Feeding fish gives curator Jaws-dropping experience

By Bryan Painter

Published: July 23, 2006

JENKS - “We give the sharks a physical once a year,” Mitch Kabrick said as matter-of-factly as if he were stating his favorite flavor of ice cream.

You do what?

Now let me give you a quick explanation on how we got into this conversation. I know the Oklahoma Aquarium in Jenks has sharks. So I wanted to talk with someone in Oklahoma who can honestly say he or she feeds sharks for a living.

Kabrick, 27 and the aquarium’s assistant curator, has filled this role for quite a while. Brandi Moss, after working part time for three years, recently became a full-time shark biologist at the aquarium.

I got the chance to spend some time with Kabrick and watch him and Moss feed the aquarium’s two bull sharks and four lemon sharks. The female bull shark is 8 feet long and weighs 350 pounds.

OK, back to the conversation. “We build a chute with a divider net, they come through this trap door and into this pool over here that’s about 4 feet deep, and then four biologists get in the tank with the shark,“ Kabrick said. “We have a cargo net, and when the shark gets over the net we close it.”

You do what? Mitch, I know it’s necessary to check their health daily like you do and even give the physicals, but what does the surgeon general warn in regards to giving physicals to sharks?

“Probably wouldn’t approve,” he said. “But there’s also a team out of the water, and everything is mapped out.”

Now pay attention to this one. “And we usually have an ambulance in the parking lot just in case,” he said.

You do what? Back to that question. It just seems to fit so much of what he says.

“We haven’t had to use the ambulance, it’s gone real smooth,” he said. “Somebody’s got to do this.”

How does someone who graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in marketing end up spending Monday and Thursday afternoons dipping a 6-foot feeding pole into the half-million gallon tank so a hungry shark can snatch a 2-pound chunk of bonita off the end?

The best I can tell it goes back 20 years to when a 7-year-old Kabrick gazed into the family’s 20-gallon tank stocked with mollies, guppies and goldfish.

“I’ve just always been fascinated with oceans,” he said. “Any time the Discovery Channel was doing something underwater, I was glued to it.”

While still in college, he was among the early volunteers at the aquarium. By the time it opened in 2003 he had experience, and he was a scuba diving instructor.

“Those two things got me hired,” he said. “After the sharks came in, I was one of the few full-time biologists on staff. I had the on-the-job training, and I was a hobbyist of aquariums.

“I had studied everything from freshwater ponds to elaborate coral reef systems. And along the way I kind of adopted the sharks.”

Feeding is only part of what he does, but it’s a fun part. On Mondays and Thursdays, he and Moss, with the help of volunteers placing the feed in the pole’s clamps, serve up 2.5 percent of a shark’s body weight each of the two days.

For example, the largest of the lemon sharks - which is about 9½ feet long and 320 pounds - is fed eight pounds of bonita and salmon.

In addition to cleaning the tank and monitoring the sharks’ health, Kabrick finds time to reap one of his greatest rewards - watching others watch his dorsal-fin buddies.

Visitors can walk through a tunnel and see the sharks swim above and beside them. Or they can go around to the front viewing window, which is about eight feet tall and 20 feet long.

“I remember one of the coolest things,” he said. “A little girl was at the front viewing window and she had a hand on the window. She didn’t see the shark coming. He brushed a pectoral fin against where her hand was on the window.

“That’s when she realized he was there and she froze. The shark was swimming off at a slow pace, and she wouldn’t move.”

On the day I visited, I walked with Kabrick through the tunnel and 10-year-old Austin Freeman of Oklahoma City happened to ask him which of the sharks were bull sharks.

Kabrick loves this.

“With the bull shark, the first dorsal fin, the one closest to his head, is tall and the dorsal fin closest to his tail is shorter,” he said.

“On the lemon sharks, the first dorsal fin near the head and the second dorsal fin near the tail are about the same size.”

These sharks are Kabrick’s buddies. So some people would say he hangs out with a rough crowd. But Kabrick defends them.

“Usually, the only time people hear and learn about sharks is if there is an attack,” he said. “If you look at how many sharks are in the ocean and compare that to how many accidents happen, it’s few and far between.”

Now, he’s not saying they’re not powerful. That part amazes him, too. Take for instance their teeth.

“The bull sharks have a triangular tooth with serrated edges that can cut right though the meat,” he said. “The lemon sharks’ teeth are pointed. They are long and skinny like a spear. And these sharks are constantly replacing old teeth with new teeth, so they’re always sharp.”

Which in a way could take us back to that whole giving the shark a physical thing.

“They are well-behaved,” Kabrick says of the sharks during the physicals, again still as calm as if we were discussing his favorite flavor of ice cream.

And just FYI - it’s chocolate.

Write Bryan Painter: P.O. Box 25125, Oklahoma City 73125

Fax Bryan Painter: 475-3183

Call Bryan Painter: (405) 740-4179

E-mail me: bpainter@oklahoman.com

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