There?s something fishy about Christina Gargan?s job.
A clinical lab technician at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Gargan works mainly with reptiles and birds.
Without her, wings wouldn?t flutter as well, scales wouldn?t slither and gills wouldn?t gulp.
When veterinarians request exams, she and her colleagues take samples from the animals, process them and report the results to the vets, Gargan said.
“As for fish, we see them sometimes but not as much as one would think, being at the aquarium,” she said.
Gargan takes and processes blood, feces, urine and most any bodily fluids of the animals.
“So we do look at poop,” Gargan said. “Anything that can come out of an animal we look at.”
She and her colleagues also do cultures and some microbiology in the lab.
“They’re essential to our lab and absolutely critical to the work we do here,” said Catherine Hadfield, a junior associate veterinarian at the Aquarium. “They have an important knowledge and skill level to interpret diagnostics that we take on our animals here, and they?re amazingly good at their jobs.”
Gargan and her colleagues, whose yearly salaries range from $30,000 to $40,000, rotate shifts seven days a week, as animals always need routine, quarantine or diagnostic exams.
“Caring for animals is a bigger responsibility than most people realize,” said Shannon Gordon, school program coordinator at Pickering Creek Center of Audubon Maryland-DC. “I?ve worked in such jobs myself, and it?s very labor intensive.”
Gargan said her favorite part of the job is working with different animals, but she never expected to end up at the aquarium.
As a senior in college, she found the aquarium as part of a research project, and contacted the lab for information.
When she graduated, technicians in the lab remembered her ? and called her to offer her a job.
“My formal training is in human medicine,” she said.
“But it was sort of a serendipitous chain of events that led me here.”
