Mystic Aquarium

Neither snow (mainly the day before) nor being in the middle of a bad cold could prevent my visiting the Mystic Aquarium. Aparently it was one of my favorite places when I was a toddler. Then we moved to the DC area, and so I don't really recall any previous visits.

There are four sections to the aquarium: a trail with several outside habitats, the "sunlit seas" exhibit with traditional aquarium tanks, the central "marine theater" with sea lion performances, and a deep water exploration building. Unfortunately, you have to go out in the cold/wet to get from one building to another.

It was quite cold, so I didn't spend much time outside. But it's not every day you get to watch swimming penguins.

Sunlit waters. These terribly cute baby aligators were part of the bayou exhibit under heat lamps that sprawled at table-height in the center of the main room of the aquarium. There were several decent-sized turtles basking there as well. As you move away from the door, you go from shallower waters like the bayou and various tide pools to deeper ones including a circular coral reef tank, and the dark tanks full of sharks.

I stalked this turtle all the way around the coral reef tank. (lengthy digression on sea turtles here)

The deep sea building began with an exhibit on some ship from WWII, that had some Kennedy on it, and sank. Ok, I wasn't paying too much attention. The reason for the exhibit was that Bob Ballard found the ship again. The room after that was fascinating, though, all about mid-sea life-forms and bioluminescence. I stood there for about half an hour as the tides of small children wandered through watching a video on it, and learned, among other things, that aparently there's a mid-sea creature that is so bioluminescent that you can dry it and years later it will still start to glow if you grind it up and add water. Aparently Japanese soldiers in WWII carried little tubes of these things as an emergency light source. They look kind of like large frog-eggs. After that it's back to Ballard; there's a room with deep sea vent lifeforms, an exhibit-in-construction on the Titanic, and two ancient western shipwrecks. The first was a Phoenecian trading vessel, for which they had as much information on manufacture and stylistic dating of amphorae as the actual ship itself. Then there was also a partial replica of the anoxic black sea ship that they found back in 2000 (I think). The theory is was that originally the black sea was a freshwater lake, but at a time slightly before the dawn of history the land between it and the Mediterranean eroded sufficiently that salt water flooded back, causing cataclysmic flooding for months. And underwater, all the freshwater got trapped below the saltwater on top, and everything that once lived in it used up its oxygen and died. So any shipwrecks that later ended up within the old lake's borders wouldn't decompose. And while they made a big thing about how Bob Ballard's team found one of these, and it was a great breakthrough for all the things they could learn from it, they didn't actually say anything they learned. It was a little disappointing. But fascinating all the same.

In this location Carmen Sandiego would probably steal: a prize sea lion