Aquarium’s annual New Year 'count and clean'

Every January, London’s Sea Life aquarium carries out a thorough accounting of its 6,000 or so animals.

Transcript

00:00We're counting all of the stock that we have here, so that's everything from our tiny coral

00:11polyps all the way up to our big sharks. It's quite a big task because we have over 6,000

00:16animals here at the aquarium. It's important because we need to know how many individuals

00:20that we have on site, particularly as some of our animals are involved in various breeding

00:25programmes, so particularly if we have any new arrivals, we want to keep that database

00:30up to date. We want to reduce stress as much as possible with our animals and we try to

00:36minimise the level of handling that we have to do when we are carrying out necessary health

00:41checks. We have had some new arrivals when we've been counting, so some of our freshwater

00:47species, those numbers have increased where they've been breeding really well in their

00:53habitats, which is really nice, and we can share that information with other sites to

00:57see how those populations are doing.