I’m in St. Louis for the weekend, mostly to watch my girlfriend’s little sister’s volleyball tournament, but I’m looking for other cool things to do since it’s my first time here. Yesterday I got to visit the Saint Louis Zoo, which is fantastic. (And I promise I didn’t act like this kid.) I got to see monkeys, giraffes, zebras, lions, penguins, gorillas, elephants, somali wild asses, and a whole range of other animals that I’d never even heard of before. I even got to see the mountain nyala that makes an appearance in the zoo’s logo. I was really impressed with the Saint Louis Zoo—it has a wonderful layout and an amazing collection of animals. The best part, though, was that we got to see feeding time for the grizzly bears. It may sound barbaric, but it was nothing of the sort. We watched as two of the laziest bears that I’ve ever seen would catch oranges in their mouths and then suck out the meat while leaving behind the rind. What made the experience even better was that it was free. Saint Louis Zoo is a “free zoo,” so all you have to pay for is parking.
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When I’m doing my daily research and looking for interesting jobs or internships, I often find postings on third party job boards. I’m not a big fan of job boards, so I try to go directly to the employer’s site to get information on the opportunities. Today I was Googling an internship, and the first result was completely unrelated. Luckily, it was a way more interesting internship with Underwater Adventures Aquarium at the Mall of America in Bloomington, MN. It’s the world’s largest underground aquarium, and it’s just the kind of place that you might end up at during a summer vacation road trip. They say it’s like scuba diving without getting wet. There are 1.2 million gallons of water, and there’s a “300 foot-long curved tunnel, complete with a moving walkway that simulates a scuba diving adventure.” Underwater Adventures has sharks, octopuses, jellyfish, and all kinds of fish, and you can watch them all get fed. They even offer birthday parties where you can sleep with the sharks.
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I’m up in Michigan for my annual Father’s Day fly fishing trip. The town that I stay in is called Grayling, which is named after a fish. Unfortunately, it’s a fish that I’ll never catch here, because it’s extinct—at least the Michigan population is. Back in the 1800s the entire state of Michigan was logged, and apparently the value of the wood harvested from Michigan during the Gold Rush was $1 billion greater than the gold found in California during the same time. That had some serious environmental consequences, and one of those was the extinction of the Michigan Grayling. The introduction of trout to many of Michigan’s rivers didn’t help either, as they outcompeted the grayling for food. Luckily, we still have populations of grayling in Montana, Alaska, and much of Canada. They’re not completely lost, but there are plenty of species that we’ll never get to see. ARKive is changing it. Not only are they fighting to prevent many species from going extinct, but they’re also documenting the world’s most endangered species so even if they are extirpated, they’ll never be completely lost. ARKive is an initiative of Wildscreen, a UK based organization with an American arm located in Washington, DC.
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I’m a nut about wildlife. I don’t watch Animal Planet all day or anything, but I get ridiculously excited when I see a new species in the wild. My hope is to one day run into a mountain lion in the wild, at least as long as I’m not being hunted. As fanatical as I am about wildlife, I bet I don’t even come close to the people at the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York City based non-profit. They were founded in 1895 with a “clear mission to save wildlife and wild places across the globe.” Their first major success was aiding the recovery of American Bison, and now they’re working to “protect many of the world’s iconic creatures here and abroad, including gorillas in the Congo, tigers in India, polar bears in the Arctic, and ocean giants in our world’s amazing seascapes.” Beyond doing that, they also run 5 parks in New York City—the Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium, Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo and Queens Zoo.
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My parents are in town for the weekend, and I’ve been thinking of fun things to do with them around Chicago. One place that came to mind is Shedd Aquarium. I don’t think that we’ll end up getting a chance to make it there this weekend, but it was certainly a good thought. And once I thought about it, I realized that they’re probably hiring. Shedd Aquarium is much like other aquariums now, but it really stood out when it was opened in the 1930s. The aquarium was founded by John G. Shedd, retired president of Marshall Field & Company, and financed by him with $3 million in gifts. The goal was to bring Chicago up to par with other “cosmopolitan” cities that had aquariums, and by the end of the project Chicago’s aquarium “housed the greatest variety of sea life under one roof.” It also happened to be “the first inland aquarium with a permanent saltwater collection,” which meant that they had to ship millions of gallons of seawater from Florida on trains to provide a proper habitat for the sea life.
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John James Audubon painted birds. His seminal work, Birds of America, was a collection of 435 life-size prints. To this day, when you hear the name Audubon, you think of birds. Interestingly enough, John James Audubon had no direct involvement with the founding of the National Audubon Society. Audubon’s widow, Lucy, tutored a man named George Bird Grinnell and some of Audubon’s love of birds must have rubbed off, as Grinnell was one of the Audubon Society’s founders. To this day, the Audubon Society persists in its mission “to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth’s biological diversity.” The Audubon Society works to achieve this mission through a national network of community-based nature centers and chapters and scientific, educational, and advocacy programs.
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The idea for today’s post came from a television commercial. So, the next time your Mom yells at you for being lazy and watching TV instead of looking for a job, tell her that being a couch potato is part of your job search repertoire. Seriously. We know that a ton of college students are watching TV with a laptop on their lap, and hopefully you’re one of them. If you’re in the right mindset, you’ll realize that no matter what you’re watching, you’ll be absolutely bombarded with new job ideas. Take these ideas, do a Google search, and find a job! You know what? We might just write an article about using the tube to find a job. (Update: We did, here’s The Couch Potato’s Guide to Job Search.)
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