Singapore marine life park to launch dolphin programmes

The Marine Life Park at Singapore's Resorts World Sentosa plans to launch its dolphin interaction programs on Sept. 30, the resorts said on Wednesday. The park invited ten children from underprivileged families to experience the programs on Wednesday at the Dolphin Island, where the 24 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins live. Adrian Penny, director of marine mammal operations at the theme park, said that the educational aspect is important to the program and that the visitors learned about the dolphins and the environment they live in through the interactive experience. He also said that the park is giving the best healthcare to the dolphins since they arrived here last November. "We have four veterinarian on the staff, as well as a whole lab staff available to us," he said. "We do body inspections (for the dolphins) everyday." "We will also be looking for more research partners to do more research with us, definitely," he added. Alfonso Lopez, chief veterinarian of the park, also reiterated that the well-being of the animals at the park is its "utmost priority." The park is presently scheduling only four interactive sessions per day, with four groups of guests at most each session. The number of guests per group is capped at five. This means 80 guests per day at most. The bottlenose dolphins from the Solomon Islands had been a source of controversy as animal rights called for their release back to their natural habitat. Three dolphins died before their arrival in Singapore. The park said that the facility housing the dolphins is better than those of international standards in terms of the space per dolphin. It has also been injecting 1 million Singapore dollars (787,402 U.S. dollars) to a conservation fund. The park's Southeast Asia Aquarium is home to more than 80,000 animals housed in 42.8 million liters of water. It has two records, one for being the largest aquarium in the world and the other for housing the largest single acrylic panel which is the viewing window on their Open Ocean Habitat tank measuring 36 meters by 8.3 meters.