Coastal Trip Episode V: The Monterey Aquarium Strikes Back

Videos have now been posted! (In case you checked this earlier when they were not up yet)

I got to the aquarium on Sunday in the afternoon, a little later than I had hoped. But I calculated that I would still have a few hours to make the rounds of the exhibits. However, I did have to park a few blocks away and walk to the aquarium and when I arrived, had to stand in a very long line to buy tickets. But the line actually moved along quickly, so I was in soon enough. The line gave me a chance to snap this picture of the outside. I guess the aquarium is in an old cannery building.



This is a giant octopus clinging to the glass of its tank. Pretty cool, eh?


I want to take this opportunity to talk about the size of the tanks. They were huge! I can't remember the exact number of gallons, but you will see from the photos how big they were. This aquarium has won several awards, and they are well-deserved.


This was the first tank I saw, which had various fish and sharks swimming about. In this photo, one of the sharks is coming right for me!




This was one of the huge exhibits I was talking about. It is called the Kelp Forest. This is just one side of it! When I first got there, there was a feeding show going on, so there was a guy in SCUBA gear inside the tank with little squid to feed the fish. He was talking through a mic to another interpreter outside the tank.

There was a school of these silver fish that were swimming around in a clump. The shiny silver looked really pretty against the blue water.

Then it was on to the ocean otters! They were so adorable! There were four of them, and they were all floating like this, sleeping right next to one another. Actually, the fourth one was a little off from the others, against one of the walls, floating into fake kelp (see photo below). This just reminded me so much of the video circulating around YouTube of the otters holding hands while sleeping. I guess they really do that often in the wild!



Here is the fourth otter who had flipped over to face us with the kelp in his mouth.



Okay, now I am not usually a fan of jellyfish, but I have to say this was my favorite exhibit. Just the way they did the tanks was awesome! So I have lots of photos of this one tank. The jellyfish were placed along with some other kinds of fish in the "Drifters" exhibit. The tanks were so cool because you could not see the entire tank. For example, at one tank, you were looking basically at a window watching a crowd of fish swimming quickly by you, but only in one direction. Then they disappeared. In the jellyfish tanks, the jellyfish would float down from some unseen place at the top of the tank and disappear below the edge of the window. So, I guess the tanks were circular or something. It had such an awesome effect. Also, as you can see with the jellyfish, they were placed in a monotone tank and then lit up. I didn't take photos of the other types of jellys, but I thought these were the prettiest anyway. You can get a sense of, once again, the size of the tank.




Now, at the entrance to the Drifters exhibit, there was this awesome thing -- around the ceiling they had a tank with fish swimming in a circle. Here's a video:

Another sweet thing they had at the aquarium was this wave crash tunnel. You stood inside it and they had fake waves crash over you. I edited two takes together from different angles.

Okay, this next photo may be a little tough to see, but hopefully you can at least make out the silhouettes of the people to get an idea of the size of this tank. I just looked it up, and it is a 1-million gallon exhibit (said with a Dr. Evil intonation makes it sound as big as it looked in person!) called the Outer Bay exhibit. It's to give the viewer a sense of the open water. There were GIANT blue fin tuna in here, hammerhead sharks, a sea turtle, and the most incredible looking fish called ocean sunfish. They were these HUGE white flat fish. I didn't get a photo of them, but you should look them up.

A video of some of the big fish and the sea turtle.

I then went to a show about life in the deep ocean -- basically a Q & A session -- that was pretty interesting. It reminded me of my biology class once upon a time in college where we saw a video of those cool deep ocean creatures that light themselves up. At the time I decided that was the career I wanted to pursue. But then I decided I didn't really want to spend hours in a tiny submarine sinking to the bottom of the deep, black, cold, ocean!

Anyway, then I went to the river otter exhibit, where they had 4 different types of river otters. The first tank was the most playful. I believe there are 4 otters in this photo, playing with one another in the water. I have video that makes it much easier to make out.

Okay now I generally feel that penguins have gone the way of pirates in terms of being over used, but this was the funniest thing I saw that day. Just a bunch of penguins bobbing right against the glass.

So my camera battery had finally died at the end of my visit (had another one in the car), but as I was walking out on the deck behind the aquarium, I noticed a crowd of people looking at something. I walked over and saw this adorable sight. I used my phone to snap a photo, so it's kind of hard to see. But this is a mother ocean otter with a baby on its stomach. Do you see the brown ball of fuzz just below her head? That is the baby. It basically kind of wiggled around on her stomach as she cleaned it. It was so cute and a great way to end my visit to the aquarium!


I would recommend this aquarium to anyone interested in marine life who is out in Northern California. I think it is definitely worth a visit and very well done.