I am surprised by how frequently I meet someone who has no idea that there is a hospital inside the aquarium. The A. Watson Armour III Center for Animal Health and Welfare at Shedd Aquarium is in fact more than just a hospital. Although the Center does include a fully equipped and functioning hospital, it also includes three specialty laboratories and a satellite clinic for providing care to the inhabitants of the Abbott Oceanarium.
To provide this level of advanced care to over 32,000 individual patients or more than 1,500 different species requires a lot of specialized technology. Adapting equipment used in human medicine or in companion animal veterinary practice is an ongoing part of daily operations in the Armour Center. The many trainees that rotate though our teaching hospital, like the Resident Veterinarians from the Illinois Zoo and Aquatic Animal Residency Program, help keep us up-to-date with the ‘latest-and-greatest’ in technological advances. They also help us adapt those advances to the unique group of patients we care for – literally writing the book on the care of aquatic animals. Another fact people are often unaware of is the number of scientific publications produced at the aquarium. So far in 2017, there have already been four peer-reviewed scientific publications just from the Armour Center.
Plus, if we don’t have the technology onsite we have access to it through our local network of specialists, part of our Medical Advisors Board. For example, we do not have a CT machine here, but we did just conduct a CT on a rhinoceros ratsnake. A few weeks ago, the snake traveled to the other side of town and visited the CT scanner and Veterinary Radiologist at Brookfield Zoo for an evaluation.
Typically though, we are imaging our patients right here where they live using one or more high-tech devices. We have a completely digital and wireless x-ray system onsite that allows us to create and evaluate high resolution radiographs (the picture created using x-rays) next to any of the enclosures or exhibits in the building. We use this system for all our animal patients to get radiographs – from a 700 pound California sea lion’s flipper (who is trained to hold the flipper still for the shot) to a less than 10-gram juvenile Amazon frog. If we need to use it to image a whale then we use a custom table, the only one like it in the world specially designed by a group of Engineering Students from Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Sometimes what our veterinarians are really looking for is a way to see with their own eyes something hidden away inside an animal’s body, and we use an endoscopy to do so. We have an array of flexible medical telescopes, called endoscopes, that can be introduced into almost any opening they can find to see what’s inside. On occasion we will actually make an opening where one does not normally occur to look inside. Chances are you know someone who has had a knee or shoulder “scoped,” which means they have undergone Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS.) During MIS, the surgeon makes a tiny opening and inserts a surgical telescope to look around. If a procedure needs to be conducted like removing a damaged meniscus or suturing a torn rotator cuff, miniaturized instruments are passed via another small opening and the whole procedure happens while being watched on a monitor. Shedd’s latest MIS patient was Shasta, one of our rescued female Red-tailed Hawks, who had a sudden bout of unexplained weight gain. Taking a look around inside with a scope enabled us to ensure this was not due to a growth of some sort and she is back on a little diet.
In addition, the aquarium has other specialized technology that is incredibly helpful to us as we lead the way in advancing aquarium science and the care of aquatic animals. Our environmental quality team has equipment like an Ion Chromatograph, which measures the amount of specific ions, such as iron or sulfur, in water with incredible accuracy and precision. Over in the microbial ecology laboratory of the Aquarium Microbiome Project the advanced technology includes equipment like robotic fluid handlers and a DNA sequencer. So, on your next visit to the aquarium why not build in a little time for behind-the-scenes visit? We’d love to give you a closer look at the technology!
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