Aquariums: make team wellbeing a system

In a public aquarium, good care also depends on whether people can report uncertainty, ask for help and contribute to decisions that affect daily work. A 2026 study in Frontiers in Veterinary Science argues that zoos and aquariums should not reduce professional wellbeing to a menu of individual benefits. Its findings instead point towards a coherent system: equitable access to resources, managers who remain connected to the workfloor, meaningful participation and visible follow-up when problems are raised.

The message is directly relevant to aquarium teams, but one boundary matters. The study measured professional satisfaction, engagement and perceived self-efficacy. It did not measure animal health, behaviour or welfare. Better outcomes for fish or safer aquatic operations are therefore plausible downstream propositions, not effects demonstrated by this research.

A mixed-methods study across 23 accredited organisations

Sabrina Brando and colleagues combined a cross-sectional survey completed by 442 professionals with 39 follow-up interviews. Recruitment covered 23 accredited zoos and aquariums in seven countries. Survey data were collected from July to September 2023, followed by interviews between October 2023 and January 2024.

Participants held roles ranging from junior caregivers to executives. Senior animal caregivers accounted for 185 respondents, or 41.9% of the sample, while junior caregivers accounted for 87, or 19.7%. Overall, 71% reported being satisfied with their job. That positive headline did not remove evidence of strain: among 435 respondents to the working-hours question, 40.9% said they often worked additional unpaid hours and 39.5% said they sometimes did so.

The analyses found positive relationships among engagement, job satisfaction and life satisfaction. They also identified role-based differences in access to provisions, learning opportunities and coaching. Perceptions of work and organisational appreciation were more closely associated with satisfaction than the mere availability of formal benefits.

A provision can exist without being usable

One of the study’s most practical lessons is the gap between a written policy and a lived process. A wellbeing policy, training programme or listening channel does not automatically provide effective support. Staff must know it exists, be able to access it regardless of hierarchy and consider it safe and meaningful to use.

Interview findings emphasised workfloor contact, information sharing, appreciation and documented responses when staff suggested improvements. The authors interpreted some manager-reported behaviours—including withdrawal, reduced initiative and passive compliance—as patterns consistent with learned helplessness. This wording deserves care: learned helplessness was inferred, not directly measured.

A 2025 paper from the same research programme and the same 442-person sample adds context. It associated workplace self-care with organisational job satisfaction and intellectual self-care with perceived self-efficacy. Because the cohort overlaps, it should not be treated as an independent replication of the 2026 findings.

What an aquarium can audit

Applying this evidence does not mean asking aquarium managers to diagnose employees’ mental health. It means examining whether the work system enables each person to perform their role well. A local audit could test:

• access to training, mentoring and discussion time by role, seniority and shift pattern;
• clarity of responsibility when an animal, water-quality or biosecurity concern emerges;
• whether staff can seek a second opinion without fearing blame or dismissal;
• the time between reporting a concern and receiving a response, including when no procedural change is made;
• how regularly managers visit operational areas and communicate decisions back to the people affected;
• trends in workload, unplanned hours, participation and staff retention.

Results should be disaggregated by role. A reassuring organisation-wide average can conceal unequal experiences among aquarists, life-support technicians, veterinarians, education staff and managers. The 2026 paper specifically warns against provisions that are effectively concentrated higher in the hierarchy.

Connect reporting culture to animal monitoring

The most useful aquarium application is the observation-and-escalation chain. A change in appetite, unusual swimming, altered spatial distribution, declining water quality or a biosecurity breach needs a route from observation to documentation, discussion, action and reassessment. Professional wellbeing does not replace a protocol or technical competence. It helps create the conditions in which those tools are actually used.

Where an ethogram is available, it should therefore identify who observes, when variation becomes an alert, who can initiate closer monitoring and how decisions are reported back to the team. The same logic applies to shift handovers, mortalities, life-support incidents and quarantine deviations. Reporting volume alone is a poor performance measure. Teams also need to track response time, closure and whether learning from one incident makes the next report easier rather than riskier.

The available research does not prove that this arrangement necessarily improves animal welfare. It does make one operational link auditable: does information produced by staff who work close to the animals reach people who can act, and does it receive a traceable response?

What the study cannot establish

The cross-sectional design identifies associations at one point in time and cannot establish causation. The 23 participating organisations were accredited, medium-to-large facilities, and the study was conducted in English. The sample is not representative of every aquarium, country or employment model. Chief executives were underrepresented, social-desirability bias is possible, and self-efficacy was perceived rather than tested as actual competence.

A separate 2023 survey of 311 zoo and aquarium professionals had already identified management, limited recognition, workplace conflict and difficulty influencing animal care as important stressors. Recruitment through professional mailing lists and social media meant that no response rate could be calculated. Together, these studies support local diagnosis and repeated evaluation more strongly than a universal organisational recipe.

Build a monitored system, not a one-off initiative

A popular one-off initiative can leave unequal access, overload or missing feedback untouched. A more robust process begins by mapping roles, decisions, available resources and the points where information is lost. It then uses a small set of indicators and structured behavioural monitoring in public aquariums, reviewed by role and discussed with the people doing the work.

Vetofish can help public aquariums review animal-observation pathways, handovers, escalation procedures and their interface with veterinary and technical leadership. This support for care organisation and decision traceability does not replace occupational-health professionals, who remain the appropriate partners for prevention, assessment and care related to employee health.