Georgia Aquarium
A Visit To
The Georgia Aquarium
Atlanta, GA
May, 2007
The Georgia Aquarium is a spectacular place. It is the newest large public aquarium in the country (that I know of), and arguably the most advanced and up to date with the latest technologies. The technology is not what makes the Georgia Aquarium so special. This place is cool because it is a visitor’s aquarium. When you go there be prepared to have an experience specially designed to please the visitor. Even the behind the scenes areas were designed with the visitor in mind, which I will show you.
The Georgia Aquarium is located in downtown Atlanta. I do not have a picture of the outside of the building, because when I came out my camera was full and I did not want to delete anything off the memory disk. The place is huge though. The day that we went there were hundreds of school kids visiting. I thought that this must have been a special day, but I was told that during the school year there are kids there almost everyday. What attracts the schools is the aquarium’s dedication to education and community outreach. There are many special programs for classes to participate in, plus the many displays designed for interaction with children. This is an awesome aquarium to bring your kids to.
The space is divided into tunnel galleries branching off of a large central area which has the entrance, the restaurant and the gift shop. Most of the aquarium is dedicated to marine ecosystems, but two areas have freshwater. One gallery is aimed at kids, and some of the displays in it are freshwater, and another gallery is dedicated to freshwater entirely. The freshwater gallery has a wide variety of displays and no overall theme. The first tank you see at the entrance is a Lake Malawi cichlid tank packed with mbuna. Neat tank, but nothing special with all the basic Florida pond stock. The next tank was a large aquarium that houses some huge alligator gar.
So far I was not impressed; but then I walked UNDER an aquarium.
I discovered one thing the Georgia Aquarium has done better than anyone else. The physical displays are very creative and placed in positions that are unexpected. The tank that makes the ceiling of the freshwater gallery is full of fish from the local resevoir system. There are lots of game fish and big catfish. The tanks to the sides of the gallery house a variety of fish from African, Asia and South America. The Amazon display with arapima, arrowanna and catfish is very well done. The ceiling (the tank above) in this part ofthe gallery gets very low, which creates a mood of tight, confined spaces… like one would find in a flooded Amazon forest. Here is a picture that I will show you what I mean.
Notice the crowd in the gallery. The display in the background of the picture is the Amazon River tank, and the people looking at it are slow to move on. The people behind those viewers are not impatiently wating to get to the window because they have the fish over their heads to look at. Usually in crowds like this there are pushy people who cannot wait their turn, but at the Georgia Aquarium the galleries are set up so that you are entertained while you wait.
The Amazon River displays include the large predator tank, a pirahna tank and a community tropical tank with tetras, discus, etc. There is also an electric eel, but that is part of a series of tanks that display electric fish in general. Most of the remaining displays are of Georgia ecosystems. I had the opportunity to spend some time with one of the freshwater area curators, and asked him about how frequently the displays change. Not very often, which makes sense, but he did say that the Georgia Aquarium was looking at making a few changes. I suggested a West African tank (of course). A month after my visit that curator contacted me about West African fish and I sent him a bunch of Pelvicachromis taeniatus ‘Moliwe’ for a future display they were planning. I will be back in Atlanta for the ACA convention this Summer (July, 2008); maybe I will see my fish! But I digress… here are some pictures of other displays in the freshwater gallery.
A part of my tour included going behind the scenes. There is an official behind the scenes tour that is well worth the money to see (more on that later), but the back room of the freswater area in not a part of that tour. The aquarist who showed me around took me in back, however, so I was able to see the euipment needed to run these tanks. One impressive piece of equipment is the pump used to create the current in all of the large river tanks. There is a row of them, and the motors running the pumps are larger in diameter than a basketball.
The area behind the freswater gallery is tight. The filters are basically tower trickles through bio media on a huge scale. In the image below the white cylinders are the trickle towers. The clear acrylic tubing parallel to the towers indicate the water level in the tower. Every aspect of the filtration process, from water flow to chemical analysis, is automatically controlled by computers. The result is that suprisingly few people are needed to maintain the systems.
Here is a view from the top of the Amazon community tropical tank, which has live plants that need halide lights. The top of the tank is about 9 feet from the floor, and to access the tank you have to climb up a ladder. I chuckled at the high tech equipment resting on top of the tank… that is where I usually leave my scrub pads too.
The Georgia Aquarium is unique in that there is not an overall theme for the aquarium. Other well known aquariums specialize in something. The Monterey Bay Aquarium, for example, emphasizes the ecosystem of the bay, and the Tennessee Aquarium in Chatanooga is set up as a journey from the headwaters of the Tennessee River to the Gulf of Mexico. The Georgia Aquarium has a bit of everything, including a gallery dedicated to the coldwater marine ecosystems. This section is very well done, and includes representative creatures from the coldwater habitats from around the world. Here are a few examples of what can be seen in this gallery.
The last two galleries are dedicated to tropical seas. One gallery covers coral reefs, and does an excellent job. There are a lot of small reef tanks housing a variety of creatures, including a garden eel tank in which there is a big colony of garden eels that rise from the sand floor of the tank and wave in the current. Any disturbance makes the animals retract quickly into thier burrows, and then slowly rise out again to forage for food. Unfortunately, I could not capture any decent images of this tank, so you will just have to go see it for yourself.
The centerpiece display of the coral reef gallery is a HUGE reef display tank. The viewing window starts at the floor and extends up to the ceiling and then curves back overhead. When standing at the window the water is in front and above you. A few feet in front of the glass is a reef wall that extends from below your feet to over your head. Corals, sponges, anemones and other reef invertbrates cover the wall, and fish wander across its face. At regular intervals a huge wave of water crashes onto the reef wall, orginating from above the glass window overhead. Here are two images taken through the curved viewing window.
The behind the scenes area for this gallery is amazing. It is one of the areas specifically designed to bring visitors to. All of the equipment is kept in a large room. The surface of the large reef tank takes up about half of the floor space. What is immediately apparent is that you can only see a small section of the tank from the big, surved-acrylic viewing window. Behind the reef wall is a large lagoon (just as there would be behind a natural reef wall), and behind that is a mangrove swamp… with real live mangroves. There is a huge bank of lights illuminating all of this. At one end of this tank are the three 2000-gallon dump tanks that are creating the crashing wave. The viewing windoe from the gallery is immediately below these dump tanks. Here are some images of the behind the scenes area of the reef exhibit.
The filter systems for the reef tanks are also large trickle filters combined with protein skimmers on a large scale. Because the systems are maintaining reef invertebrates there are also huge calcium reactors. Here are some pictures of the filter equipment. The first image show the basic combination of systems for a smaller tank in the gallery. The rest of the images are closeups of the systems for the large reef wall and lagoon. The protein skimmer is massive. It stands about 10 feet tall and the foam chamber is about three feet in diameter.
There is another room connected to the filter room in this behind the scenes area. In this room there are several holding tanks where reef fish are quarantined. There is also a nursury tank for zebra shark egg cases and a tank for the baby sharks. A bay of windows allows visitors to see what is going on, but I was given a tour of the room itself. One vat has a group of cuttlefish that are growing up for a display out in the gallery. There is also a long, shallow trough under intense lights in which the curators are propogating corals for the various displays.
The pride of the Georgia Aquarium is the gallery called Ocean Voyager. This is the display that houses the whale sharks. As you enter the gallery you pass different viewing windows into the HUGE aquarium, and pass through an acrylic tunnel.
After winding your way through the gallery the tunnel opens up to the room with a 60 foot wide viewing window. This display is absolutely amazing. There are monstrous groupers, sea turtles, big schools of big fish and the whale sharks. This window is located at one end of the aquarium, which is so large that water density prevents you from seeing the far end. The effect created by the water density is awesome. The whale sharks appear as if from nowhere, swim a lap in front of the viewing window and then disappear back into the water as the swim away from the window. This is one of the few aquarium displays that I could spend a full day sitting and watching.
The behind the scenes tour also features Ocean Voyager. The room that holds the aquarium looks like an airplane hanger. The tank is over 300 feet long and close to 100 feet wide in some sections. There is a moving catwalk that spans the tank. Visitors are allowed to walk out over the water, where they are only a few feet from the whale sharks passing underneath.
I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to the Georgia Aquarium, and I am looking forward to taking my family to see it this summer. This is a must-see attraction when visiting Atlanta, or any where else within a few hours’ drive.
If you would like to leave a comment about your visit to the Georgia Aquarium, please feel free to do so.
