Home > Aquarium coverage > Fish Tank > Archives > 2005 > November > 20
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Requests for tickets swamp call center
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The paying public gets its first peek inside the Georgia Aquarium Monday. But unless you bought a season ticket, the only place you’ll see giant whale sharks, ghostly belugas and frisky sea otters is on morning television.
About 14,000 people who purchased annual passes and reserved time slots will be permitted inside the world’s biggest fish tank the first day, said aquarium Director Jeff Swanagan.
Nearly 80,000 people had purchased annual passes as of Sunday, he said.
“Our call center has been overwhelmed with people wanting tickets,” Swanagan said. “We doubled the staff from 9 to 19, and that still didn’t keep up with it. So we’ve hired a call service company to start Monday to help out.”
Monday and Tuesday, which are completely booked, are considered a “soft opening.” The two days are intended to take some of the crowd pressure off Wednesday’s official grand opening, when visitors can use general admission tickets to get inside the 500,000-square-foot facility.
People who want to visit from Wednesday forward will find few tickets remaining for the aquarium’s first week. Visitors who purchase tickets online (www.georgiaaquarium.org) can view available time slots.
“The aquarium is, for the most part, sold out through Nov. 26,” Swanagan said. “We do, however, have a few thousand tickets available each day beginning on Nov. 27 through the end of December.”
Initially only people who reserve time slots can get into the aquarium. The time-slot system requires that they arrive at a specific time. Once inside, however, they can stay as long as they like.
Aquarium officials estimate it could take three to four hours to see all five galleries, perhaps longer if there are children along and the family stops for a bite to eat at the food court.
The $290 million aquarium, the only one outside Asia to display whale sharks, begins a week marked by major-league publicity.
NBC’s “Today” show will be there Monday, with hosts Matt Lauer and Al Roker doing more than a dozen cut-ins over three hours.
On Wednesday, reporters for CBS’ The Early Show” and CNN will do live feeds from the aquarium.
Sunday the aquarium was a beehive of activity as NBC technicians laid wires and tested lighting in front of the huge window to the whale shark tank. Lauer and his family were scheduled for a private afternoon tour.
Groups plan protests
Several groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, will be on hand to protest today’s opening. PETA plans to unveil a half-naked model in a mermaid’s outfit for Wednesday’s events.
“The sexy mermaid will sit topless in a cage and hold a strategically placed sign that reads, ‘Life Sentence, No Parole,’ making the point that the fish stolen from their homes and crowded into the Georgia Aquarium are innocent of any crime, and yet they’ve been given a life sentence in a fish prison,” said PETA’s Arzinda Jalil.
Karin Robertson, founder of the Norfolk, Va.-based Fish Empathy Project, said her organization will join Atlanta area PETA members to pass out brochures opposing public aquariums, which she contends deplete fish in the wild and confine huge ocean-going animals like belugas and whale sharks in small spaces.
“To us, the tanks look huge,” Robertson said Sunday. “But to a whale or a whale shark, it’s like swimming in a bathtub.”
Located at the north end of Centennial Olympic Park, the aquarium contains more than 100,000 fish and other animals. Its tanks hold more than 8 million gallons of water. The Ocean Voyager tank — home to the whale sharks — holds 6.2 million gallons alone.
Those who brave rainy skies and chilly temperatures for today’s opening will find very tight security to get inside. Visitors will pass through security checkpoints, where bags will be searched. Individuals will be scanned with security wands.
“Security checks me just like everyone else when I walk in,” Swanagan said. “And if they don’t, I yell at them.”
For those driving to the fish tank, the aquarium’s parking garage has 1,600 spaces. It costs $8 for four hours.
About 200 aquarium personnel will be on hand to help visitors find their way and answer their questions about exhibits.
“We plan to make this the world’s most engaging aquarium experience,” Swanagan.
The upkeep costs plenty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There’s the Georgia Aquarium you see. And then there’s the other one.
From fish food to fish surgery, there’s a behind-the-scenes world at the planet’s biggest fish tank that you won’t see when you buy a general admission ticket or annual pass.
Fish commissary
The unschooled might be tempted to call the place the “fish kitchen,” but Ray Davis, the aquarium’s vice president for zoological operations, will quickly remind you it is officially called the “husbandry commissary.” This is the place where technicians prepare the grub for the aquarium’s 100,000-plus fish and other animals.
This stainless steel room has a freezer that holds 20,000 pounds of frozen food at minus 20 Fahrenheit and a refrigerator with a 6,000-pound capacity. It prepares everything from frozen fish for the beluga whales to pre-made “gel diets” for the giant whale sharks. Gel food is specially mixed from a powder and fortified with vitamins, minerals and even algae.
“It’s not the Jell-O that Bill Cosby would sell, but it’s Jell-O,” Davis said.
The whale sharks also eat lots of krill — small shrimp — that has to be thawed and measured in the kitchen before being ladled out to the big fish. Each of the polka-dotted juvenile sharks eats about 34 pounds of krill a day.
Whale sharks, however, are not the most expensive eaters in the aquarium. That distinction belongs to the three dozen or so weedy and leafy sea dragons. They have to be fed live mysids, tiny shrimp that they feed on in the wild. It costs about $50,000 a year to feed the exotic-looking creatures.
The strangest thing found in the kitchen just might be the “fresh frozen plankton” that comes from the North Pacific.
“It’s used to supplement the diet of the jellyfish,” Davis said.
There are also worms for the freshwater fish and even vitamin-fortified romaine lettuce for some of the fish in the coral reef exhibits.
The sea otters are the poster children for gluttony. They have high metabolisms and have to eat up to 25 percent of their body weight in food every day. They enjoy “restaurant quality” clams and fish, Davis said.
“The husbandry commissary, for cleanliness, is held to a higher standard than any restaurant kitchen,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducts random inspections of the kitchen, and the aquarium’s lab does routine culture samples to make sure it is sterile.
Davis said the overall food budget for the fish tank “is a moving target right now” but will increase dramatically as exhibits are expanded and animals begin to grow. It is now in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we will move into the millions,” he said.
Fish hospital This place — Davis calls it the “animal care facility” — looks like something out of a science fiction movie. And what they do here can be just as strange.
It is essentially a high-tech surgery unit for fish and the other animals that inhabit the Georgia Aquarium.
“We could bring down a shark or a large grouper or some small butterfly fishes to work on them directly in the surgery suite,” Davis said.
The equipment can also be carried to the largest animals — the beluga whales or whale sharks. Big animals can also be transported to the surgery unit.
Fish can be anesthetized with a special chemical bath. Their heart rates and blood gases are monitored during surgery.
Why would an animal end up here? There are always the good old-fashioned brawls that require stitches. Grouper have been known to develop gastric blockages that have to be cleared with surgery. And Davis once — at another facility — assisted with the Caesarean birth on a cownose ray.
The aquarium has hired folks like Howard Krum, the manager of veterinarian services, who has developed groundbreaking practices in aquatic medicine.
“We will have the leading aquatic medicine training available,” Davis said.
Filtration system The problem with fish tanks — as everyone with a home aquarium knows — is keeping the water clean. Imagine trying to do that with tanks that hold 8 million gallons of water and more than 100,000 fish.
The Georgia Aquarium currently has to filter the water in its giant displays every 85 minutes or so. As the fish in the tanks mature, the water will have to be filtered every 60 minutes.
A huge battery of whining pumps moves water from the tanks through “fractionators” that produce a foaming action. Wastes in the water adhere to the foam, which is removed.
The partially cleaned water is then pumped through a pressure sand filtration system for final cleaning before it is pumped back into its tanks.
“There are a lot of things we can do to mimic Mother Nature and keep the same process going,” Davis said. “That’s why we need the filters.”
A small portion of the water is “side streamed,” where it is either heated or chilled to help maintain the temperature in the tanks. The whale shark tank, for example, is kept relatively warm. The beluga tank, however, is kept at a chilly 55 degrees for the cold-water mammals.
Very little water is lost in the process.
“We compare it to a very large supermarket, and we’re using less than that,” Davis said.
Window cleaning
Having the world’s biggest fish tank means little if people can’t see the fish.
There are more than 12,000 square feet of acrylic windows (they weigh about 328 tons) at the Georgia Aquarium, and every inch has to be cleaned — from the tank side and the visitor side.
Davis said the aquarium is contemplating doing some of the cleaning during visitor hours because visitors like to watch the divers working. The divers also lend perspective to some of the larger displays.
Cleaners use cotton diapers and something called “heavy delta,” which is synthetic nylon like that used in fish seines, to keep the acrylic looking crystal clear.
Some areas have to be cleaned more than others. The clear tunnel through the whale shark tank has to be cleaned every other day, Davis said. The big window for that display currently has to be cleaned every day — one of the problems is all of the media attention. The television lights shining on the acrylic causes algae to grow faster.
