The Interchangeable Aquarium

When I was a kid, I'd set the modest goal for myself of seeing every zoo on earth (which also meant going to just about every country on earth... and seeing every animal in the wild on earth... and so on.  I was much more ambitious as a 12-year old).  With the realization that there are a lot more zoos than I knew about in those halcyon pre-internet days, coupled with the resignation to the fact that no one is going to pay me to be a professional fulltime zoogoer, I've had to accept that this isn't quite as realistic as I thought.  Even seeing all of the zoos in the US is pretty much an impossible task - so I have to prioritize.

Given the preference, I like to prioritize zoos and aquariums that are accredited by the AZA, though I'm not deadlocked into that rule - there are some excellent private zoos in this country, and some of them feature animals that you'll never see in AZA these days.  After my most recent visit to a SEA LIFE, however, I've started to wonder if I can skip those (or at least not go out of my way for them), with the understanding that, if you've seen one, you've probably seen them all.  That got me thinking, though - my main beef (fish?) with SEA LIFE is that they are nearly identical - but the same argument could be made about a lot of the larger aquariums, too.

Some aquariums are truly unique and having something spectacular to recommend them - Georgia Aquarium with its Ocean Voyager, home to whale sharks and giant manta rays, comes to mind.  A lot of them, though, are starting to strike me as kind of... sameish.  They feature the same species, usually exhibited in very similar exhibits (acrylic tunnels are becoming increasingly popular, and though they may not be present in some of the older aquariums, many of the newer ones are full of them).  There will be a touch tank, an Amazon rainforest (anaconda, piranha, electric eel, arapaima), a gallery of stand-alone species, such as giant Pacific octopus and moon jellies, and then a large oceanic tank, dominated by sea turtles and sharks (usually some combination of sand tiger, sandbar, nurse, or blacktip reef).  Some will have penguins, or puffins, or both, or a seal pool, or a crocodilian of some sort. Increasingly few have cetaceans. 

Usually, my favorite part of an aquarium is the small section devoted to native species - because this is where I've got the best chance of seeing something new and unusual.

Oceans cover three-quarters of the planet, and that says nothing of the rivers, lakes, and wetlands.  There is so much life in water - so why don't aquariums do a better job highlight that diversity?  A big part is probably that we have millennia of experience keeping land animals (including birds) in zoos, whereas our experience with aquatic life is much more limited.  Aquariums are likely to stick with species that they know a) will do well and respond to their care, and b) the public will enjoy.

Most people don't visit too many aquariums over the course of their lives, so who cares if they're all vaguely the same?  If it ain't broke, the reasoning goes, why fix it?

That's probably true, and experimentation with new animals in a zoo or aquarium setting involves trial, error, and usually a few necropsies.  With today's growing standards of animal welfare, including for fish and invertebrates, taxa that used to be considered disposable in less-enlightened ages, there is an understanding unwillingness to experiment.  

I'm not saying that we should be yanking giant squid out of the sea and sticking them in tanks just for a lark, just to see if we can do it - if we do, I've got a feeling that pretty soon we'll all be trying to scarf up as much calamari as we can before it goes bad.  I just wish that there was some more differentiation between aquariums, some more thought about trying to create unique experiences, not only for what species are displayed, but for how they are displayed.  So many tunnel exhibits, and so many octopi in boring boxes - has anyone tried an octopus exhibit with a tunnel through it?   The Amazon has been done to death - why not try a West African river forest?  I'm a zoo person primarily, so I don't know aquariums as well as I'd like, and as such I don't know what's as likely to unlikely to succeed or fail.  I just wish that there was something different to keep me coming back to different aquariums... because right now, a lot of them remind me of giant SEA LIFEs.