Bored Panda reached out to Emily Greenhalgh, a marine biologist and science communicator who worked at the New England Aquarium in Boston and posted a picture of a baby penguin being weighed. Emily explained what the procedure of weighing wild animals looks like.
"As you can imagine, keeping a wild animal still enough to get an accurate weight reading can be a bit of a challenge.” Emily further explained: “Plastic tubs and containers are clutch. The penguin chicks are placed gently in a plastic tub (the kind you would store flour or cereal in) and then the tub is placed on the scale to get an accurate measurement.”
Meanwhile, other animals (like the sea lions and harbor seals) “are trained to hop up onto the scale as part of their enrichment activities, which makes things a bit easier,” said Emily.
It really depends on the individual animal how often they get a checkup and how they get weighed.
For example, “The Aquarium's 550-lb green sea turtle, Myrtle, gets a full workup twice a year, including weight measurements, ultrasounds, and blood-draws.” Meanwhile, “Much like a human, the Aquarium's giant anacondas get a checkup annually.”
However, the baby animals like the rockhopper and African penguins that are born at the Aquarium get a checkup and a weigh-in much more frequently.
