SeaWorld’s Christmas Celebration is underway and at the Cannery Row Clyde & Seamore are starring in the Countdown to Christmas. We are excited to see the return of this fun production and we have even added some fun new aspects to the show. One thing that always gets a big response is the appearance of Opie otter throughout Clyde & Seamore’s endeavors to “get Santa here”.
A crowd pleasing behavior is always the ball walk. Can you imagine what it is like to teach an otter how to jump up on a brightly colored large basketball and “walk” across the stage? Here’s an inside peak at how it’s done. The team at Sea Lion stadium started with a much bigger ball to give the otters an opportunity to master the art of “walking” on a larger surface. It looked a little something like this when one of our otters, Bubba was learning how to ball walk …
Once the otters had a pretty good “walk” going on the larger ball they graduated to a smaller ball. Here’s another otter, Natasha with some pretty amazing ball walk skills.
It’s always fun training a new behavior, because you never know how the animals are going to adapt in their own way to the behavior. That’s one of the best things about being an animal trainer. You never have the same experience twice. Learning may occur faster or slower or even in a completely different route. All of the animals are different in how they learn and what they have learned before usually has some sort of influence. The animals even teach us a thing or two!
