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The New England Aquarium
On Sunday, April 29, we went to the New England Aquarium. It was of course filled with all kinds of wildlife. There were certainly plenty of fish, but really the most interesting things there were not fish at all. Below is a sampling of the residents at the aquarium.
Gray Seals frolic in a big tank just outside the main building. They seemed pretty happy, and somewhat aware of all of the attention that they were getting from the tourists.
Penguin feeding time was quite an adventure. The staff keeps track of how much the penguins eat, so feeding ends up a pretty time-consuming process. Some of the penguins like to beg, as you can see here. These penguins are the biggest that they had out of the three types, and are from the southern part of South America, Chile and Argentina. They had no Antarctic penguins, due to the extreme nature of their environment that would have to be replicated. Penguins are a lot faster and more graceful when they are in the water, as you could probably guess. When they are on land, they mostly waddle and spew penguin guano everywhere. They're not too bright.
These are called Little Blue Penguins. These are the smallest penguins at the aquarium. These birds were also amazingly stupid, but cute to look at. As far as I can tell, most of their day is spent standing around squawking. The little interpretive signs said that they communicate by squawking, so this is how they know where they are, and identify each other. They didn't do a whole lot of running around in response to all the noise, so I can only assume that they just do a penguin version of roll call...all...day...long.
These are the Crowned Penguins. These guys had funny little yellow and red topknots that looked kind of like tassels. They're hard to see in this picture, but they were definitely very funny looking. The fat one in the lower right seems to be beached. It never moved the whole time we were there.
This was a pretty bizarre fish in the big central tank. It swims by flapping the dorsal and ventral fins almost like a bird would fly, but sideways.
This giant sea turtle was in the central tank as well. It was so huge I couldn't get the whole thing into the picture through the little windows in the tank! There were a few of these in there, but I think this was the biggest one.
This picture was taken near the top of the huge central tank. You can see a smaller turtle and several other fish, as well as a small part of the habitat itself, which was extremely detailed and well done.