New England Aquarium

We got up early and treated ourselves to Dunkin Donuts (were they founded here?? There is a store every other block in the city!)  Then we headed to the aquarium.  We had entry tickets for their opening time and I'm glad we did.  It just got more and more crowded as the day went on.  We saw an exhibit that showed the areas of downtown Boston that are at increased risk with rising sea levels.  Delaney couldn't believe it when she looked because the tide was down when we arrived.  When we left it was up at least 6 feet and it was much easier to see that it wouldn't take much to spread onto street level with a storm.

We explored every exhibit tank in the aquarium.

 I love aquariums and I'd have a hard time picking my favorite.  I always love watching the jelly fish.  I also like the octopus a lot.  He wasn't very active when we were watching though.  There was a funny picture of him however with a story.  Octopus' are very intelligent and curious, so they often put a cube puzzle in the tank with a crab treat inside.  The octopus has to figure out how to open the lock.  One time it decided it would be easier to go into the cube rather than open it, so it squeezed through a small opening and crammed itself into this plexiglass cube to get the crab!

Octopus hanging from the ceiling

These were some kind of sea worm I had never seen before.  They were about 6-8" long and would come out of their holes in the sand to eat this tiny, tiny little shrimp things in the water.  They looked almost like sea weed.

The highlight of the aquarium is the large central tank that is 3 stories high and holds tons of water and fish!  Its like a large coral reef with tons of colorful fish, several sea turtles, two mid sized sharks, and some huge rays.  There is a spiral walk way that goes all the way around on several levels and I could spend the entire day just watching the fish go by.  They tend to swim in a circle because there is a current inside the tank and they swim against it to get more oxygen past their gills.

Sea turtle and shark in the big tank

They had a petting tank with small sharks (can't remember what kind) and rays.  They also swam in circles right past a long area where you could put your hand in and stroke them as they went by.  The shark was kind of rough, but the rays were smooth and squishy.  Pretty cool.  Delaney went back twice.  

Delaney petting the rays and small sharks

We also saw a seal training program where they talked about how they trained the seals to follow hand signals so that their vets could more easily examine them to make sure they were healthy.  There was a huge male fur seal.  They explained that his fur was the 2nd thickest in the world (not sure what the first was).  He has 300,000 hairs per square inch!

We watched a 3D Imax show on Penguins that was pretty cool.  It featured some that were on Georgia island in the far south Atlantic.  They took 16 months to raise a chick to adulthood.  Amazing conditions.

Penguin exhibit.  It was fun to watch them being fed.  They track what each penguin eats daily, so each penguin had a colored band on its wing (left for males, right for females, with the same color pattern for mated pairs).