Aquarium!

Merry Christmas! We had a wonderful day at the aquarium!

Our membership (which we just activated now) was a Christmas present from doting Grammy and devoted blog reader, Grammy Ann.  Thanks, Grammy!

I think I have been coming to this aquarium for about twenty years, and it just keeps getting better and better!

Plus it has been interesting to visit with kids of different ages.

These kids used to fall asleep in the backpack here when they were babies.

And this Black Tip Reef Shark exhibit used to hold a single Beluga whale before they built the Mammal Pavilion.  I think Choclo prefers the sharks!

I don't know what ever happened to the whale, but with the "new" (15 year old now?) pavilion, they got around 10-12 dolphins.

Even though they aren't doing "shows," the dolphins are still more fun to watch than the whale!

The big new exhibit this time was an aquarium "petting zoo!"

We got to touch rays and skates.

And horseshoe crabs (more closely related to spiders than crabs) and conchs.

I discovered that the conch did not face the direction I thought they did.  Their heads are closer to the narrow end instead of the thick end and they move what I think of as sideways.

 And then we got to pet the jellyfish.

I am not making that up.

Personally, I thought a jellyfish petting zoo would rank up there with such classic failures as the scorpion and poison dart frog petting zoos. Very educational, but not very fun.

But they must have thought of that, so they were using harmless moon jellies.

 For extra bonus cool, they were cleaning the shark tank!

Not the big tank with the small sharks, the small(er) tank with the big sharks!

The tank itself is shaped like a racetrack, and they pen the sharks in half of it while the other half is being cleaned.  One great side effect is that you can see a huge number of very large sharks in a fairly small space.  There are five sharks in that picture!

Choclo was in raptures!