Hello, friends, and welcome to episode 181 of Just the Zoo of Us. This week I spoke with the

president and CEO of the Texas State Aquarium about their work rescuing and rehabilitating

loggerhead turtles and other marine wildlife. We discussed the challenges faced by sea turtles

in a changing world, the human work that goes into saving them, and the magic of connecting with another species.

Just the Zoo of Us presents Loggerhead Turtles with Jesse Gilbert.

Music I'm going to this week, I'm really, really excited to be talking to a brand new friend. This is Jesse Gilbert. Say hi, Jesse.

Hi, Ellen. How are you? Hi,

everyone. It's good to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you. I'm excited to talk about your work

with a really, really cool animal that I honestly don't know a ton about, so I'm looking forward to

learning. But before we talk about our cool animal friend today, I would like to get to know you a little

bit. What got

you into marine biology? Yeah, it was an interesting road. I actually grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma,

so Landlock State. Oh, sure. When I think marine biology, I think Tulsa, Oklahoma. It screams,

marine science. That it does. And so I was really fortunate.

I grew up in Tulsa and Tulsa has a fantastic zoo and my parents would take us to the zoo a lot growing up and just kind of got into animals.

I think it was my introduction into the wildlife.

And from there, I think like probably a lot of people, I made my first

trip to SeaWorld and saw Orcas and thought that was incredible. I, you know, probably more on

the training side of things. But as I grew a little bit older, knew that I was kind of probably

headed down on the Marine Science Road and was very fortunate to get an internship at the Tulsa Zoo. They had a

Marine Aquarium Department there. And that was my first internship, my first job as a zookeeper.

And then was really fortunate to find an aquarium biologist job here at the Texas State Aquarium

...