It’s feeding time, and Elliot Tong has a date with a sea turtle.
Diving into the depths of the New England Aquarium’s four-story giant ocean tank, Tong passes fish of every size and color. At the bottom, he pulls out what looks like a thermos and starts to shake it, creating a maraca-like noise. After ringing the dinner bell for slightly longer than expected, a loggerhead sea turtle emerges from the tank’s coral reefs and swims up to Tong, ready to gobble up a fish taco.
For Tong, it’s just another day on the job. However, despite going on close to 300 dives during his co-op as an aquarist for the aquarium, the experience has never lost its sense of wonder.
“Being in the water is just a completely different world, and it’s something that I relish,” says Tong, a marine biology student at Northeastern University. “Being able to be in the water has this kind of wow factor that it still has to this day.”
Tong, along with Noah Brown, an ecology and environmental science student working with the aquarium’s penguin team, is one of two Northeastern co-ops who is getting his feet wet with the kind of education and conservation work done at the New England Aquarium. It’s an opportunity for a pair of conservationists to pass on their passion for protecting marine life to the public.
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
