"Aquatic Bodies: Sea Monsters Revealed" is open at the Georgia Aquarium and is included in the price of admission. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday-Friday, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday; $23.95-$29.95; the Georgia Aquarium, 225 Baker St., 404-581-4000, www.georgiaaquarium.org/
The gelatinous folds of an enormous Humboldt squid greet visitors in one corner while, overhead, an 18-foot whale shark is suspended in midflight.
Elsewhere, a detonated grouper is poised in midexplosion, its exterior parted to reveal gills, vertebrae and internal organs.
By turns fascinating and macabre, the creatures are part of a new show at the Georgia Aquarium called “Aquatic Bodies: Sea Monsters Revealed.”
Open this month at the downtown facility, the traveling exhibit is intended to stay in Atlanta for a year.
It showcases sea creatures that have been preserved with a technique called “plastination,” in which the tissues are replaced with a liquid polymer, down to the cellular level. The same technique is used, to more shocking effect, in the flayed human figures on display at Atlantic Station in the “Bodies” exhibit.
Eighteen large creatures and some 150 smaller animals and organs make up the Sea Monsters show, all of them in various states of disassembly. In keeping with the Halloween season, the show leads visitors through a kind of maritime spook house, featuring darkened hallways and glowing ultraviolet light.
“Many of the animals on display are also part of our living collection,” said Carey Rountree, the aquarium’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, “including the devil ray and the whale shark.” To underscore that point, video footage from the aquarium’s Ocean Voyager tank, with its gliding sharks and rays, is on display inside the Sea Monsters exhibit.
“You can get a great science lesson,” he said, “and then you’re able to go see these creatures in real life.”
The show first ushers visitors into an anteroom set up to resemble an 18th-century gentleman scientist’s conservatory. Artifacts in jars and a lighted map table lend a quaint air.
In that world, the mysterious creatures of the deep, often glimpsed only briefly, were seen with fear. In the show’s narrative, 21st-century science can bring these creatures up close, replacing fear with understanding.
Some of the exhibit’s techniques are striking. A shark that has been sushi-ed into dozens of paper-thin slices allows the visitor to see its inner workings from nose to tail, like a 3-D CAT scan.
There is little of the shock here inherent in the “Bodies” exhibit — we are all accustomed to seeing the insides of fish, and the color palette is restricted to grays and beiges — except in one display of a preserved Emperor penguin, sliced open to reveal its heart and lungs. It is difficult to feel dispassionate about a penguin.
The show also carries a strong conservation message, pointing out that these monsters are in fact magnificent creatures who deserve not to be hunted but heralded. “(O)ur activities on land and at sea can have direct and tremendous effects on the health of the ocean and the delicate climate balance that life as we know it needs to survive,” one superscript says.
“It would be a sad irony if, after centuries of hunting monsters in the ocean, the real sea monsters turned out to be … us.”
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