Shark surgery, escape artist flamingos, and the modernisation of a 79-year-old facility are all in a day?s work for Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo (BAMZ) curator and veterinarian Ian Walker.

Since Dr. Walker, 33, started at BAMZ as a volunteer at the age of 14, he is as much a hatchling of BAMZ as many of the birds and fishes there. He took up the post of curator just over a year ago, after working at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland for a couple of years. He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh?s veterinarian school.

As BAMZ prepares to build a new $1.7 million animal hospital and Madagascar exhibit, met with Dr. Walker to talk about the life of a zoo veterinarian.

?One of our new projects for the Caribbean exhibit is a more natural space,? he said. ?We want to get away from the aviaries that were built in the 1970s. They were acceptable then but they are not acceptable now. We want to improve them so people are more one on one with animals as opposed to seeing them through barriers.

?With some of the animals we want to exhibit from Madagascar, that will be impossible, but we want to be able to make it as naturalistic as possible so we can get people in-tuned.?

The animals for the Madagascar exhibit are not necessarily coming directly from Madagascar, but from zoo collections around the world.

?The movement in the zoo field is not to collect any animals from the wild if it can be avoided,? said Dr. Walker.

Through different organisations and a series of legal agreements zoos loan various animals back and forth to help fill in gaps in the breeding populations of different species.

?Hopefully, the zoo will be the ark that will carry some of these species through until native lands can be returned to the wild or alternatively, if the land is lost, then we hold the breeding population and try to find some other way of releasing them, eventually.?

The Madagascar exhibit will front the new animal care facility. Currently, animals are crated and taken off-site to domestic veterinarians. This is stressful to the animals, and domestic veterinarian offices are not necessarily set up to meet the needs of exotic facilities.

Among other things, the BAMZ animal hospital will make things like shark surgery and fish anaesthesia a little easier.

?I have done small surgeries on fish here,? he said. ?When I was at the National Aquarium in Baltimore I did abdominal shark surgeries. I repaired hernias. There were surgeries that would last up to five hours on fish. It is absolutely possible.?

Operating on aquatic animals is not a simple task. First there is getting them into a state of unconsciousness. Fish have a special chemical added to the water in their tanks which knocks them out.

Then there is the task of keeping them alive in surgery. You can?t exactly put an oxygen mask over a shark?s nose.

?You have to have water going over their gills,? said Dr. Walker. ?There are two ways of doing it. For the shark surgeries I designed a surgical table that was at a slight angle that allowed the sharks? head to be kept underwater and their body was strapped to the table.?

He said that although he designed this special shark surgical table he didn?t patent it because people in his field tend to share their ideas.

With aquatic animal surgery there is also the question of keeping the wound clean during the procedure.

?Obviously, when you are doing surgery on humans and other animals you use surgical drapes that keep the area sterile,? said Dr. Walker. ?It is a little more difficult when you have water underneath it. We would use plastic bags that would adhere to the surface of the water. ?Then it would also adhere to the animals so you would have a surgical field to work in. There are certain complexities associated with it.

?You always have to make sure your anaesthetic keeps them at the right plane of anaesthesia. We had to devise a system of pumps to put water in and take water out at the right time so we wouldn?t have our shark waking up.?

Like any other medical patients, aquatic animals sometimes need blood transfusions. Luckily, blood types don?t vary among sharks of the same species, as they do among humans.

?It is difficult to say if they have blood types the way humans do,? said Dr. Walker. ?They are very ancient creatures and there are blood types. You do get reactions. If you take the blood of a whip moray and put it into a shark it will definitely coagulate. If we were to take blood from a nurse shark and put it into another nurse shark we didn?t seem to get a reaction.

?At least not the first time. There is the possibility that the first time you raise antibodies to it and the second time you do it you have a problem. Hopefully, you are not doing repeated surgeries on a shark. In Baltimore, we did quite a lot of research on that with the University of Maryland in their immunology department.?

Dr. Walker said there is not necessarily a shortage of exotic animal veterinarians, but it is a field that is difficult to get into.

There are a lot of people who want to be a zoo vet,? he said. ?It is probably even more specialised on the aquarium side. There is actually an organisation called the International Association of Aquatic Animal Medicine.?

For those wondering why Dr. Walker goes to so much trouble to anaesthetise marine animals, he said research has shown that fish do feel pain.

?Absolutely fish feel pain. Certainly most animals have the ability to have an aversive reaction to something otherwise they wouldn?t survive,? Dr. Walker said. ?As a veterinarian we make the assumption that all animals feel pain and therefore we should take steps to alleviate any pain when we are working on them?.

His favourite animals are sea turtles, and he has an interest in sea turtle medicine.

?In Bermuda this fits in nicely,? she said. ?Jennifer Grey has done a great job with the Bermuda Turtle Project for so many years. She has done such great work. It is a fascinating animal. They are dinosaurs of the sea; they have been around so long.

?If you can rehabilitate one animal and put it back in the wild you are doing a tremendous job. I consider sea turtles to be an almost sacred animal; ones that you want to protect.?

He said Bermuda sea turtles are interesting because they are really only visitors to our waters. They come up from the Caribbean.

?They grow up in our waters but in order to mate and lay eggs they return to the Caribbean,? he said. ?We have done a great job here, but more has to be done down there to conserve them.?

He said since Hurricane Fabian the turtle feeding grounds around Bermuda have shifted because the sea grasses that they like have moved. He said that tagging the turtles and tracking them by satellite had showed that they swam long distances.

?One satellite tag took a turtle all the way down to Cuba in three weeks,? he said. ?We had returns in the middle of three hurricanes. The story of the sea turtle is a pretty amazing story.?As curator and zoo veterinarian, Dr. Walker also has to deal with the occasional escapee, namely a flamingo named Flo.

?In Hurricane Fabian we didn?t lose a single animal,? she said. ?We left our flamingos out in the yard.?

While the wind may have been traumatic for some zoo animals, Flo saw it as the perfect opportunity. After a long period and many sightings by Bermudians, she was apprehended at a local pond and taken back into custody.

?Flo is the only one who has escaped over and over again,? Dr. Walker said. ?We have her back and she is doing beautifully.

?She has a name because she is special. She is pretty easy to pick out. She got pretty bright plumage when she was at Spittal Pond. She was getting an algae that she wasn?t getting in our pond. It wasn?t an algae that was absolutely necessary for her health. It was more for their colour. We have flamingo chow and that provides colouring.?

More serious than escaping flamingos, is the threat of escaping nuisance species such as snakes.

?We depend on imports, lumber for example for building,? Dr. Walker said. ?There is a lot of stuff coming in now. In each of those crates is the possibility of having wildlife including bugs and insects, but also snakes.

?We get regular calls to go down to the docks and pick up animals that they have found.

If they are finding some they are probably not finding everything that comes through. It is impossible to do that.?

He said on the Island of Guam brown snakes accidentally got onto the island and decimated the bird population.

?They have spent a lot of money trying to eradicate brown snakes from that island,? he said. ?It is such a great habitat for the snakes. They don?t really have an enemy. In Bermuda we do have a problem with people bringing in or obtaining exotic animals. The problem arises when the exotic animal, such as the red-eared terrapin, escapes or is released.

?I have nothing against the pet trade, but generally, exotic animals don?t necessarily make good house pets. Domestic animals have grown up in our environment and that is all they know. They make a lot better pets then some of the exotic ones.?