular activity.

 

The Living Museum also had a special frog exhibit on display during the summer where I worked. When I was working with the frogs at the Living Museum, I started out writing blog entries for the museum on frog species that were native to Virginia before transferring to a position as an assistant for the exhibit in proper. The Frogs exhibit included some species that were native to Virginia, like the Amerian bullfrog, but many others that were not, like the tomato frog and dart poison frogs. The dart poison frogs were the most popular animals in the exhibit, since they were easily the most active frogs, were very colorful, and occasionally did humorous things like shoving one another around and accidentally falling in the water. There was one frog in the poison frog tank that didn’t seem to be on the exhibit’s list of frog species on display, and I had to ask one of the exhibit supervisors what kind of frog it was when I was unable to answer a guest’s question. It turned out that the mysterious frog wasn’t an unidentified species, but only a color variant of a species that was already identified, only a dull blue color instead of green. There was another episode with the Mexican dumpy frogs, two of whom engaged in amphiplexis during display. Amphiplexis is when one frog sits on top of another frig and releases sperm while another frog releases eggs. The idea of watching two frogs having sex made the dumpy frog exhibit very popular once I explained what was going on to an older guest. Unlike the Wild and Well job, there was less direct interaction with visitors outside of occasionally answering questions or helping a visitor find an animal that was hidden on the walls or in the trees. However, I did learn about answering questions from guests and observed which animals were the most popular. In general, since the frogs were not active animals with the exception of the dart poison frogs, the guests did not linger in front of any displays for very long.

The two jobs were connected through the work with children, although there were differences between each one. In Wild and Well, I had to clean up after the children and put toys in their proper place without working with them directly, while at CDR I learned how to play with them and interact on an individual level.