It's the End of the World (Aquarium)

Years ago, I spent a summer in St. Louis, interning at the wonderful St. Louis Zoo.  Not surprisingly, I was at the zoo almost every day, but I also took the opportunity to explore a lot of the city's other many attractions - the museums, the parks, and the Gateway Arch among them.  One night, my fellow interns and I spent an evening in the labyrinthine mazes of the City Museum, which despite the name isn't so much as museum as it is a fun-house/maze/jungle gym that we roamed for hours.  During those hours of exploration, I never knew that there was an aquarium there.  In fact, apart from some aquatic exhibits at the zoo, I never knew St. Louis had an aquarium at all.


Leasing space in the Museum was the privately owned World Aquarium (not to be confused with the Dallas World Aquarium), an interactive facility that, besides fish, houses a variety of small mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.  The facility had a checked reputation for animal care, eventually leading to its banishment from the Museum in 2015.  It briefly took up residence in a historic building on the Mississippi Riverfront, but earlier this month, that facility was condemned as unsafe.


The World Aquarium, is shutting for good after 25 years.  Now what?

Condemned World Aquarium Draws Protest Over Fate of Displaced Animals

A fish swims at City Museum.  previously home to the World Aquarium, the museum now has an aquatic life exhibit of its own (Chelsea Neuling)


Employees get laid off.  Buildings condemned.  Materials sold to pay off debts.  But what happens tot he animals?  No one is sure yet, including the president of the facility and owner of its animals, Leonard Sonnenschein.  PETA is putting on pressure to have the animals sent to what it deems reputable facilities (whatever those may be in PETA's eyes), and has announced that, effective today, they will be protesting outside the shuttered building.


St. Louis is set to welcome a new aquarium, the St. Louis Aquarium at Union Station, later this year.  Sonnenschein suspects that the city was motivated in part to shut down his facility in order to remove a potential rival for their new crown jewel.  Whatever the case may be, perhaps some of these animals can find new, permanent homes in the new aquarium.  Or maybe they can be accepted at other facilities around the country.


There are other options for where they could wind up, but some of those are less pleasant to imagine.