ZIMS at Work: Loveland Living Planet Aquarium Rates Online ZIMS for Aquarists and Keepers course

ZIMS for Aquarists and Keepers, is hosted on The Nature Conservancy Conservation Training website, and is available to all registered ZIMS users. The free course is aimed at animal care staff and has been developed to provide the skills needed to enter daily aquarist and keeper information into ZIMS. Click here to enroll.

Species360 recently launched the ZIMS Training Academy’s first online training course – ZIMS for Aquarists and Keepers, and we are delighted to see the response to the course! 

Hundreds of people have already signed up since the course was launched in November last year, and we have loved hearing your feedback on the course. We recently received some fantastic feedback from course participant, Andrew Lawrence, Registrar at Loveland Living Planet Aquarium, United States. 

Andrew Lawrence says that ZIMS is essential to operations in the husbandry department at Loveland Living Planet Aquarium, and says the features they use the most are husbandry (particularly notes and observations), enclosure measurements (water quality data in aquarist daily log), and medical records, to water quality and life support equipment maintenance records. In all, more than 50 staff members at the Aquarium use ZIMS to track animal health and ensure the overall health and wellbeing of the individual animals and groups in their care.

“This holistic approach that ZIMS tracking provides ensures the highest level of care is being maintained at the aquarium,” says Andrew Lawrence. “ZIMS is an amazing tool and has become essential to how we operate here in the husbandry department at The Loveland Living Planet Aquarium.” 

Andrew Lawrence, Registrar Loveland Living Aquarium

Andrew recently completed the ZIMS for Aquarists and Keepers online course and found it so useful he is encouraging his colleagues at the aquarium to enroll. 

“Industry specific software doesn’t have the luxury that other tools put out by Microsoft or Google that you can search online how do something. All the help guides, other trainings by Species360, and especially the Species360 support staff have been tremendously helpful, but I really enjoyed going through this new online course and really hope to see more offered soon,” said Andrew.

“This new course is entirely web browser based and was able to interact with directly without having to use a practice or live version of ZIMS. It really was a smooth step-by-step interactive guide that simplified everything that an aquarist or keeper might need to get started using ZIMS from data entry to reports. I liked how the sections were separated so I could go in depth on some of the topics I wasn’t as familiar with and could go faster on the others. It helped me learn some tricks and shortcuts of things I was already comfortable with like sorting search results, and helped me master some of the topics like enrichment and training data entry that I haven’t really used before. I do a personal ZIMS training with all my new staff, but this is will be really nice to refer them to as well and will let them learn at their own pace,” said Andrew. 

Andrew continues, “My only negative is I want more! ZIMS for Medical would be my first suggestion, but care and welfare, provisional entry, other templates and reports, water quality, and life support module trainings would all be great.” 

He is also thrilled about the recently announced ZIMS modernization plans, saying; “I am very excited to see them and all the potential that ZIMS has to offer, especially to aquariums.”

ZIMS for Aquarists and Keepers, is hosted on The Nature Conservancy Conservation Training website, and is available to all registered ZIMS users. The free course is aimed at animal care staff and has been developed to provide the skills needed to enter daily aquarist and keeper information into ZIMS. 

 The course is made up of multiple mini-courses:

• In ZIMS for Aquarists & Keepers – Animal Care, you will learn how to navigate ZIMS, complete animal searches, and enter basic information in the Animals Module.
• In ZIMS for Aquarists & Keepers – Tools and Reports, you will learn how to use tools and reports within ZIMS to view, visualize and extract data.

For more information on the course and to enroll, please visit: training.species360.org