Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Venice and every week I sit down for a 40-minute

conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Charles J. Inness, the director of Animal Health

at the New England Aquarium, where I ask him, how are turtles doing these days and are

they the same thing as tortoises?

Okay, so welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Venice. I'm so excited for this

episode today because today's episode is about turtles and tortoises, all things turtles.

I have Dr. Charles J. Inness, who is the director of Animal Health at the New England Aquarium?

So you're a literal veterinarian expert of turtles and tortoises.

I work on all sorts of animals, but I do work with turtles and tortoises as a big part of my job.

So when you say that you're a vet, honey, you do all the animals.

Yeah, I mean earlier in my career, I was a regular dog cat vet. I worked in a small animal hospital,

but I also took care of people's ferrets and rabbits and snakes and iguanas and whatever anyone wanted

to bring in. But being a vet is like arguably like harder than even being a doctor because

your patients don't talk. It doesn't take forever. It's similar to being a physician where we go

through medical school training for four years and then there's years of practice experience

afterwards to develop the specialty. So once you were doing, you had patients, you had clients,

you're just being a gorgeous veterinarian in the world. And then how did you realize that you

wanted to start working like more aquarium and like zoo life and tortoise life?

Well, I was always interested in wildlife and non-domestic animals. And so when I was in practice,

I wanted to see people's iguanas and turtles and snakes and things like that. And by practicing

on them for a long time, I gained enough skills that I was high-erable into a more specialized

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