Water World

By Laura Legere ’02
Photograph by Bob Handelman

Andrea Gissing ’05 was too busy to get jealous when Bernie kissed her co-worker in public, even though hours before, Gissing was the one being smooched. Bernie, 19, belongs to no woman, but will crawl on his belly for at least three.

Gissing took a philosophical view of the relationship. “That is nature’s design,” she said into a microphone as onlookers applauded. “All life on Earth is interconnected.”

Bernie smiled to the crowd, and Gissing’s co-worker tossed him a herring.

Bernie is an Atlantic harbor seal, and Gissing is one of his trainers at the New York Aquarium. Just a stone’s throw from the beach where Coney Island meets the sea, Gissing works to keep three fur seals, six sea lions, a gray seal, and Bernie alert, active, and fed. As the newest member of the marine mammals training staff, Gissing is also the voice of the aquarium’s daily demonstrations. On a gusty June morning, Gissing described for a rapt audience the difference between seals with visible or hidden ears; narrated as one sea lion, Bodega, mimicked a great white shark and another, Otis, gave a howling call; and prompted the sea lions to show off their flexibility—“Watch this,” she directed. “They have very flexible necks.” On cue, the sea lions craned their heads backward until their brows touched their spines.

In her short career training marine mammals, Gissing has worked at two of the nation’s most esteemed aquariums. She is both energetic—often running in her water sandals from deck to pool—and deliberate. In conversation, she declares facts with a scientist’s precision, and is careful to begin nuanced answers with the phrase, “Yes and no.”

Gissing wanted to be a trainer as a child. “That being said,” she cautioned, “I’ve also run the gamut of wanting to be a doctor, lawyer, writer, astronaut. I had a big astronaut kick for awhile.” When she was eight, she called the Woodland Park Zoo in her hometown of Seattle and asked if she could work there. She was told to call back when she was 18.

The first job the biology major landed after graduating from Middlebury was something of a dream assignment. After finishing an internship at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, she was hired by the Shedd to raise a sea otter, Capers, that had been orphaned in Alaska. Baby otters learn everything from their mothers, so Gissing became a surrogate otter mom. As she fed and groomed Capers, she taught him to feed and groom himself. She changed the sheets of his little water bed. In the trainers’ temporary “locker room” in New York—a trailer where Gissing hides behind a worn office chair to change into her uniform each morning—she keeps a photo of the baby otter pinned to the wall.

The visible joy Gissing feels when she talks about Capers appears again when she watches Bernie flop by on his belly. “Bernie was my first animal to learn more than just basic things with me,” she said. During a morning feeding, Bernie wiggled his rear flippers, hid his face, and touched his nose to Gissing’s gloved fist. After each move—or “behavior”—was finished, Gissing said “good” and tossed him a fish. She held him still with his nose to her wrist and stroked his slick and speckled brown coat. “Tactile stuff is a trained behavior, but some animals seem more receptive to it than others, just like dogs,” she said, then interrupted herself—“Good!”—to pull another fish from the plastic pouch at her side. “Bernie is one of those who actually leans in.”

When she applied for a job at the New York Aquarium in the fall of 2006, Gissing had the qualities of a desirable young trainer: a college degree, scuba diving certification, experience with animals, and an understanding of the rigors of the job. Training is an evolving profession and one that has come far from what the aquarium’s behavioral husbandry supervisor, Martha Haitt, described as its “circusy” roots. When Haitt began training more than 20 years ago, she said, “The animals did shows. That was it.” By the time Gissing joined the aquarium last October, she was valued for her desire to educate and observe, much more than her willingness to entertain.

Now, training is used to help animals be comfortable with medical care. A flipper shake, for example, gives a trainer an opportunity to check out the bottom of a seal’s “foot.” An open-mouthed gasp is practice for viewing teeth.

Training is also used to exercise the animals, both mentally and physically. In the sea lion compound at the heart of the marine training department, Gissing pointed to a traffic cone resting on the bottom of a half-moon tank. The salt-water pool is the home of the aquarium’s “wonderfully grumpy” 42-year-old gray seal, Spook, a mammoth creature, half blind and gentle. Gissing, pony-tailed and kneeling by the pool, described how the crotchety old animal enjoys playing with his food. “I’m using the anthropomorphic ‘enjoys,’” she added. Trainers will stuff the toy with fish and watch Spook, whose head is much too large to fit in the mouth of the cone, puzzle out his dinner.

But not all of Gissing’s job involves observing the subdued or the spectacular. Appreciating training takes more than what Gissing called “Sea World exposure.” “If all you see are the people in the wetsuits riding on the Orca’s nose, then you have a completely different perception of what the job is,” she said. “I would say it’s maybe 40 to 45 percent, at most, spent with the animals.”

The other 55 to 60 percent is why she warns guests to bring an extra set of clothes for a day behind the scenes. In short, she said, “Poop is part of the work.” There’s also the trouble of running outdoor demonstrations 365 days a year, including winter days when even salt water freezes on the stage.

Then there’s the food. Some of the sea lions eat up to 38 pounds of fish a day, and each pound is carefully thawed and weighed. When Gissing arrives at around 7:30 each morning, she is greeted with pallets of herring, capelin, and squid. In stainless steel buckets resting in large stainless steel sinks, she and several volunteers sort through each meal to make sure none of the restaurant-quality fish are ripped and nothing unexpected has slipped in. “Sometimes we’ll find other kinds of fish,” Gissing said, tossing herring onto a counter below a hanging scale. “This is a shad. Not what we’re looking for.” She kicked open the sink drain then threw her gloves into the fish garbage, next to a capelin head.

Gissing has an infectious verve, even when sorting fish or sweeping algae from a tank. Because she is new to the aquarium, she can’t yet signal Otis to leap straight out of the water for a hanging globe, or get Bodega to walk on his front flippers. But even seasoned trainers admire her narration. “Andie does a great job,” trainer Joanne Sottile said after a demonstration. “[The mammals] feed off the energy of the crowd, and they definitely feed off the energy of the trainers,” Sottile said.

When the mammals occasionally refuse to perform a choreographed behavior, Gissing improvises with facts about sea lions and conservation. “There have been demonstrations where Otis will swim for ten minutes straight,” she said, then stopped herself. “Maybe not 10 minutes—like two minutes straight, but it feels like an eternity.”