August 15 -- fishy, fishy, fishy

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There is a really big tank at the center of the Aquarium.  It has a lot of fish.  A lot of different kinds of fish.  A sea turtle.  Sharks....

It's possible to walk all the way around the tank.  See the people outside the other side of the tank, in the upper left corner?  Right behind the ray that is swimming toward us?

A person could park in front of this tank for a very long time, and never tire of watching life unfold within.

Taking pics in aquariums is very frustrating.

Glass (glare, reflection, smudges, maybe algae or some other slime on the inside!), water, low light, moving subjects.  Argh!  I always expect to throw away a lot of pics, but at an aquarium, the percentage goes way up.

Here is a relatively clear fish.  This one was either not moving at all, or moving very slowly.....

Stepping back a few feet -- this is what the outside of the really big tank looks like.

There are panels above the glass, helping us to figure out what we're looking at.  I know I got some pics of that little guy in the upper right corner, with his dots and stripes, but those pics were too blurry and dark to keep.........

We wandered on.  We saw two tanks with jellyfish.  They are hypnotic to watch.....

The colors of light on the jellyfish changed over time.

The images above were taken with the camera.  The next one was taken with the phone.  I've lightened it a bit, after the fact.

These jellyfish had long skinny red appendages, in addition to the fluffy ruffly white ones.  I wondered how it was that they didn't get tangled.  Apparently they do, sometimes.  They were able to disentangle relatively easily.  It took them less than a minute, I'd guess, to separate and go their own ways.

I did take some video, but the reflections of legs of passers-by are so irritating that I don't want to put them up.  I'm sure you can find much better video online of swimming jellyfish............



Hey!  Look!  A tank with way more light!  That makes the camera's focusing job a lot easier for it.

I think the big pink thing, more or less in the middle, is a giant clam.  We can sort of see its shell on the right....

This is a closer crop of the above.  I think there are at least eight different kinds of fish in this image.

Taken moments after the previous -- there are at least three kinds that weren't in the previous image -- the orange one, the black one, and the yellow one with the blue patch over its eye.  Another tank one could park by for a long time, and just watch and watch...........

Back to lower light, alas.  At least this guy held still for me.

A deflated puffer fish.  It was interesting to learn about their toxins, in Intro to Neuroscience.

Ahh.  These little ones were well lit AND pretty still.  I think they were some kind of eel.  They went up and down (into the sand) like fishy jack-in-the-boxes.  Two kinds -- spotted and striped (see the yellowish one sort of behind the plants, in the upper left corner).  They were less than half an inch in diameter and the part above the sand was 4-5" long.  I don't know how much was below the sand; we never saw one come right out.

I did an abysmal job of capturing descriptive info.  I worked so hard to get reasonably clear images, and so often failed, that figuring out what that blurry mess in my pic was supposed to be was the least of my concerns....

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