SeaQuest Folsom — Attraction in Folsom

Majority of workers have love for the animals here, but the people in charge have always made a money hungry choice over animal health choice when it comes to decisions. Maybe smart choice to start out would be not putting your petting zoo in a mall, but here we are, so let’s get into one topic of issues I will focus on, the reptiles. Some animal husbandry practices due to the amount of animals they have here without enough enclosures or space are outdated, such as cohabiting bearded dragons, spiny tailed lizards, and leopard geckos. I will focus on the leopard geckos for this: Leopard geckos here are the same ones since 2021, except instead of the 7 leopard geckos that used to be here in 2021 it is now down to 4, i know the reasoning behind why the number has dropped and I will not say it here, but i think you may be able to come to your own conclusions on why it is now 4 leopard geckos, not all within the same circumstance but there are reasons behind why not all 7 are still there. The leopard geckos in 2021 did not have dropped tails, now i believe either 3 or all of them have dropped their tails. Leopard geckos do drop their tails and regrow them, but this is caused by being scared or stressed. Peep, the lightest color morph leopard gecko there has dropped her tail multiple times. Pineapple is always lethargic, and Marsha and Leafy have scars on their bodies that were not previously there. They pile on top of each other constantly, and this is a perfect example with physical evidence on why they shouldn’t be together as they are solitary creatures. Leopard geckos can be cohabited and survive at the expense of their comfort, and they /can/ survive like this since they are such hardy animals, which is what higher management like a husbandry director has said when I asked about it, but if it’s going to be interacted with all day, dear god, give those lizards a chance to rest on their own comfortably at least when they get downtime from interactions. The choice of keeping them together is being done with the knowledge of chancing an injury or higher stress to marsha/leafy/peep/pineapple, why even chance an injury to them? These arent just numbers these are 4 unique lizards here. There would be 0% chance of this if they were separated. Why say animal health is priority, but instead of doing actions that show preventative strategies they instead will try to fix things up once they get scratched or bitten by the other lizards. They shouldn’t even be getting injured by each other in the first place. This definitely is not showing comfort over profit. It has been said to me the reasoning behind keeping multiple leopard geckos and other solitary reptiles together are so that if one is hiding, the guest can possibly have a chance to see a different one, but what use is that when what the leopard geckos end up doing is piling on each other in one of their hides? Wouldn’t it make more sense to make one leopard gecko live in comfort enough to the point of them wanting to come out by their own choice rather than have the employee shake them out of where it was hiding whenever someone asks to see them? It basically is showing the leopard gecko that if it comes out, it gets picked up and gets stressed, and i can genuinely say I know those lizards after watching them deteriorate for the past 4 years, none of the leos enjoy their interactions which can be seen through their body language. They cannot speak human, but they are trying so desperately to tell us they do not want to be played with like toys, and when they aren’t squirming to get away its not in a way where they became comfortable, its in a lethargic stressed freeze response. As for the capybara, Westley should have other capybaras to be with, not 2 patagonian cavies. He is getting old, and hasn’t seen another actual capybara in awhile, I just hope he gets to see another one before he passes in a place that isn’t here, but who knows what choice they will make, because they know he will simply survive. Changed name or not: Simply surviving is not the same...

Well, I'll start by saying I don't like zoos of any kind and this place really solidified my reasoning. First, my kids had fun.. they liked to see all the different non aquatic animals and the aquatic animals. Next, you can walk around at your own leisure and spend as much time there as you want. Now, when you purchase the tickets they people at the front don't give you a schedule for the "encounters" ... Apparently each encounter is on a schedule and they only allow for that. If you want to see a "fancy" animal like a sloth or wallaby, it's a special encounter that costs more.. You pay for the entrance fee, but then you have to buy "encounter" tickets separately. So it can get pretty pricey. AND after spending so much money to not even be able to use the tickets is the definition of a rip off. There is a pretty big variety of animals, however, I'm not sure their enclosures are appropriate for alot of them. The cats are in the same little room 24/7. The sloths are in smaller enclosures, one is dark. HUGE snakes in seemingly small tanks. The birds have limited space and most of them are alone. The front people told us there are people at each encounter, this was not the case. We walked around for probably a hour and saw 1 person. Eventually I found two others having a lil conversation and when I approached them asking about encounters the girl acted as if I wasn't standing there and the guy didn't know what to say but they kept talking to each other. I interrupted their chat again because the front told us the tortoise encounter was at that time. All the guy did was uncover it a little so we could see it's shell. The only "encounters" we got to do were petting the cats, holding a gecko and feeding the iguanas. So we spent a lot of money for tickets and came home with most of them. Every time we asked about an encounter we were told "oh it's not time yet" (each person said a different time for the next one) or "that one's done for the day" (it was 3pm) or "that one is special and has to be purchased separately." Most of the employees are pretty young and don't have the BEST customer service skills. Some of the animals looked sick or hurt. It was sad. Tucan beaks are crooked and cracked, the cats are Fatty's lol, the koi fish have weird things growing off their eyes, in the small shark tank, only one was swimming and couldn't tell if any of the others were alive, theres a gecko that did not look alive at all, same with a small orange snake, the chickens looked sick and their space was way too small for chickens. The rest of the animals just looked sad, tucked away and sleeping. Cuz , what else can they do?! I never saw anyone to get the "feeding bags" from, that we paid for. There's a vending machine you can buy extras I guess..? The front looks like it used to have a gift shop area but not anymore. It smells funky, but I'm guessing that's a mixture of open saltwater tanks and the non aquatic animals open enclosures. It's in the middle of a mall, which is convenient but weird. There are photo booths too. We paid 8$ for a family photo and it never printed. The guy at the front just said "yeah some times it takes a while" well we waited about 30 minutes and it never came out. We won't be going back and I don't recommend this place to anyone. It would actually be better if this place didn't exist. The ONLY reason for 2 stars is because it's fun enough for kids and there are no time limits for...

Summary: Despite friendly staff and a wide variety of animals and aquatic life, the overwhelming heat, lack of staffing, and borderline in-operable token system, this was not a satisfying visit and we would recommend avoiding this spot for the time being.

Pros: +1 star The staff was very friendly and willing to help and address our needs to the best their facilities policies would allow They had a lot of animals and sealife that was (in theory) available for interactions and feeding. This pleased our 7yr, 5yr, and 2yr

Cons: This place was unbelievably hot. They did not appear to have any AC and seemed to rely on just fans. It was unclear if they didn't have AC or were trying to cut their costs, either way, all of us were sweating buckets and got overheated. Avoid coming here in 90-100-degree weather. With the limited seating, it was pretty miserable in terms of personal comfort. The number of staffers present was insufficient to handle the people there. Their interactive exhibits appeared to need several employees to facilitate them. This meant that we couldn't do very much with the animals. The potential for animal and sealife interaction was a big pull for our group to come here and the inability of the limited staff to allow for those interactions was hugely disappointing and a large reason why we are very hesitant to return. The token system for feeding and interacting with animals didn't work very well. It's designed so you can purchase tokens, which nearly match the cost of admission, and use them to purchase opportunities to feed creatures or other forms of interaction. One of the ways to feed the animals is by depositing tokens into a quarter-candy-style machine and receiving food to give them. Some of these machines were inoperable or drastically unimpressive. For example, some of the fish food machines deposited 3-4 flakes per token. That's about $2 for a pinch of fish food. Not all the machines were like this, but you noticed the ones that were. Furthermore, at the end of our tour, we were left with 39/55 of our tokens. We were not frugal--there was a lack of supply for us to spend them on. These tokens seem like they should be refundable, but the facility policies do not allow such customer service. The only options we were left with were to A) Save them and come again to spend them (yippee...) or b) exchange them for a few plastic and gimmicky toys at the end of the tour. To be clear, these toys are not neat stuffed animals, books, or activities relating to SeaQuest. They were toys that you could buy in bulk from Temu or Wish and sell to a dollar store. None of the selections even remotely appealed to our 7yr, 5yr, or 2yr.

Again, the staff (the few there were) were friendly and the selection of creatures was solid, but it was unbearably uncomfortable, there wasn't enough staff to facilitate the interactions that attracted us, and the token system felt like a scammy cash grab during our visit.

As we are left with over $40-50 worth of non-refundable tokens (reach out if you want some cheap tokens...), it seems like another visit will have to happen in the future. The only time that seems like it could be worth our while would be to go during the winter, when the weather and the staff-to-customer ratio may be...