It’s official. This last weekend I took the test and passed to become a certified touchpool volunteer at the Albuquerque Aquarium.

To certify, the aquarium’s volunteer coordinator, Tiffany, walked with me to both of the touchpools and watched as I demonstrated how to setup each exhibit.

She asked me to show how to properly contact the animals and to describe some of the interesting features of the animals that I could tell visitors. Basically some of the same questions that I went through in the previous posts The Shark and Ray Encounter and The Invertebrate Touchpool.

Once we finished with the demonstration, I had to take a written test which was much more challenging. Some of the tougher questions included identifying the phylum of an animal or the diet of a specific animal.

Since some of the other volunteers in training are readers of this blog, I won’t ruin the questions by sharing anything more specific. I will give one hint on a question I know I got wrong…. you should study up on the times of daily events at the aquarium.

Now that I am a certified touchpool volunteer, I can signup to run the touchpool anytime I’m available. I’ll announce each day and time that I will be running the touchpool on the eXtreme Aquatics Facebook page, so like my Facebook page if you live in Albuquerque and want to know when the touchpool will be open.

Find me at the aquarium and say Hello! I’ll be the tall goofy guy wearing the pirate hat: