(... and Aquarium)

There's an old "zoo man" that I'm friends with, someone in the mold of the old-school curators and directors of decades long past; I think we would have been perfectly at home working alongside Hornaday at the Bronx, or Mann at National.  He's the sort of guy who's visited every zoo, seen every animal, and has an encyclopedic memory of all of them.  He's also the sort of guy who retains strong opinions on how things should be properly done.

I had been talking with him recently after my visit to Sedgwick County Zoo, a facility that I enjoyed very much, when he cut me off after a bit and said, "It's a fine enough zoo.  Of course, to be truly great it would need an aquarium."

I unpacked this a bit with him.  His ideal for a zoo was based in the older European tradition, in which a truly great zoo was defined by its buildings.  The Bird House, the Reptile House, a Small Mammal House (which might be a nocturnal house)… and the Aquarium.  To his mind, a zoo could not be great without an aquarium.  How could a park have "zoology" in the name and then cut itself off from the biomes that cover three-quarters of the planet's surface?  (I've heard similar arguments made about the dearth of invertebrate exhibits in zoos... and made a few of those arguments myself).  It's been a longstanding tradition in many European zoos, dating back to when the first public aquarium opened at the London Zoo in the nineteenth century.

In the United States, zoos and aquariums tend to be separate facilities.  Sometimes they retain an association, as the New York zoos have with their aquarium under the umbrella of the Wildlife Conservation Society.  In other cases, they are completely separate with no shared membership or management, though they may collaborate on occasion.   Then there are the facilities that have an aquarium building as part of their main campus, and may even take on the name, "Zoo and Aquarium."  Facilities that fall into this category include Point Defiance, in Tacoma, Washington (which has two aquarium buildings), Pittsburgh, Columbus, and, most recently, Kansas City.

The extent of the zoo-aquariums varies.  None that I've seen so far has even come close to the size and comprehensiveness of the giant US aquariums, like Shedd, Georgia, or Monterey Bay.   Sometimes it's as simple as a few small fish or jelly tanks situated around a stingray touch pool, or in association with a penguin or sea lion exhibit - in which case I feel like the zoo might just be giving itself airs (and by which theory Sedgwick could claim that it, too, has an aquarium, because it has fish on display in its rainforest building).  I don't like the idea of tacking on aquarium just for the sake of saying you have one.  Aquariums require a lot of expense, a lot of infrastructure and investment, and a lot of expertise to run properly.  If you find yourself in possession of indoor real estate that can be devote to animals at your zoo, there's other things you can do with that space.

So, for most of my career, I've felt that separate and specialized is best.  Zoos are best left to handle terrestrial animals, aquariums with the aquatic, with a little overlap.

I recently visited Memphis Zoo for the first time in well over a decade.  Despite not doing so, the Zoo probably has a better claim than some others to tack on "and Aquarium" to its name.  The aquarium in question is a fairly small building, located towards the west end of the zoo.  It consists of a series of fairly small tanks - mostly freshwater in scope - situated around the perimeter of a small room.  There are no sharks or sea turtles here, no grand vistas of coral reefs or kelp forests.  The selection of animals was modest and well-suited for the size of the building.  Another zoo might have cleared most of the tanks away for one, maybe two, room-sized tanks with one or two small side tanks, just to say that they had sharks, octopus, jellies, and sea horses, checking the boxes for what most casual visitors would want to see.  Instead, most of the species chosen for this building were smaller, and more obscure, which actually made them more interesting to me than seeing the same exhibits that I've seen at a dozen places.

When I left to go back out to explore the rest of the zoo, I thought, "This was nice.  A fun break, highlighting a diversity of species, and it would be a nice addition to the zoo on days when the weather was poor."  Something like that I feel would be a welcome addition to many large zoos.