The Zoo Review: Zoo Review: Aquarium of the Pacific, Part I

To my immense surprise, Los Angeles, California - second largest city in the US, after New York - doesn't have an aquarium. Shocking, I know. Fans of fishes, however, don't have to travel far from Hollywood to see a spectacular collection of aquatic animals. A relatively short drive away in the nearby city of Long Beach stands the beautiful Aquarium of the Pacific. Opened in 1998, this is one of several "newish" aquariums which opened in the late twentieth centuries to draw visitors to downtown waterfronts. In this case, the location hardly needs an additional draw. The aquarium overlooks Long Beach's beautiful harbor, home to the famous ship Queen Mary, along Shoreline Village.

As the name would suggest, the aquarium is (mostly) focused on the life of the world's largest ocean, offering it a far broader palette of species and habitats to draw from than the two more-geographically-focused California aquariums reviewed recently, Aquarium of the Bay and Monterey Bay Aquarium. Aquarium of the Pacific may lack Monterey's fish-cannery charm, but it has its own aesthetic - sleek and modern looking, inside and out. The first thing most visitors will notice upon entering the atrium is the enormous, life-sized model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling. The whale looks out over the aquarium's signature habitat, the 140,000 gallon, 3-story Honda Blue Cavern. The graceful, beautiful leopard sharks and enormous giant sea bass (a critically endangered species which this aquarium was the first to breed) are the most readily seen residents of this tank, which depicts the sealife off the Catalina Island coast. Nearby displays feature additional residents of southern California's coastal waters, including a kelp forest habitat and a series of smaller tanks.

One of the most popular exhibits of California wildlife is the enclosure for two species of pinnipeds - California sea lions and harbor seals - which swim over the heads of visitors as they pass through a tunnel through their habitat. Immediately outside, guests trade the underwater view of the marine mammals for an eye-to-eye above water view, perhaps from a small amphitheater from which they can watch training demonstrations.

The outdoor courtyard that houses the seals and sea lions also features a ray touch pool (an almost obligatory feature of any aquarium these days), as well as a small pool for young bamboo sharks and a very interesting, multi-tank set up for steelhead trout. Larger sharks - zebra shark, sand tiger shark, blacktip reef shark, gray reef shark - as well as a sea turtle and stingrays occupy Shark Lagoon and can be viewed above or below the surface of the water. At most aquariums, the shark exhibit is the signature display - it was a little odd seeing this one (admittedly one of the less impressive of the aquarium's habitats) tucked away in a forgotten corner of the campus. Another strange feature was that this shark tank is outside - one of only two that I can remember seeing, though there may be more that I'm not familiar with. I imagine maintaining sharks in a large, open-top outdoor habitat poses some challenges, be it from the weather (does heavy rain mess up the salinity?) to native wildlife (to ducks every land in the pool?). I was at the aquarium for an evening event, and I will say, the biggest impression that I had of the exhibit was standing a slight distance back from the underwater viewing and watching the sharks silently cruise by beneath a full moon.

The courtyard also holds Lorikeet Forest, a very large walk-through feeding aviary for rainbow lorikeets. Lorikeets are found in New Guinea and other islands of the South Pacific, so I guess they don't not fit, but it still seemed like a shoe-horned exhibit. I might have been more interested if they'd made it a more general "Birds of the Pacific Islands" aviary... or done pretty much anything else with at least some of the large space that they devoted to this, which could have been any other outdoor attraction (this is one of the few major aquariums I've been to without a single species of crocodilian, for example - saltwater crocs?).

Up the path is a habitat for a modest colony of Magellanic penguins from South America's Pacific Coast (though I think of them more often as the penguin of South America's Atlantic Coast). It's a decent enough habitat with above and below water viewing, if lacking the panache and grandeur of some of the newer penguin exhibits such as those of Baltimore and San Diego. I was more interested in the shorebird aviary nearby, which contained a diverse and interesting collection of ducks, shorebirds, and the only grebe I've ever seen in an aquarium, sharing their habitat with coastal fish.