 Okay, well, welcome everyone to today's Mar-Guess Lecture. We have two presenters that are, I'm just so excited about being able to listen to them and find out more about record keeping and the environments in which they work. Our first is Matt St. Wood from the Securator of Husbandry and Records at Moat Marine Laboratory and Aquarium and I hear he's here in Sarasota, Florida, so I'm still here for a few more days myself, so we're actually in the same state. And Matt, Josh Courcho, who's the Training Manager for Species 360, that's the records management program that Matt also uses, so we're going to actually see what's being used in the industry. And I'm going to turn the mic right over to Josh first, who is going to begin the presentation. Thank you for having us, Pat, and thanks for letting us speak to your course. Of course, Matt and I have a chance to work together a few times a year now, which is very cool. It's nice to have another opportunity to work with him and to talk about some of the cool work that we get to do together. So my name is Josh Courcho. I'm the Training Manager here with Species 360. We're entering our 45th year serving the zoom aquarium industry, which feels like a very long time and it is. We've been around before computerized records back at the very start of things. We started as just really a twinkle in someone's eye. That person's name was Uli Seal. He went on to also found another organization called the Conservation Planning Specialist Group, which is another organization, nonprofit organization that works in the preservation of species and their natural habitat. So this guy came up with a couple of really cool ideas a long, long time ago, and Species 360 has carried on in his lead for about, as I mentioned, 45 years. So with that in mind, what we're really going to talk about is what is Species 360? What is the International Zoo community when it comes to data management? So we can really think about it as operational software to serve kind of operational needs. We talked about it at a regional and a global level where we talk about cooperative animal management, and some of this presumes a little bit of industry knowledge. We'll do our best not to speak to too many acronyms and too many zoo specificisms, but we'll likely trip on them and you can question and ask us what we're trying to actually say, because if we say things that are a little too industry specific, we might lose you. Yeah, we sort of live and die by acronyms. So CPSG, we used to be called ISIS, which I'm troubled to even say it out loud now. So you'll still hear people talk about their animals and their collections with their ISIS numbers, because we were ISIS for 35 years. Of course, we changed for good reasons. So with that in mind, some of the things that we do to serve the community again as regionally and internationally, we serve for this cooperative animal management idea, and I'll get a little bit into that, which definitely revolves around species management. And something new for us in our 45th year is conservation research. We've been cited in many publications over the years, and we have a lot of scientific cred to our name, given that we've produced a lot of aggregated data that serves the community. But just until very recently with the founding of our science team by Dr. Dalia Condi, who's based out of the Southern Denmark University, she has a group of postdocs and master students and she's spearheading kind of a new research partnership that we have with universities who are actually doing research on animals and human care and also how that relates to wild populations as well. So we're doing native research now for the first time in our life, and that's pretty cool. So that's opening up new possibilities in conservation research. Who are we in particular? We are, by any count, we're the largest association in this industry, except we're not an association. We are a nonprofit membership services organization. We're made up of, actually it's now, since this slide was written, we're over 1,100 members in about 95 or 96 countries. And now we're counting our newest member in mainland China as a new country or not, because we had someone in Hong Kong before, but we now have, by any count, we have the largest participatory membership. We are a voting body. Our members choose our board of directors. It comes from trustees from people throughout the community. We're this very strange software development organization, because if you think of us as just a software company, you're getting just part of the picture. If you think of us as an association, well, it's true. But again, it's really focused on what we do for the community, which is a services organization as opposed to like a membership association or a crediting body, which you'd find with the American Zoo Association or the European Zoo Association or some of the other ones that serve the world. So we are this really strange, interesting group with members all over the world, and they're all doing something together. And what is that something? Well, it's data management. To the tune of, I think we've got 21,000 individuals and users, is kind of what our current count is. So that's humans putting hands on keyboards. And again, over 1,100 different institutions doing the data. So it gives you an idea of where those members are with the map on the screen. And records management is key. So really what we talk about and what we provide software that captures is information on zoos and aquariums. We like to say we're guardians of captive wildlife populations in zoos and aquariums and in particular, you know, we're the champions of protecting that data and making sure that it's standardized and useful. So of course, this is becoming a bigger and bigger concern as we're entering the sixth extinction, as we call it. There's, you know, more and more habitat loss, more and more species that are being threatened in the wild. And so what you're seeing in our industry is zoos and aquariums are starting to think in this concept of what's called a one plan approach. Whereas in the past, you might have had animals and the wild and animals and captivity and they wouldn't necessarily be thought of in the same breath in the same programs. Our industry is in the middle of pivoting to making sure that anytime we're thinking about one captive population, we're also thinking about its wild counterpart and vice versa. So knitting those two things together. One of the ways you can do that is with data. So we have kind of a new space that we're moving into as well with what we call in situ research. So that's research and records management for animals in the wild as opposed to ex-situ which is in human care at our member facilities. So cooperation breeding programs is really one of those aspects where we serve data to a region. And that region is, you know, it's, you know, part of me just closing out the window. The region is at the national level. It's at the international level. There's a couple different acronyms that we could throw at you, but it really just helpful to understand that associations create these breeding programs and we support them with recording and standardizing the way that they record that data and then how they output that for demographic analysis. So all that data that goes into it is structured and collected by individual volunteers. The individual volunteers are either at our members or at non-members, but we use our software to actually collect that information that is then aggregated at those regional associations. And of course, research needed to improve animal care and welfare. That's a big aspect of what our software does is imagine human record management for medical records. We have the animal counterpart to that as well as information about animals that are, you know, how they're being tended in captivity and how they're, you know, when they're moving from place to place that they're standards of care maintained. So long-term management and stability. This is really when we're talking about, you know, making sure that the populations are preserved in the wild. You know, this is what we call kind of like the ARC mentality or making sure that you have, if you have a breeding program that's intended to either preserve that species that you're dealing with as much of the data as possible to make sure that those populations are in fact, you know, viable. And that's all species-specific. So it gets very scientific and very specific for each species right away. So I can't speak in too broadly general terms except for, you know, having the most amount of data is really going to improve your ability to serve. As you know, you can imagine there, at least with us, there's 1,100 different holders of information or of animals of data and doing them 1,100 different ways would mean that you'd have very limited ability to speak about a distributed population. But with the software like XIMS, you can actually get all that information in one quick view, which is great. And the zoos and aquariums and the associations have figured that out long in advance. So they've really thought about this back in 2000 is really where XIMS started to take root and some of the hopes and dreams have come to pass. So what we actually do serve our members with is we like to say that, yeah, all that stuff that I just said is the idealized, the benefit to working with an online, global, real-time collaborative data set. Those are kind of hard sales to make when you're talking to an individual institution and our relationship, our business model is one where we serve individual institutions. So our, you know, our clients are those institutions. And so we have to both offer them that big picture value, you know, why is recording data in a standardized way good? Why is it helpful for the species as a whole that they manage? But we also have to talk at real-world stuff such as staff efficiencies and productivity, making sure that they can run reports that help them in managing their day-to-day workflow. So in some real practical ways, we're just a regular software company that develops software that helps them. But we also have that kind of that one-two punch of being a really globally unique data set. So we work our best to improve their planning, their ability to manage their collections, to manage the medical care that they're giving their animals. We, of course, are paying attention to all of the trends of software as software development changes. We are doing our very best to stay at the cutting edge, making sure that we're providing our members with the best return on their investment. It's another strange benefit to being as big as we are. We're a non-profit, so we're a pretty small organization, given any other software at scale that we're talking about. Like if you think of any of the softwares that I heard you guys talking about at the start of the call, any standard software that's used in an international sense you'd imagine would be a pretty large organization. But all things considered, we're pretty small. But we do our best to make sure that our members' dollars turn into results. So, you know, updating to the latest software trends and all that is a big part of what we have to do. See here. Some of the stuff we can also do is help in compliance with government and accrediting application forms. There's a lot of that in our industry as there's many industries, there's unique governmental relationships. But in moving animals, you can imagine that, you know, especially moving them internationally, there's some specific regulations that apply. So we support our clients in the UK with a pretty easy output in the system. It kind of fills out a form for them. One of our other main reports supports some USDA regulations here in the States. So we do our best to make sure that the software makes their jobs easier. And we do our best, and my job is on the training front. We do our best to provide comprehensive training to our members in whatever ways we can. We talk about three different main product chunks and zims for husbandry. This is where Matt spends most of his time. And this is really managing the actual animal count, the inventory at the individual facility. We talk about being able to control and pay attention to the demographics of your collection and the relationships between the parents and children, that kind of thing. We can make information available to your region. So if you wish to let folks know that you have an animal available or if you're looking for a certain animal for your collection, that's kind of a listing service that's available in our system. I mentioned pedigrees. So being able to figure out breeding recommendations. Again, this is about having the best genetics that you can have with a small population they have. You can figure out what's called breeding recommendations from that. And then identifying facilities with specific experience in the animal that you're dealing with to make sure that they, you know, if you don't know how to deal with a certain new species you've never dealt with, you can find a colleague who has dealt with it based off of our global holding. So we also deal with and have been dealing for 30 plus years with medical records for thousands of different exotic species. You know, some runs the gamut of all the different types of records. You can imagine what is recorded on humans. We do the same thing for animals. One of the cool things that we can do that you can't do in human medicine is that we can aggregate based off of all these different species. So we have a series of these results that are provided for typical drugs given, typical anesthesia is given, blood tests that are norms for that species and mortality morbidity analysis which is what do they get sick of and what do they die of because we don't have hippo to worry about individual records is not as big of a concern in animals. We can aggregate data and give some really powerful metrics and that's, you know, worth the price of admission alone for most of our members is just to get access to that global reference information. Josh, what's hippos? What would you say? What's hippos? Sorry, HIPAA, HIPAA compliance. Yeah, I'm sorry if there's a question typed up. Sorry about that. HIPAA is the laws that are protecting people's individual records so you wouldn't ever see something like that in human medicine where basically you're just aggregating millions of records together without anywhere getting sued. I can tell you about hippos too if you want. Yeah, of course I said hippos. So this is not a hippo but you can imagine this could be a hippos weight comparison graph. This is another tool that we have again because we don't have to worry about privacy of certain types of data. We share things liberally and this is a case of weight data. So anyone who's a holder of let's say hippos, you could compare your individual hippos to the global records. So in this case what you're seeing on the screen is a box and whiskered chart of all the weights that are known for this species. And this is a, I believe it's an Arabian oryx but you can imagine being a hippo. And each of those blocks and lines, it's hard to see on your screen but they're age classes. So as you go on the x-axis, those are the age of the animal. And then you can see the weights on the y-axis. And that blue line that charts across it is your individual animal. So you're saying from my collection, I don't know if this animal, as it gets older, is it over conditioned? Is it heavy or is it light for what it should be? Well, you can, using our data, you can plot your animal on what is effectively the typical weight range for species and captivity. So that's again one of those powerful, you know, worth the price of admission types features we have. Kind of to, and I'm going to transition because I know it's trying to make sure that I'm not skipping. A lot of the rest of the slides are just more specific graphs like this, but it is worth spending some time on this one, given that we don't get too stuck in the weeds. I mentioned Ulyssil at the start of the call. This is literally what this individual wanted to see when he started the idea of species 360. He wanted to see physiological reference ranges for exotic species. And what that means is basically he was doing some, he was a researcher, he was wanted to find typical blood values. And when we're talking about blood values or like white blood cell count, lymphocytes, what you see on the screen right now is an example of some feedback for, again, an auric species. He was looking for that information. And what he found at the time was is he could get the blood, he could get the results, but he couldn't tell you whether or not they were a standardized set. So he didn't have the ability to pool together all of these different blood samples from all around the different zoos. This is back in the 60s. He wasn't able to do that with any statistical relevance. He wasn't able to say it scientifically accurate. And so he literally created the organization Species 360 as a way to record basic records on animals so that we knew their age, we knew their pedigree, who they were related to. We knew their relative health status, we knew their weights. We knew all the basic information that we now record as a standard in the industry so that he could get this information. And now this information is available and it's to the tune of, I think we said something on the order of 80 million medical records are pooled together now on 10 million plus animals that are in human care around the world. So this, it's really the story of the tale that waged the dog, when it comes to why we exist. And it's really that person's foresight to say, we can't do this job well, we can't do it at the best level, until we do basic records. And so that's sort of the takeaway I think from, from my side of the talk here is that, you know, you can, you can have good software can have great software, you can have people with good interests and, you know, every every intent to do it well. You kind of have to have a reason for doing it and that that that reason can really bring people to the table and that's, that's what I think is really why we are here as an organization and why we get to serve people like Matt. So with that said, I'll transfer over to Matt. My takeaway from that is you work for me Josh. I do work for you sir. So we have a couple more slides and there was just more, more facts and figures but I'm happy to answer questions later. And I'm going to go into some of the things that Josh has already talked about me a little more detail and so you kind of more of applied how we actually take care of things but I'm starting off with kind of the history of my organization because why not to have your role might as well give a little commercial for where I work. I work here at Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida. That's our entrance right there. And we were founded in 1955 by this woman here. Her name is Dr. Jeannie Clark and she's known as the as the Shark Lady. This is her working with some some deep water sharks there. This is the one that was actually recently named after her and this is something I got from our website and kind of a quote that we like to say we're the guardians of the sea and all living things that depend on it. And that is, like I said, a quote that Dr. Clark came up but she unfortunately did die a few years ago at 92 years old. And she was still publishing research and still working with sharks so pretty awesome woman and she was our founding director. We're an independent nonprofit marine research institution comprised of really world-class marine scientists. We have 32 PhDs working here right now, committed to the belief that the conservation sustainable use of our oceans begins with research and education. So we're an aquarium here and we're founded in that science and education. And really we have a lot of and on the research side I'm going to get into the morning the aquarium later which is where I mostly work but I want to give you that foundation. We do both laboratory work and field work. This field work on the right there is there was a viral video about that somewhat recently about Dr. David Vaughan who started doing some micro fragmenting and made it his mission to return a bunch of coral back to the ocean and big coral farms. We have a big coral facility down in the keys. We manage quite a few facilities around the state of Florida, and using the digital record, your record keeping system makes it much easier for us to do so. So these are some of our research some interest here at mode some of our departments. I'll read through them in case it's difficult for you to see we have a chemical and physical ecology sharks and rays conservation research program we have a dolphin whale and sea turtle hospital we do quite a bit of rehab. So ocean technology research there right there showing one of our AUVs are autonomous underwater vehicle, which basically cruise up and down the coast looking for signs of red tide right now. Marine biomedical research so we're looking at the cancer and tumors and basic disease resistance and shark skates and rays stranding investigations they see why the dead animals wash up on shore. Ecotoxicology, obviously looking at toxins in the environment. Marine and freshwater aquaculture coral health and disease ocean acidification marine ecology fisheries and enhancements and then our Sarasota dolphin research program which is basically a study on the same population of dolphins. For the past, I believe 40 years. Hey, Sarah's and think be very cool. So okay, go ahead next. More benthic ecology environmental health benthic ecology sorry studying what lives on the bottom Jim Coulter does a lot of deep diving but also studying the clams and oysters and scallops to live on the bottom. Manatee research because everybody loves manatees of course we actually in the aquarium that ties in pretty closely our two resident manatees are the only two in the United States that are trained for research so pretty cool with that fisheries habitat ecology and acoustics basically studying how fish talk to each other coral reef monitoring and assessment coral reef restoration forensics environmental laboratory for forensics phytoplankton ecology seachore conservation and immunology so quite a bit of research going on here. That's the science we have here we also have a big foundation and education and that lower right is actually a studio where we do a lot of distance learning. And of course I'm not set up in a distance learning I have a webcam on my desktop computer here, but if I wanted to I could have asked for their help and been on a great studio and had you know green screens behind me make it look like I was underwater. But they do that for a lot of classroom visits and things like that that you know they can visit with any classroom around the world through our, our education department there. I think the other photos show some pictures of our educators with people of all ages of course we have programs for school age kids we also living in Sarasota you know we have a pretty large population of older folks the snowbirds the people 65 and over the retirees, and we have programs a lot of programs for them to do lifelong learning to to learn about we're doing also so education being the second big part of our aquarium and the next. The actual aquarium also and this is either Hugh or Buffett doing some of his some of the husbandry research there. It's a picture of our shark exhibit and then Amanda and the lower right holding some of our, our seahorses but I'll get into how this all really expected data in a second. And it's not mentioned science education and aquarium, and this is the facility we're building within the next four or five years. We're moving in London like I said little commercial for what we're going to have hopefully within the next few years that's our vision for a new aquarium that we're building right now. So my title is a curator of husbandry and records and what that means for one I'm in charge of the daily care of our animal collection, and that's the health of the animals the procurement of the animals and the quarantine of the animals. I have some quarantine going on right here behind me right back there and there's a tank back there with two yearling American alligators right now so no matter where I am I feel like I'm surrounded by sick or otherwise you know new unquarantined animals that I'm responsible for taking care of working with our veterinary team. But I'm not going to be talking too much about that today other than how it deals with records. The big part of my job like talking about today is the records I'm our service our registrar which I'm sure a few of you might be interested in that sort of a career potentially a register type type Of course they go hand in hand how my register work is deals a lot with the permitting and the sourcing of the animals. I have ICP and they're not for the insane calm policy that's our institutional collection plan, which is certainly important for our long term care of our animals. How we source animals and where they go once after we source them, and then the daily records it's all get into as well. And the data which Josh mentioned is where I spent a lot of my time and it is true. And data is very vital for any type of a research study. So data is, we're really data for with all of our animal husbandry here. Any research project and methodologies can differ, but research is always based in having a good data and analyzing and interpreting that data of course is a good foundation then your research project and using this program provided by species 360 ZIMS it allows us to have this great Both capturing and pooling our own data and then sharing that data with other organizations around the country. This picture I have down here is just some of our statistics of what we have in our collection. So once again just some data and how we have animals grouped in our collection into our primary collection rescue rehab strandings etc. Let's go ahead to the next next picture and excellent there. So, before I started working here about 10 years ago, and I'm not going to say I showed up and everything got better. It wasn't anything like that. But I want to show you in a second here how our historic record work our historic records were. Post it notes it was physical folders representing enclosures. We would have record an animal got here and we'd have a permit during the period was supposed to have gotten here but finding matching an animal to which permit was collected under which permit was held on there was very difficult. And it was a real pain to obtain information if the my VP told me hey we'd like to get you know I want to sense this on all their animals. I would just, oh man, I don't want to do that. It's going to take me weeks. It was terrible just finding any information historical information in particular was very difficult. Of course our current records, something like that request like that can be two clicks of my mouse. It's very easy to do. And it serves as a digital backup for all of our paper records we still keep our paper records and boxes are in file folders but the species 360 folks back it up on multiple continents I think Josh you back it up all over the place. You're not in your head. Yeah, it's backed up and it's secure. Trying to find the mute button. Yeah, yeah, we're back where we're cloud hosted where we're backed up or redundant where all the all the good things. So it's good and easy to so it's much better than my file folder. Basically, we used to have our backed up meaning I would take all the files and Xerox them and put them in another building. That's that was our backup before much better now easy to access the access data because of the species 360. Yeah, this is a look at some of our historic records. As I mentioned, it was pretty terrible a lot of post it notes. They really like putting the date in the month and not the year on things exhibits are named after whatever animal they were in and unfortunately like I we have on the swan the right that blue thing says flounder tank. We don't have any founders now in our collection I have no idea what that meant as a flounder tank. And just, you know, it says on the on the one of those white things on the right says the permit for it is on the fridge. And it's just really difficult to kind of follow that sort of information, and much easier now with the digital records, like I said provided by the species 360. This is just an overview of some of our, or with some of our files and some screenshots from them. I think after I'm done going through this I'll be able to actually take you into our into our database and show you a little bit more about what's on here just in case there's a list of some of our enclosures on the left like I said much easier to access them file folders. And on the right is within one of those enclosures a list of some of the animals that are in it that's in our main shark exhibit. And each one of those has its own record as well so very handy for us to keep track of those. So really why keep records we've got quite a few reasons why we keep records here and why having this digital database is both important for us and useful for us. The reasons I have listed here facility management so legal obligations and permitting the species management so for the individual tax on managing that species is much easier with a database population management and closure management, then individual group or husbandry management. And then even just mentioned briefly, the individuals health management or the medical records. So all of those are important reasons for us to use this database. So first off facility management and legal obligations. My name is not all the permits and my bosses is and making sure that we're permitted properly for everything we do here keeps him out of jail and I imagine if he went to jail I probably wouldn't have a job anymore. So it's really important that we keep good records of all of our permits you know I we apply for the permits and then have to know what we're permitted to do here and we have quite a few people looking after us. The first one I mentioned there is the Association of zoos and aquariums. They've put out the standards that we try to to live up to and they're very strict and we try to surpass their standards. And they require these digital records so that's one reason right there to have digital records because our accrediting organization requires us to. We're respected by a lot of people all the time us da the as I mentioned us Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA FWC, which is our local state wildlife organization here in Florida, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and then we're not we're a private institution so we don't have to worry about the Freedom of Information Act, but a lot of zoos do have to also have their records easily accessible because anyone from the public can request information as well. They could request our permits since those would fall under a government entity, but a lot of other zoos, especially city run zoos and aquariums have to have access to that information for the call what a FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, but luckily working for a private organization like I do. I don't necessarily have to worry about that FOIA right now but who knows in the future. It's very important for facility management to know where the animals came from. We have several animals in our collection that are considered prohibited species, meaning it's not legal to collect or possess them without permits. So if any of these inspectors were to come in and know where we got we have my ask and be able to ask where we procure that animal, where we got it from and we need to have that, you know, chain of custody to know if we collected it ourselves, or what supplier we got it from to make sure it was collected both legally and then also so we could tell our own story and make sure we're getting good sustainable sources that it was collected from a sustainable vendor. If it was something we purchased and the vendor that's trustworthy and knew where it was collected. So it's important for us to know our supply chains. And of course, the shorter the supply chain the better, unless being coastal and mostly showcasing our local wildlife, we collect most of the stuff ourselves so we know our supply chain is very short. And then that permit because of them says always associated with that animal. There's no question, you know, I don't have grouper written on a post that note stuck in a file. I know exactly which grouper I have, and where it was collected so very, very easy to do very, very helpful. So species management. This is a kind of broad spectrum if you're looking at just species in general I'm since working in an aquarium and much in some of the safe species which is something started by AZA. They have animals from extinction program, and they have a few animals that were involved with their program sharks and rays and the Atlantic Acropora and corals in general the for the reef track corals. They're both all species involved with the saving animals from extinction. And there's a number I think there's 20 animals all involved in the saving animals from extinction program across all season aquariums. There's just a few that we're involved with and we're involved with quite a few stud books and SSPs, Species Survival Plans. And these stud books are run through ZIMS also, and it allows them to track the genetics of any of these animals. So I think Josh mentioned that a little bit really briefly, but it's really nice on the stub bookkeeper can make breeding recommendations based on the family history the family tree of these animals. And on the right there, a lion seahorse. We collect, you know, usually two click the male and a female pair every year, and we'll spread those animals, you know, we'll breed them really successful breeding these lion seahorses. And we'll keep track of the genetics and Stephen Young who's over at the California Academy of Sciences, keep track of all that in the database and those the parent kids of all the lion seahorses in the country. And when we have babies, he can tell us, hey, you should send these to maybe an aquarium in California or maybe one in Ohio, and we'll send them there to be able to better represent the genes in the population and ensure that we have a sustainable population within our zoos and aquariums. It makes it much, we don't have to do as much collecting from the wild if we can take two animals genes and spread them amongst all zoos and aquariums it's much better for all facilities. So, go ahead to the next slide. And then population management within our institution is certainly important as well. Now this is like for animals that might not be tracked through a species survival plan but we're still doing culture on them. I used our neon gobies here as an example because I have lots of pictures of them breeding and their babies are pretty cute sitting on top of that PVC pipe in that bottom picture there. Those are the eggs developing you can see their eyes on the bottom and they're pretty adorable. Anyways, we like to keep track of them and Zim's because it allows us to maintain their genetic diversity. That's with any of our species we're breeding bonnet head sharks, sickleids, cuttlefish, and through Zim's we can keep track of their family tree of any of the thing that's breeding. And with these and actually with our seahorses are culturing biologists that's mostly a man to hodo right now just to give her a shout out. What she does is we'll collect a pair or we'll have a pair and know that they're you know genetically unique and we'll give them a last name so we might call the neon goby in that upper right corner. They might be the Jackson family and any babies that they have will be the Jackson's and we'll know don't breed Jackson's with Jackson's because they're going to end up with some funky Jackson's. We'll have another family then that are the Johnson's I should have picked them or the croutos and we'll know that that is their lineage and just to give people the idea that might not understand population genetics, but everybody probably knows that the Jackson shouldn't meet with another Jackson allows it much easier for us to know where to spread animals within our institution to not if you want to create pairs again later. So it's really helpful to do all that in Zim's and track that parentage. Unclosure management. This is where I do most of my work a ton of my work. We keep checking environment environmental measurements and the picture in the upper right hand corner are some pictures of water chemistry. Testing that we're doing testing for ammonia nitrate nitrate salinity temperature all of that. You know we've been doing that for years before we had digital record keeping we are our first for a digital record keeping was keeping track of our, our environmental measurements in Microsoft Excel really easy to do. We're separate from the animal collection. Now those animal records are constantly tied into our environmental records and it's really helpful to have them tied in together. So really nice you can you can graph them really nice in the database as well but it's nice to kind of always have the association where forever is a problem we can go back and look kind of a cool thing with those neon gobies when I had him in quarantine. The water was a little cold 72 degrees. We moved them into their current breeding lab and as soon as the temperature is 78. Everyone had babies pretty neat so we can see that definite change and tie those in exactly to the water chemistry. Those breeding events. Of course we can know which animals are in which which in which enclosure which is really important again for breeding but also knowing which species can live together peacefully or not. In an aquarium a lot of the times you're essentially keeping you know the lions and with the antelopes and with the African wild dogs and with the jackals at a zoo yeah the ability to spread everything out but in an aquarium. We're keeping the predators with their prey a lot of the times and we need to know when that's okay and when that's not okay and by keeping track of that in this database will know you know these animals do coexist peacefully. We can take great notes and know how we allow them to provide it for them to exist peacefully or if it doesn't work and they don't do work together peacefully. And then we can also keep track of moves between enclosures so if I have tank A and tank B and I moved an animal from tank A to tank B. And then three months later I have a parasite outbreak in tank A although we'll actually look out for tank B too because that animal was just in that other one and maybe some hitchhikers went with it so it allows us to better track those transmission of disease. Now individual animal or also group husbandry. Zimz does a good job of keeping track of both individuals or groups. We use groups a lot in aquariums because take for example these three cuttlefish here. It might be difficult for me to tell them apart. I can't tag them. I can't put a transmitter inside of them. So I will probably most likely manage those as a group. So either an individual or that group is going to have its own unique what species 360 calls their global accession number or their GAN. And that's unique worldwide. It's like a social security number that's always associated with that animal. And that gives us that global connectivity. Kind of cool. We sent some jellyfish to Florida. We sent Florida jellyfish a long time ago and then they gave some back to us and they ended up giving us back the same jellyfish we gave them. We knew it through the global accession number that these are the ones that we had sent them a while ago. Maybe the other way around with that. But either way the story is the same that we can keep track of those individuals and know these are the ones that we initially got from Tennessee Aquarium. We can track their whole parentage that way. It's really neat. We can also of course to the husbandry track food consumption and any training or enrichment. And of course the welfare of the animals as well. There's a really nice welfare module that we can go right on our phone even take it out and talk about the welfare and document the welfare. Any questions on welfare if any of our animals. We monitor that really well through the application. So it's very, very broad. And now our health records. I mentioned quarantine because that's what I do. I had to put that first. I had to put some pictures of some fish parasites on there because it's what I like most. We can keep track of any of these medical treatments and procedures. Any medical notes or physicals or veterinarians. She can go out and put any notes she wants on any animal and have it associated with the animal forever. It's it's amazing. You know, we don't have to, you know, you know, we have an issue with an animal. No, if that was the same one, we're not really sure to have to go look in the file and see what's going on. No, it's always going to be right there and accessible so it's really easy to use. Josh was holding up a what it was something I made it's a laptop sleeves are using it for I use it as a hat. But Josh uses it for a laptop sleeve. It's this picture on the right very similar or your anima. So that's what he's holding up there. We can keep track of medications, the growth of animals and even parasites to have through their medical medical records. No better way to keep your laptop safe than to wrap it in some sort of disease. So the individual health management, the medical records just to show this about Josh, I kind of mentioned this about sharing information globally he showed that they had the blood values and keeping track of that and sharing that worldwide. What really helps with with fish also are some of the medical see where I have it here medical resources the the summaries the drug use the drug summaries. It's a it's the drug use extracts I think I highlighted the wrong one on the bottom there, but it's great if if we have a question we have an animal and our veterinarian wants to know what drugs have worked well on in the past and what hasn't. So you can do a search on that animal and species 360 is all this information together to know what types of antibiotics have been used on let's say a bounded head shark. What types of anti parasite drugs have been used on a queen angelfish and how successful they were so all that you know work we're putting in here is useful for us but it's also useful worldwide any other aquarium that's using this stuff so I should thank Josh for that because I probably never have and it's very very helpful for us. I mean data in here is also super important there's different ways of us doing it either through a centralized data entry or distributed data entry. I'm either entering the data myself and my team. And with that I could have errors transcribing errors with penmanship you know some of the acquires I work with have terrible penmanship, and it puts some of us having a lot of computer time but with that distributed data entry with the vial just entering data. So that was some inconsistent verbiage, a lot of smiley faces, some incorrect data every once in a while, and it requires a lot of training to train a lot of these people. I tend to use a distributed data entry a lot more, just to try to get them tied more to the data and more invested in it. But ultimately, as a register I'm responsible for that data. That picture I have in the lower right was done basically amounts of data points put in by about probably 10 or so of our aquarium biologists. Here's the next slide there. And data out is where we get buying from the biologists this is where they're motivator. So, they can put in data all day, but if they're not getting anything out of it they're not going to care. They just think there's putting into oblivion. So the reports that Josh mentioned are huge. We can look at trends and food consumption we can look at the genetic diversity as I've mentioned many times so we can find the sourcing of the animals. So, let's say if we need to find some Blemings tanks or unicorn tanks and I don't have to look through a bunch of records here. I can search, well, where did we get our Blemings things in the past and call up that supplier right there. I don't have to start over here. If somebody 20 years from now wants to do that, and I'm not working here anymore, maybe they can know where it is here in our data. If someone had done an inspection or we have to do a report, rather than me spending weeks on that report, the reports now don't tell my boss who's in here can do most of it in just a few minutes. It's really nice to do the reporting. So it's really helpful. The water chemistry trends down here on the picture I have shows on a salinity trend for our one of our exhibits we call our E1. I give it a description Florida reef, but it used to be a freshwater exhibit with some some sturgeon. You can see right in the records there right around end of May 2016 by actually is more June I guess it went from freshwater to saltwater and then you can see our saltwater values kind of bouncing around and pointing at the screen like you guys can see. Anyways, doing a census easy looking at sensitivity to medications is really easy to find that exhibit compatibility and whether animals are compatible with each other and then PR marketing and education find a lot of use in this as well. I've shown them how they can run a census and find out what animals we have in our collection and it works really nice for education team if they want to know what animals are in what exhibit. They can just look at the census that exhibit and see exactly what's in there if they want to write up a a program or if they're doing a program on Atlantic blue tanks they can run a query on where are the Atlantic blue tanks and know where they're at usually usually call me anyway but you know this would work in practice. I don't know where they can find those animals. There might be yeah that's all I got for the for those. I have a big manatee. This is Hugh who likes to crunch his nose against the glass make all the kids excited. But if you guys have any questions. And I can also go and bring up my my zims if you guys wanted to see that. But if you have questions for Josh or I maybe we should take those first in case there's any burning questions. If we have any questions I could take a quick look at the chat and you could also grab your mic. Emily Mercer said if someone wanted to work in this field with a background in records management be enough or would we need to have animal biology knowledge as well. Any other subjects or experiences you recommend we study or pursue to move into this field. You mentioned you want to talk Josh. Well I think we could take it from two different directions. I have a bit of a background in biology. So my my my road in was sort of one of luck and and also you know I had the right combination of technical skills and software as well as some some you know light animal management experience. The vast majority folks in the registrar role which is folks who'd be using our software or veteran veterinarian technicians. You know now more and more as Matt noted you know we're doing you know direct entries of folks who are actually also for the animal care specialists are also doing direct entry of records it's kind of depends on which audience you're talking about as a veterinarian is the records management person. Those of those all have different track records, you know sorry tracks into the into the field. So when we're talking about our core user based the records management people, it absolutely helps to have some foundations and data management. It's becoming more and more of a professional job over the last 30 plus years, meaning that you know the actual, the actual knowledge of information management is is a, you know, more and more of a understood and respected field. But it definitely is not the same as being a library. You know, as a manager or a corporate records manager, you're having that touchstone with biology and maybe more than that is having having a, you know, to want to learn it. Because there is so much to learn as there isn't any industry but the zoo and aquarium field is one where, you know, maybe Matt you can, you can add a little bit of like on the ground experience but it's one where you're almost to mission, you know, being a being a missionary who's willing to go anywhere that you know where we're where God calls you and working for relatively small amounts of money it's not a it's not a terribly lucrative industry. You have to be called to do it and that's something that I don't think it's necessarily as shared with other records management fields, but Matt, I don't know if you have anything to add. But a lot of the registrars that that I've met maybe not the ones that well seems like we've all started as some type of a keeper or something like that is a. I started as an aquarist mostly doing the the quarantine type stuff, and then kind of stepped into the registrar role because I just had a big interest in it. And that's what seems a lot of them have started on that side but that's not to say that you need to start on that side and to be a registrar. So that that zoology background, I think having the data management background if you know you want to be a zoo or aquarium registrar is even more important to have that background that you're getting I believe through the coursework you're doing now and records management, and you know you just take that strong background in records management and apply it to being you know the zoo world, as opposed to me taking my zunals and learning how to how to manage data. It seems a little bit more challenging is very what you're learning there is much more technical skill and I think you can apply it to the zoo field like you would any other field. So if you knew that's what you wanted to do, working a zoo or aquarium, having that records background is really solid. And if you and if you don't have this specific industry experience. You know, depending on where you're located, your local zoo aquarium, you know, sanctuary rehab clinic, whoever it might be if you have a love to want to work with and serve, you know, species conservation. I think volunteers very readily at some level, be it a docent be it a, you know, volunteer educator. That was my first job was as a wolf research, sorry wolf sanctuary, you know, doing, doing anything that you know that that helps an organization out will get you a foot in the door, then you figure out if you really like it to, which is a benefit. And then, you know, if you come in with records experiences Matt mentioned, you sort of become the de facto expert at your organization too because it's not a lot of duplication of efforts in that space. So if you're the records person if you're the registrar if you're the make the curator of data at your place you're probably be the go to for everything so that it's kind of empowering. Also means that it's your job and there's not a lot of people to help you all the time but that sometimes is a good thing for people who like to control things and I think data records people like to control things that works. You know, I'm doing records but I also you know share an office with two baby alligators right now. There was an indigo snake in there a couple weeks ago and I've had crocodile in here. I've had siren you know you get a lot of animals in my office like that which is pretty cool if you're just in the animals have a passing interest or passion for animals and still want to do data management working at a zoo is a good way to do it. Thank you. So I think you said you may have a little time to show us the actual records management software there. Yeah I can if you don't mind Josh. It's great when a member shares their data because we don't technically have rights to share their data so. Let's see if I'm doing this right. His organization is approved it. I'm going to go quick. So just to show quick what I've mentioned about the enclosure here I won't go into my institution and all that, but just to show how the utility of this and kind of go through the different steps that I mentioned, I can go and show a tree view here. And this is all of our enclosure groups expand this go through all of our enclosures here I can pick an animal out. For example, I'll pick out our Florida reef here. Open this up and it's got all of our details and to expand this over water chemistry measurements that I mentioned here so I can go and graph those if I wanted to that's all under these pictures so I don't know how to do that. But anyways, I can go into the occupants of this then. Mostly corals in this exhibit. What's the one I mentioned before I went with a it was the. I remember who I was using when the sunshine it was a clown clown wrasse I think is the one I mentioned earlier when I was kind of going through this here's a clown wrasse. Click on this we have 1.1 clown wrasse they have a male and female they're moved into the enclosure July 19 2016 and click on this. And this little once again. So now I'm out of the enclosure module I'm in the animal individual animals module I can open this up open this up with. I don't expand all very often because it gets a little overwhelming and any information here on it I don't have any weights on this animal is you put it in there and we haven't ever caught it out. Any notes that we have all in here which is really nice we have there's a hurricane in this data that and there is a note. Then any transactions so we got this from KP aquatics May 31 2016 and then you know we had we weren't sure if it was a male or female we had point zero zero zero point zero point two. And then February 26 we decided it was a male or female because we saw some breathing behavior with them. So and there's a lot I can go and beyond that there's medical information and you know Josh reminding me maybe what would want me sharing all that. Anyways this is kind of just need to see all this information that we have on every animal in our institution we have that so it's pretty great. Thanks man. Any questions about all that. If you know you could place a question in the chat area or just grab the mic. No I don't hear any well you know not hearing any I'm going to thank you Matt and Josh for presenting today. This is fascinating to me. I yeah I really am quite amazed at all that goes into your work and the volume of data that you're responsible for. We really enjoy it. Yeah it is it's a unique opportunity for sure. And that software looks so helpful and the fact that you can use that across the world to as you said aggregate that information is just wonderful. Yeah. Yeah a small a small plug for that. We do have a teaching partnership level service level. I mentioned research partnership so we have a lot of universities that are joining just to have access to that data. We also have a teaching license program. We're working with 26 different schools and universities colleges around the world and they're actually teaching records management within their curriculum now which is yeah that's that's my that's my pet project as a global effort it's really it's a challenge. I wouldn't say it's difficult but it's a challenge to to instruct everyone who needs to know at the highest level how to use the data. There's a software platform like this and I get the joy to work with Matt once a year teaching regionally at the at the AZA school we actually spend six days together. 12 hour days you know teaching registrars basically all the things that a registrar needs to know including using ZIMS but you know having having the ability to have universities and schools. Assistant teaching us we have partners all across Europe and Australia and North America and it's great to have schools actually considering it you know relative information before you actually enter the job field to have these skills so that's been a benefit for us as well. Oh that's wonderful I'll have to learn more about that. And then how I met Katie we have a zoological registrar association also if anybody is interested in it you can go on and I'll just search ZRA registrar. I don't know the exact website. The website is Zuregistrars.org. There you go Zuregistrars.org thanks. Hey Katie. Hey. Yeah thanks for thanks for the notice about the the talk I'm glad it worked out.