Life's Work

It's a short list—the visionary leaders who are known for the significant way they've molded, shaped, formed and framed the National Aquarium as we know it. Jack Cover's name most certainly belongs there, too.

Jack first joined the Aquarium as a herpetologist in 1987. Since 2004, he has served as the general curator, a broad and demanding role that he plans to step back from (at least full-time) at the end of this year. Jack started his Aquarium career working on the Hidden Life exhibit that's part of Upland Tropical Rain Forest and has played a part in creating every major exhibit since then, including Amazon River Forest, Australia: Wild Extremes, Blacktip Reef, Living Seashore and, most recently, Harbor Wetland.

"For some of us, the words 'Jack Cover' and 'National Aquarium' are synonymous," said Ken Howell, a curator who's worked with Jack for more than 20 years.

"If you think of the National Aquarium, there's hardly anything that doesn't have Jack's influence on it," agreed Brent Whitaker, a veterinarian who held multiple positions at the Aquarium over 28 years, including chief science officer, and now operates ZooQuatic Laboratory. "He knows so much and is willing to learn what he doesn't know. He has an incredible ability to take an animal and its biology and communicate in a way that really impacts people, with conservation messages woven in."

"It's not a job for him; it's his life's work," added Robin Faitoute, the Aquarium's former manager of exhibit development who worked with Jack for 12 years. "It's no accident that Jack has been a primary player in almost all the exhibitions that the National Aquarium has won awards for. He has a good eye for how to create an authentic habitat, he has the animal and scientific understanding, and he has an engineering mind; he understands the mechanics of things."

Most recently, Jack played an outsized role in the creation of National Aquarium Harbor Wetland presented by CFG Bank, the free, outdoor exhibit in the Inner Harbor between Piers 3 and 4 that re-creates the tidal salt marsh habitat that used to exist before Baltimore was developed.

A Young Boy and a Snake

At a very early age, Jack developed a deep love of animals—especially reptiles and amphibians—combined with a deep love of learning, which his parents fostered and supported.

Jack was born in 1956. His father, Jack Sr., was an upholstery salesman, while his mother, Shirley, was a homemaker. He grew up in a rowhouse on West 35th Street in Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood with his parents, two older siblings, Sue and Jeff, and a younger brother, Joel. He can pinpoint the exact moment that set him on the path his life has taken.

"It all started when I was like 6 or 7 years old," Jack said, "and this man who drove a school bus knocked on our door. A boy had gotten on his bus with a ringneck snake and was terrorizing the girls with it. He felt that my brother and I should have this snake and my mother for some reason went for it. It was in a glass gallon jar and had slate-grey scales, a bright yellow belly, a bright yellow ring around its neck, and a forked red and black tongue flicking in and out. It was on the kitchen table, and I just remember sitting there; I probably stared at it for an hour. From there I started checking out books about reptiles from the Enoch Pratt library. It just became something I was obsessed with."

His parents bought books for him, too, signing him up for a subscription called "Our Living World of Nature" that delivered a new hardback book about a different habitat to their mailbox every month for a year. He still has every one of those books as well as several others from that time in his life, including his original copy of "A Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of Eastern and Central North America" by Roger Conant, which led him on a lifelong quest to find every animal in it. (He hasn't yet.) When Jack was in sixth grade, a teacher set up a conference with his mother to discuss the books Jack liked to read. According to this teacher, he was reading the "wrong books." Shirley Cover disagreed and advocated for her son; she told the teacher that he loved to read, and that was enough.

Beyond reading books about animals, Jack liked to explore his Baltimore neighborhood. "The city was not without wildlife," he said. "I would explore the wilds of the Jones Falls. I'd find Northern brown snakes in Wyman Park, and frogs and fish in Stony Run."

Jack's parents also allowed him to keep snakes and other reptiles in their home. "My parents were fearful of these animals, but they saw my joy and allowed me to do it," he said. "Back then every department store had a pet department. Once I bought a 6-inch spectacled caiman that grew to over 5 feet long. I like to say I learned my crocodilian handling skills in a basement in Hampden."

The family also vacationed on Kent Island and later bought property there, so Jack has spent most of his life exploring, crabbing and fishing in the Chesapeake Bay.

He became a Boy Scout, primarily so he could look for snakes and earn a reptile study merit badge. He frequently rode his bike to the Reptile House at the Maryland Zoo and befriended the curator, Frank Groves, whom he describes as an extremely generous man who encouraged Jack's interests. Later, as a student at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Jack joined the Herpetology Club where he met like-minded students, many of whom he's still friends with today. From Poly, he moved on to Towson University where he was deeply influenced by Dr. Don Forester, a professor emeritus who taught herpetology and behavioral ecology. Jack graduated from Towson in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in biology with a herpetology focus. "My time at Towson was very important in my life," he said. "I became part of a rich community of field biologists and got to explore the academic side of learning about these animals."

Path to the National Aquarium

While he was still studying at Towson, Jack got a job working in a lab where he extracted venom from a variety of animals so it could be freeze-dried and sold for use in research and to make antivenom products. "We would extract venom from king cobras (one of the deadliest snakes on the planet), scorpions, black widow spiders, tarantulas, bay nettles," he said. He worked there from 1975 to the early 80s. "I decided that, if I stayed in that business, I probably wouldn't have a very long life, so I needed to get out. From there, I got into the zoo and aquarium field."

At the same time that he was working in the venom lab, Jack met Carole Scharp, who would later become his wife. "We met through mutual friends," Carole remembered. "I'd known him awhile, but he was so shy, I ended up asking him out. I didn't think it was going to happen unless I asked."

They dated for eight years and got married on February 3, 1983. "When I first met him, I couldn't even open a book and look at a picture of a snake," Carole recalled. "It's been a learning curve, but seeing his passion has changed my mind. I'm a bookkeeper, into numbers and business, so it's a totally different world. But I've always been an outdoor person so that's something we've shared."

Soon after they got married, they relocated to Fort Worth, Texas, so Jack could begin his post-venom-lab career at the Fort Worth Zoo, where he worked as a reptile keeper in the herpetarium from 1983 to 1987.

Jack had tried to get a job at the National Aquarium when it first opened in 1981, but he didn't have any paid experience in the field so was not hired. "I helped the Aquarium staff acquire some animals on their target species list—an emerald tree boa, a Gila monster and an Eastern hellbender—all in hopes of getting a job, but that strategy failed."

Those contacts he'd established at the Aquarium paid off, though. They asked him to informally consult on the design of the National Aquarium's new Hidden Life exhibits, which he did, drawing on his experiences in Fort Worth. When the Aquarium opened a position for a herpetologist in Upland Tropical Rain Forest in 1987, he was ready. "Getting back to family and getting back to the Chesapeake Bay was the biggest motivation for leaving Texas, but I also really liked that the Aquarium was willing to invest resources in making cutting-edge exhibits. Hidden Life set the bar for high-quality habitat exhibits, and that's what I wanted to do."

When he got the job, Jack and Carole moved back to Maryland, settling in Harford County, in the same house where they still live today. The boy who read voraciously and kept snakes and crocodilians in his parents' basement in Hampden grew into a man with an extensive library, a spare bedroom known as 'the snake room,' and a yard that provides habitat for wildlife—complete with a pond, waterfall, brush pile and a compost heap that's legendary among Aquarium colleagues for its massiveness. Because it's not a grass-only expanse of lawn, Jack says his yard attracts bats, garter snakes, bullfrogs, pileated woodpeckers, monarch butterflies and all sorts of other mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and insects.

Jack and Carole have one son, Zak, who was born in 1993. "Zak doesn't have the bug like I do, but he has an appreciation for animals and nature," said Jack. Zak's calling is music; he's currently pursuing a career as a professional pianist. Carole said, "[Jack] has such a passion for what he does, it instilled in our son that if you're passionate about something, you go for it. He's watched his dad follow his dreams, so that's what he's doing as a musician."

It's impossible to sum up the value Jack has brought to the Aquarium over the past 37 years, but it can (mostly) be boiled down to three things—the depth and breadth of his animal care knowledge, his eye for design and ear for communication, and his overarching commitment to conservation.

Depth and Breadth of Animal Care Knowledge

Jack's deep love for and knowledge about animals—particularly reptiles and amphibians—was and is the foundation of his career.

According to Ken Howell, he and Jack "both grew up during a certain period of time when a boy could enter a local pet store and leave with a pet alligator or crocodile. We both had permissive parents and grew up keeping various animals at home. I may be biased, but I think that allowed us both to become very intuitive about what we do. Everybody wants the recipe, but we figured things out on our own."

Ken added, "He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Chesapeake Bay biology; he just knows everything there is to know. He is a preeminent field biologist and is usually more at home there—wading through a salt marsh, piloting a small boat, looking for rattlesnakes, or doing bog turtle surveys—than in a formal meeting room."

Charmaine Dahlenburg, the Aquarium's director of field conservation, agrees. "The one thing that sticks out to me most about Jack is his informal knowledge, particularly of the Chesapeake Bay. People can read and study, but he just knows. He has years of wisdom and experience from spending his whole life watching, observing and learning."

Brent Whitaker points to Jack's unique understanding of the need to get animals' social structures and environments right to ensure they're able to thrive in Aquarium habitats. "Creating exhibits for multiple species can be challenging," Brent points out. "How can you have predator and prey living together, like they do in Blacktip Reef? You have to understand and meet the needs of each animal, so they don't compete. Jack understands this very, very well."

When Brent was hired by the National Aquarium in 1989, he became the first full-time veterinarian on staff at an aquarium in the United States. "Jack was one of the people who interviewed me," Brent recalled. "He'd come from a zoo, and zoos had had vets on staff for 30-plus years by then. He knew it would be helpful to the Aquarium. He always surrounds himself with people who he knows will help make things successful. Every major aquarium has multiple veterinarians on-staff today, as well as training programs for vets."

Dr. Stephanie Allard, the Aquarium's chief animal welfare officer, noted, "Jack has been through so many evolutions of this profession and has seen so many things change, but he's stayed true to the art and science of caring for animals in an aquarium setting. And he's committed to creating memorable, impactful experiences for guests."

Jack sums up his strategy and motivation this way: "It's one thing to see a video or a movie, but to look an animal in the eye and have them look back at you is a unique experience. By reconnecting people with nature, I hope they realize that we want to live in harmony with all these species."

An Eye for Design and Ear for Communication

The exhibit that Jack was first hired to work on—Hidden Life, part of Upland Tropical Rain Forest—is where Aquarium guests can see blue poison dart frogs. These frogs are only found in a few isolated rain forests in southern Suriname. In the 1980s, "rumors were circulating through the herp world that blue poison dart frogs were extinct in the wild due to brush fires that burned through their forest island habitat," Jack said. He traveled to Suriname twice to assess the status of the frogs' populations and was able to set the rumors of extinction to rest. The Aquarium later became the first institution to hatch and raise blue poison dart frogs in the U.S.

"To see these frogs," he explained, "you're on a bush plane for most of a day, then you're in an indigenous village, then you're in a boat for two days, then you're walking across the Sipaliwini savanna, getting eaten by tiny insects called no-see-ums. Finally, you come to this place where there are no people but there are these bright blue frogs. Our visitors just get to walk through an air-conditioned building to see them."

He continued, "We want to give people the experience of walking along a river gorge in Australia, or diving in an Indo-Pacific reef. We re-create experiences that people might not otherwise have."

Jack has visited Australia, Costa Rica and other far-flung locales as part of his work creating National Aquarium exhibits. He's also been known to take teams out on field trips to help them better understand the habitats they're creating. Robin Faitoute remembers when he took an exhibit development team to a place he knew north of Baltimore. She remembered, "We were kicking around in a stream, and he was showing us all the things we'd been talking about. He really brought the team forward and gave us a clear picture of a Maryland mountain stream habitat that he knew like the back of his hand."

"From an exhibit developer's perspective," Robin continued, "Jack is the rare curator who appreciates all the complexities of what makes a truly compelling living exhibit. He understands everything from species selection to habitat fabrication to the visitor experience. Creating an impactful exhibit experience is complicated and takes time. He is committed to the process, and to ensuring authenticity and accuracy."

"He's detail oriented," agreed Ken Howell. "Many non-biologists look at natural history in a 'big picture' sense only. Jack insists on a truthful examination and scientific portrayal of detail and nuance."

Jack said creating exhibits is a natural extension of all the time he spent making terrariums in his basement in Hampden. "It feels like making terrariums that people can come in and walk through," he said.

"I see Jack as an 'accidental teacher,'" said Stephanie Allard. "He didn't go into a career to teach, but that's what he does. He is a walking encyclopedia of information; it just comes out through a regular conversation, and you are the better for it."

Charmaine Dahlenburg said it's hard to overstate Jack's role in the creation of Harbor Wetland. "He played a big part in creating the successful prototype," she said. "I oversaw the floating wetland project, but I was struggling with off-the-shelf purchases that would fail. He's not in our department, but once he became part of the project, he became fully engulfed."

There's one moment during the multi-year process of creating Harbor Wetland that stands out to Charmaine. "When he was working on the air lift design, people just weren't understanding when he tried to explain it. So, Jack went home and carved a miniature version out of Styrofoam and colored it with markers. He'd made his own prototype, complete with aerators that actually worked. That was the moment when everyone understood. He took the project to a different level that we never would have been able to without him. He never just does something; he really cares about doing it right."

An Overarching Commitment to Conservation

Charmaine also describes Jack as a true conservationist. "He saves everything and finds a use for it," she said. "Reusing the bags our oyster shells came in for bait bags, saving all the scrap PET material for future floating wetland projects, keeping every 5-gallon bucket."

This isn't a recent development. Brent Whitaker remembers Jack talking about conservation in the 1980s. "He was ahead of curve on that. He was talking about and participating in conservation long before the Aquarium had a Conservation team," Brent said.

"He loves the natural world, and he inspires others to love and protect it," said Robin Faitoute. "He's always learning, and he's committed to sharing his knowledge. He's passionate about animals and habitats, and he is so generous with his time and expertise."

Jack said that one of the proudest moments of his 37-year Aquarium career is the organization's work in the early 2000s to protect diamondback terrapins. When he learned how many terrapins were being exported to food markets in Asia, he realized it was unsustainable. "It was an uphill battle in Annapolis, but we knew this was a real threat and we had to try to do something about it. I'd learned about the power of soundbites, and it just came to me one day that we should use, 'You can't have your state reptile and eat it too.'"

The line resonated, and it helped pass legislation that ended commercial harvesting of terrapins in Maryland in 2007. The state also requires all recreational crab pots to be equipped with turtle excluders to protect terrapins from getting trapped inside and drowning.

"That was a huge accomplishment," Jack said. "It takes a long time for turtles to reproduce, but terrapins are rebounding. The legislation didn't eliminate all the problems, but it helped. Despite habitat loss, we have healthy populations of terrapins in Maryland."

A few weeks ago, Jack was out working on Harbor Wetland (which is where you can currently find him most days) and he saw a four-year-old terrapin swimming in the shallow channel of the habitat. "It totally shocked me," he said. "I'd never seen a diamondback terrapin near Pier 3 or 4 before. To see one here in this urbanized environment, it shows that habitat remediation like Harbor Wetland really can restore biodiversity."

A Nature Nerd Lifestyle

There was a moment during the opening of Harbor Wetland on August 8, 2024, when Jack said he got emotional. His son, Zak, had come down for the ceremony. "Zak has spent a lot of time on Kent Island with me, exploring the marshes and the Chesapeake Bay, so he understands what we created here. And he said how proud my parents would've been of this, which made us both get a little choked up."

Though he will step back from his full-time role as the Aquarium's general curator at the end of this month, Jack said, "I don't think I'm ever going to retire. I have huge plans—for building more turtle basking platforms, volunteering with Department of Natural Resources on bog turtle habitat restoration, getting out there with like-minded people who aren't going to sit by and watch these animals go by the wayside when there are so many things we can do to keep them around. The challenge is not being able to do everything."

He added, "What a life I've had. It's been incredibly gratifying, and I'm so appreciative of the Aquarium for letting me have a career and pursue this nature nerd lifestyle."

The Top Ten List

Five times during the late 1980s and early 90s, Jack appeared as a guest on Late Night With David Letterman to talk about animals and promote the National Aquarium. In the spirit of Letterman's top ten lists, we've compiled the Top Ten Moments of Jack's National Aquarium career:

10. Appearing as a guest on Late Night With David Letterman to talk about animals and promote the National Aquarium!

9. Traveling to Surinam, Australia, Costa Rica, Panama and Venezuela to do research for new Aquarium exhibits.

8. Helping the Aquarium recover from flooding caused by Hurricane Isabel in 2003. The Aquarium was able to reopen in two days and lost no animals from this devastating weather event.

7. Being part of the team that created multiple Aquarium exhibits honored with prestigious awards—including AZA's 2008 Exhibit of the Year award for Australia: Wild Extremes, 2014 Significant Achievement Exhibit Award for Blacktip Reef, 2016 Top Honors Exhibit Award for Living Seashore, an American Alliance of Museums award for Living Seashore, and more.

6. Conducting bog turtle surveys with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

5. Rescuing a lost ball python found on Mr. Trash Wheel, which later became the theme of their popular beer, Lost Python Ale.

4. Being forgiven by his wife and son for bringing home a large dead horseshoe crab in the back of the car after a family beach vacation. (He cleaned the crab and placed it in the Beach exhibit in Maryland: Mountains to the Sea.)

3. Supporting a collaboration led by Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore to install a turtle basking island in the Lancaster Canal in Harbor East.

2. Helping pass legislation to protect diamondback terrapins in Maryland.

1. Opening National Aquarium Harbor Wetland on August 8, 2024.