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DEL.ICIO.USThe 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.
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By Michael Wilson
November 23, 2005 08:34 AM | Link to this
The Aquarium is indeed a great gift to my hometown. I don’t usally it excited about events. It took me twenty years to go to the King center,but I was at the Aquarium the second day its a great place.Kudos to Mr. Marcus.
Michael Wilson CEO SingleVision Entertainment