The coolest part of the aquarium comes, of course, when you get to all the large animals: the manatees, sharks, rays, penguins, etc.
Of course, if you have a time limit you know you want to spend most of your time here. Unfortunately, once you hurry forward to this section the layout of the aquarium makes it difficult to double back to see earlier section. Kind of annoying.
Anyway, August really went crazy when we got to the tank filled with sardines, rays, giant guitar fish, and other fish. The sardines are impressive to watch:
And here is August at his best. Note that he is mainly waving at himself in the mirror in this video, but looks intently at a ray near the end. We spent more than fifteen minutes here:
A couple more moments from around this time. He was saying ‘dadada’ in this sing-songy voice quite a bit:
The rays are pretty cool:
Here is a view of part of the tank. That is a guitarfish laying on the bottom of the tank off in the distance:
The grand finale is the moving walkway that snakes through their biggest tank. You get to see sharks and tortoises and rays swim right over you. And when they do there is an interesting optical illusion that makes them appear closer to your head than they actually are:
A ray going over our head:
And a tortoise:
Or is it a turtle? I wouldn’t know because there is a distinct lack of signage here. There was one set of plaques at the very beginning, but then nothing.
Anyway, that brought us to the end. August had one more fun experience though in meeting the statue of an axolotl and poking its eye:
I will leave you with one last sign. One that purportedly teaches you about the axolotl and the exhibit:
Sigh.