[holiday]

I saw a post on here telling about this aquarium and it peeked my interest but living 8 1/2 hrs away I thought I would never see it. We happened to plan a last minute trip right after X-mas to do some rock crawling in Alabama and Georgia with some friends and the weather was too wet to continue. So for my birthday request we headed back to Atlanta for a trip to the aquarium.

Sorry - don't have any pics because the glare from the acrylic was awful. I will go thru them again and see if even one is decent. All us reefers will spend all day in the Tropical Diver section. Dozens of tanks set up in all shapes and sizes and just perfect. They have a main tank in the middle which the viewing area is a quarter turn in front of you and over your head. The coolest part was it has a timer to have breaking waves at the top of this area for movement. Carpet anemones about 2 feet across. Some tomato clownfish that were about 9" long. The tank was full of yellow and blue tangs, foxface rabbitfish, anthias, very few clowns some wrasses made up the bulk of the tank. I think the sign said it had about 45 different fish in there including 2 small sharks about 2' in length. I could have stayed there all day. SOme of the other tanks were varieties of jellyfish, clowns, jawfish, angels, corals, butterflyfish, tangs, wrasses just to name a few.

The Whale Sharks were cool to watch as well. My husband has seen them twice here in the Gulf of Mexico. His first time was a 26' male that comes here every year for about 2 weeks according to our local marine scientists. He was within 2 miles of shore. He went to dive a radio tower just north of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas and low and behold he found 2 40' just cruising around. They came up to our boat which is 40'. Their size was still intimidating. He spent 1/2 hour with them. It was an experience I know we will never forget. The cobia that were swimming with them were 4-6" in lenth and in the hundreds. We took as many pics as we could. Since he is a diver - we bought an underwater camera that we can hook up to the tv in the boat so he could show our kids what is down there when he dives. So he was able to take it down and show the kids up close and personal under water.

Anyways, these whale sharks are much smaller than we have seen. 2 15', 1 20' and 1 12'. They were caught in Taiwan and shipped here via UPS. Pretty wild. They came here in 2005. I believe 2 males first and then 2 females. They have them trained to eat out of color coded buckets. The tank is huge. I would have loved to have ssen an aerial view. The acrylic for the tank is almost 2 feet thick made out of 17 layers bonded together. We went to all the viewing windows and it was so far across that you couldn't see them from one side of the tank to the other. The tank also had hammerhead sharks, guitarfish (very interesting), jacks, snappers, stingrays, sawfish, potato groupers, goliath groupers, bumphead wrasses, black tip sharks, carvelle jacks and some I forgot. They have an acrylic tube that goes thru the middle of the tank that you can ride the moving walk way to view all the critters as well as 4 other viewing areas.

They have 4 touch tanks. One with hammerhead sharks and rays. One with horseshoe crabs. Did you know that they are older than dinosaurs? Or that the ocean is ~ 35, 870 feet deep. See, I was paying attention. One with different varieties of shrimp and one with starfish. This tank was 52 degrees. Damn cold for a girl from Florida.

The Beluga whales and african penguins are complete hams for the viewing public. We saw some mating rituals going on with the Belugas. The penguin exhibit has an acrylic tube that the kids can crawl into so they are right in the middle of all the critters. It was cute to watch all of their faces. Ther arctic section has the belugas, penguins, otters and seals.

The river section has tanks that are over your head while you walk thru. It is like you are in the sand looking up to the top. The otters in both the arctic and river section were cool to watch play as well.

Tickets run around $30 and we spent 3 hours there. Could have stayed longer but there was a football game a fews blocks away at the GA Dome and we wanted out before the traffic was horrible. Parking will cost you a small fortune too. We couldn't fit into the garage since it was full so we had to pay $20 bucks to park in a lot across the street.

Well, here is my review. Please excuse the spelling and grammar errors - we drove straight thru and are a little whipped.

Have a great New Year.

Noel

[e_baer]

It is my dream to go there! Hopefully when I go down to MACNA this year, I will be able to visit the aquarium. Glad you had a good time there!

The guitar fish is a very interesting creature!

[Jeffrey Porter]

I'll be there for MACNA as well. But i'm flying in 2 weeks early to intern at the South Carolina Aquarium, and my boss is still trying to get me an internship at The Georgia Aquarium. That way i'll be a week working at each, then stay for MACNA.