Animal athletics

While some Bloomington residents flocked to beaches last week, 7-year-old Jeffrey Witney left his coastal California home and got to learn about canines with careers. Saturday afternoon, he sat with a group of parents and kids watching a German shepherd named Journey herd ducks at the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology. \nThe exhibit, called “Dogs on the Move,” is part of Animal Athletes, a series of live animal shows that demonstrate animals’ physical abilities and need for active lives, said Staci Radford-Vincent, program manager for WonderLab. Shows to come include “Super Bugs” and “Silly Safaris: The ‘Wild’ World of Sports.”\n“People love live animal programs,” she said. “Kids don’t get a chance to see this sort of thing often.”\n“Dogs on the Move” drew a crowd of all ages, large enough to fill a room on the second floor of WonderLab. The crowd watched and interacted with the show, which demonstrated some of the different jobs dogs perform.\nSarah DeLone, education program director for the Monroe County Humane Association, used Journey to demonstrate the herding ability of dogs. Journey drove several ducks around the room, through a tunnel and back into their cage.\nThe crowd also watched a presentation by Erlene Schiting from the Indianapolis chapter of Greyhound Pets of America, an organization that finds homes for professional racing greyhounds that no longer qualify to compete at the racetrack.\nSchiting let children in the audience feel and compare the muscles of two greyhounds. One of the dogs, Libra, was “fresh off the track” and the other, “Leaning” Lena, has not raced for more than four years.\n“She’s known as ‘Leaning’ Lena because she’s very lazy,” Schiting said.\nJeffrey said his favorite part was watching Journey, but said he didn’t learn anything new because he already knows a lot about dogs.\n“I’m an expert on dogs,” Jeffrey said. “I want to be a vet when I grow up.”\nWonderLab continued teaching people about animal athletes Wednesday at its “Insect Olympics” exhibit. Indianapolis resident Cameron Todd, 8, said one of his favorite stations was called Cockroach Strongman.\n“They can pull so many times their own weight,” Cameron said. “I was so surprised.”\nAt this station, visitors placed metal washers into a matchbox taped to Madagascar hissing cockroaches. The pulling power of each cockroach was measured by dividing the weight of the washers the cockroach was able to pull by the weight of the cockroach itself.\nCameron’s cockroach weighed 5.9 grams and pulled 71.9 grams, which is 12.2 times its weight.\nWonderLab Associate Executive Director and insect enthusiast Karen Jepson-Innes said when WonderLab uses live animals in its exhibits it’s careful to keep the animals’ stress levels as low as possible.\n“We don’t use the same one twice in a row,” Jepson-Innes said of the cockroaches.\nJepson-Innes said she talked with IU assistant professor of biology Armin P. Moczek, who told her this activity was no more stressful than taking the cockroaches out and holding them.