My only aquarium dive experience was once being in the audience watching divers do buoyancy and other tricks, fish feeding, etc. for a show. I assume volunteering at one is not this. What exactly do you do in volunteering at an aquarium? I can't imagine there is a whole lot of skill involved, but I don't know.
You're a gloried free labor aquarist at the best. You often do maintenance dives, wiping windows, vacuuming, scrubbing the rockwork, and feeding.
Depending on the institution and paid man-labor, you can get experience in aquarium husbandry, shark medicals, animal collecting in open water, etc etc.
With the way the industry is heading (which is fairly new) you're now being trained in reserve air systems (pony bailout bottles), full face mask surface supply, and general bouyancy control and competence since you're always "on-show" with the public.
Often one main aspect in all aquariums is holding bouyancy and proper trim so your BC/equipment doesn't gouge the acrylic window while you're wiping it. Acrylic is lighter, stronger, and more malleable than glass. And most aquariums use it because it makes possible curved tanks and deep tanks. Glass would need to be in excess of 20ft thick to house 16ft and greater-deep exhibits. Where as acrylic allows 12ft or less and also gets rid of the magnifying aspect of glass that makes your fish appear smaller. The only problem is acrylic scuffs easily. Even an eyelash scrubbed really hard will scuff acrylic.
There's a lot of skill involved. But all of it doesn't pertain to open water diving. Often times you break rules such as ascent rate or the rule of always breathing. When you're on comms, often you have to skip breath or hold your diaphragm open to hear your comms, as breathing garbles your hearing. Being able to hold depth during these situations is extremely important.
Ascending faster than 30ft/min is necessary at times (keep in mind you still don't rocket up), especially during fish catches on exhibit or when you're performing antibiotic/sedative shark injections and that shark goes ballistic after a hit. Sometimes you accidentally hit just in the "right" place and shark goes down quickly instead of being sluggish (you're aiming for a sluggish shark not a comatose shark). You then have to make a swift collect and recover so the shark doesn't over dose on metabolic lactic acid and poison itself. You then move it to a shallow rehab tank and manually swim it to help it recover.
There's a lot of behind the scene work and science that goes into aquarium husbandry that you don't get in your typical household pet store aquarium.
There's definitely A LOT of variance between aquariums, but what I listed is the ideal. Dependent on paid-staff man power and what not. Aquariums rely on volunteers. Without them, we would be out of business. Water quality would be crap. Exhibits would look terrible.
Dive Safety Officers are a fairly new career, so often paid staff in that position pull double duty as curator/biologist/aquarist and DSO. Its slowly being integrated into it's own position now that aquariums are realizing it's a full time heavy commitment gig.
---------- Post added April 24th, 2014 at 08:04 PM ----------
To put it in even more perspective. Imagine a fish catch in a 16ft aquarium exhibit. Both hands are holding hand nets. Or a barrier net.
You're changing depth (sometimes erratically), monitoring your ascent rate, monitoring air usage, equalizing, monitoring your target fish(es), managing air input into your BC, your buddy position, breathing, monitoring your CO2 limits (limiting perceptual narrowing), making sure you don't bang into the acrylic tunnel tank; all the while keeping within visual contact with your teammates and managing your dive profile.
This type of dive doesn't happen often, but it does hit on the fact that you really have to be on your A game. You do plenty of leisure easy maintenance dives, but every so often you get a dive that really task loads you and the basis of good aquarium training revolves around this heavy task loading and putting dive safety into your second nature.
It's a very specific specialty of diving that you would never do in open water.
