The monitoring and care taken with the water supply is the first step in keeping animals healthy. As any home aquarist knows, prevention of disease and illness is a priority. The best way to do this is to ensure the animals are kept with compatible species, given excellent nutrition and high water quality, and not overcrowded. It's a high-nutrient mixture of gelatin, salmon chow, vitamins, ground spinach and carrots, krill, herring, shrimp and squid. It looks like brown sugar fudge.
Frozen foods supplement the diet.
Two OSU graduate teaching assistants care for all the live exhibits with help from Center volunteers, or docents. The daily routine involves cleaning tanks, feeding, watching to ensure all the animals are eating and healthy, and checking chillers, plumbing and filters. While our goal is to prevent disease, sometimes animals do become ill. Animals that stop feeding or begin to exhibit unusual behaviors are transferred to the hospital's holding tanks. Other signs of illness include reddened areas, ulcers, popped-out eyes, loss of spines, scale loss or skin loss.