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ellarienAs promised, here's the detailed (and illustrated) account of what I was up to last Wednesday. A colleague and I spent the afternoon in the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas.
They specialize in stingrays; plain and spotted, from six-inch babies to adults a couple of feet across; gliding and flapping around the great tanks, showing their white undersides and tooth-lined crescent mouths to the glass; trailing their long slender tails.
An anaconda curled on a rocky ledge, then slipped into the water. A docent explained that it eats (dead) rabbits; a little girl mentioned that she had a pet rabbit, but was happy with the explanation that this was all part of the cycle of life. I refrained from remarking that while it might be part of the lifecycle of an anaconda to eat rabbits, I doubt that the normal lifecycle of the north american domestic rabbit includes being eaten by anacondas. A pair of blue macaws presided genially over the exit from the Amazon exhibit.
Angelfish dart in and out between rock and coral, striped orange-and-white (prompting childish cries of 'Nemo!') and blue-and-yellow and delicately blue-on-blue; spotted; yellow and blue; magenta on orange; splashed yellow-orange where tail-fin joins body. Seahorses rest tail-hooked to weed, or gracefully slumped on the bottom of the tank; a seadragon hovers, waving fins like translucent fronds of weed. Coral and anenomes wave delicate translucent tubes and shimmering carpets of hair-fine fronds. Mottled lobsters lurk under rocks, waving their many-jointed antennae.
Jellyfish bob and swoop, transparent, tenuous domes limned in blue or golden light, trailing hanks of tentacle. Sharks cruise across a huge tank, sleek and shimmery-grey, and a sawfish with its multiple dorsal fins and unlikely snout tooth-edged like a chain-saw maneuvers around the tank bottom. Turtles, the largest at least two feet across, seem to like swimming close up against the glass. An electric eel, thicker than my arm, ugly as the dullest kind of sin, looks rather too large for its tank.
A colony of African penguins seemed to enjoy having their habitat hosed down, but they weren't having half as much fun as the sea-otters pirouetting and somersaulting after their food. A rare white alligator hung slanted head-up in clear water, providing a splendid demonstration of the different refractive indices of water and air. I didn't notice any octopus exhibits, but I can't think of anything else that was missing.
Photography was difficult, with the glass and the dim light, but the movie facility on the camera really came into its own. The only problem is, now what do I do with 30Mb of low-resolution MPEG files at about 1Mb/minute? They're more memory-joggers than art, though I'm rather intrigued by the one where for some reason the reflections of people outside the tank look more solid than the creatures inside. I've linked to a few of them, for those with abundant bandwidth or patience; the longest is about 340K, and the resolution is the same as that of the thumbnails. I'm afraid they have sound as well as movement, and it was noisy, so you might want to turn down your volume before clicking!
As usual, I was fascinated by the giftshop, and particularly by the realistic plush jellyfish and the three-foot-long plush Nemo-style fish.
Afterwards, we walked a little way along the river bank to admire one of the older and more authentic riverboats, watching the ferry come and go and a long, low barge crawl by, and then returned to the hotel through the fringes of the French Quarter, where old, pastel-stuccoed buildings stand in the shadows of the modern downtown towers.
They specialize in stingrays; plain and spotted, from six-inch babies to adults a couple of feet across; gliding and flapping around the great tanks, showing their white undersides and tooth-lined crescent mouths to the glass; trailing their long slender tails.
An anaconda curled on a rocky ledge, then slipped into the water. A docent explained that it eats (dead) rabbits; a little girl mentioned that she had a pet rabbit, but was happy with the explanation that this was all part of the cycle of life. I refrained from remarking that while it might be part of the lifecycle of an anaconda to eat rabbits, I doubt that the normal lifecycle of the north american domestic rabbit includes being eaten by anacondas. A pair of blue macaws presided genially over the exit from the Amazon exhibit.
Angelfish dart in and out between rock and coral, striped orange-and-white (prompting childish cries of 'Nemo!') and blue-and-yellow and delicately blue-on-blue; spotted; yellow and blue; magenta on orange; splashed yellow-orange where tail-fin joins body. Seahorses rest tail-hooked to weed, or gracefully slumped on the bottom of the tank; a seadragon hovers, waving fins like translucent fronds of weed. Coral and anenomes wave delicate translucent tubes and shimmering carpets of hair-fine fronds. Mottled lobsters lurk under rocks, waving their many-jointed antennae.
Jellyfish bob and swoop, transparent, tenuous domes limned in blue or golden light, trailing hanks of tentacle. Sharks cruise across a huge tank, sleek and shimmery-grey, and a sawfish with its multiple dorsal fins and unlikely snout tooth-edged like a chain-saw maneuvers around the tank bottom. Turtles, the largest at least two feet across, seem to like swimming close up against the glass. An electric eel, thicker than my arm, ugly as the dullest kind of sin, looks rather too large for its tank.
A colony of African penguins seemed to enjoy having their habitat hosed down, but they weren't having half as much fun as the sea-otters pirouetting and somersaulting after their food. A rare white alligator hung slanted head-up in clear water, providing a splendid demonstration of the different refractive indices of water and air. I didn't notice any octopus exhibits, but I can't think of anything else that was missing.
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Photography was difficult, with the glass and the dim light, but the movie facility on the camera really came into its own. The only problem is, now what do I do with 30Mb of low-resolution MPEG files at about 1Mb/minute? They're more memory-joggers than art, though I'm rather intrigued by the one where for some reason the reflections of people outside the tank look more solid than the creatures inside. I've linked to a few of them, for those with abundant bandwidth or patience; the longest is about 340K, and the resolution is the same as that of the thumbnails. I'm afraid they have sound as well as movement, and it was noisy, so you might want to turn down your volume before clicking!
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| Caribbean Stingrays | Coral |
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| Reef Fish | Jellyfish |
As usual, I was fascinated by the giftshop, and particularly by the realistic plush jellyfish and the three-foot-long plush Nemo-style fish.
Afterwards, we walked a little way along the river bank to admire one of the older and more authentic riverboats, watching the ferry come and go and a long, low barge crawl by, and then returned to the hotel through the fringes of the French Quarter, where old, pastel-stuccoed buildings stand in the shadows of the modern downtown towers.
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