Official Kids Mag

The fun begins before you even step foot inside. Just outside the Aquarium is the new Dancing Waters Fountain Show. The spectacular fountain plays two songs every half hour all day long with dancing water and fog to get you in the mood for your watery adventure! Welcoming you, and wrapping around the front of the building is a 55-foot stainless steel octopus named Aquarius. Inside the Aquarium, you'll get up close and personal with colorful fish, seahorses, jellies, octopuses, sharks, and a rescued sea turtle named Miss Archie. You'll take an undersea journey where you'll learn about and connect with ocean animals and their habitats. Some of these zones of fun are: • submarine Adventure – You'll be whooshed down to the bottom of the ocean, guided by Aquarius the Octopus and Finn the Golden Puffer. The 5D ride transports you to the Observation Station, for some close-up views of a wide variety of fish. • Mermaid Palace – You'll marvel at schooling sardines and a large gathering of sea horses, plus have a chance to become a mermaid or a merman, and learn about the quest to protect coral. • Jelly Infinity room: Here, you'll feel like you are in the center of a color- changing jellyfish bloom. • crawl-throughs and Pop-Ups: Observation Station: Pop up into an exhibit where spiny poisonous lionfish swim all around your head. Shipwreck Cove: Crawl through a sunken vessel and get an up-close view of crabs and their fishy friends. Kelp Climber: A 24-foot structure in Kelp Forest environment. Fin-tastic Creations: Color a fish and watch it come alive on a giant screen. Hidden Aquarius Game: Cleverly disguised sculptures of Aquarius the Octopus are hidden throughout the Aquarium. Can you find all nine? Touch Pools: Here you can safely touch sea animals, including stingrays, sharks and horseshoe crabs, as well as sea anemones and sea stars. What does it take to build a giant indoor aquarium? There are 16 aquarists and 4 water quality technicians who work at the Aquarium at the Boardwalk. Their team leader is a man named Steve Bitter, and it's their job to make sure the ocean creatures here stay happy and healthy! What is an aquarist? An aquarist is a person who keeps an aquarium. Steve actually grew up in the Arizona desert and visited the California coast when he was about 7 or 8. That started his lifelong fascination with the underwater world. Steve's first job was at PetSmart in the fish department, where he had a ball watching fish, caring for them, and talking about them with customers. Steve went to college and worked in a fish store and kept aquariums as a hobby. Then he learned there were careers that involved caring for fish in aquariums! Steve has worked all over the world developing aquariums, and said that fish at the Aquarium are from many places, including Florida, Hawaii, Australia, and the South Pacific. Steve told Official Kids Mag all about his job at the Aquarium at the Boardwalk! How did you choose what animals could be happily kept in the aquarium? "We wanted to pair the right species with the right environments. For example, we planned for lobsters, crabs, and eels to live in habitats that are part of a shipwreck zone, and we included rays and sharks in the large coral reef touch pool. The largest exhibit, The Grand Aquarium, was designed to showcase the diversity and splendor of the tropical oceans. We wanted to have as many animal species as possible, but we had to make sure they could all live together in harmony for their entire lives. So, it was a challenge to select fish that wouldn't push each other around for territory, compete for food, or try to eat one another. In the end, we were able to create this habitat with over 2,000 individuals from nearly 100 species all living together. The Grand Aquarium houses everything from sharks and rays to small damselfish and wrasses. Our smallest exhibit has seven individual windows along one wall in the Observation Station. Since really getting serious about aquariums, I've been in love with corals, and I'm especially delighted by the relationship of corals with other animals. I was lucky enough to do some coral reef fieldwork with Coral Restoration Foundation during my time in Florida. Unfortunately, nearly all of the corals in the Florida Reef Tract have disappeared in our lifetime. I hope that our aquarium will inspire guests to learn more about coral and help the Coral Restoration Foundation restore that area." FUn FAct: the single species in the largest number in the aquarium is the GreenbAcK sArdIne. there are 2,100 of them in the Mermaid Palace! www.OfficialKidsMag.com • OctOber 2022 • 27

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