This aquarium is an indoor/outdoor kind of place, so it was a perfectly sunny, 65ish kind of day for a visit. It's on the north side of Corpus (as the locals call it) just across the Harbor Bridge, which you can see in the picture below, taken in front of the aquarium.
It's also right next to the USS Lexington, another popular attraction that we haven't visited yet.
The aquarium is situated on the Port of Corpus Christ, a busy deep water channel. While we were there a huge ship loaded with five or six windmill blades passed by. There is a large windmill field nearby, where this ship may have been heading. This is really Rick's kind of place and he was probably more interested in the ships than the creatures inside the aquarium. He made me take this picture.
The displays are about equally divided between indoors and out, and one of the first to catch our eye was the dolphin pool, covered by this grand sunshade.
Between shows, the dolphins are in the pool just swimming around and peeking at the visitors.
Downstairs below the pool there is an underwater viewing window, but when we got there the dolphins were somehow gone. Throughout the aquarium there were lots of preschool aged kids with their parents. No school groups thankfully. The place was kind of empty and that was really nice for taking pictures.
Back up top, we watched the dolphin show, which was probably one of the best things there. Several little were kids jumping and twirling around too, doing ecstatic dances about the dolphins.
Nearby there was a pool of small stingrays you could touch. They're soft and slippery.
Another large tank held a few sea turtles...
…who really like this one window a lot so it was easy to get this eye to eye perspective.
There was also an alligator pond with one alligator, a small shark tank with no sharks, an otter pool with one otter, and a small arena for wildlife shows. We went to that, but it was too bad to even mention. Overall, I'd say this is an underwhelming aquarium (Rick says "rinky-dink"), with no really impressive exhibits or collections. Many of the animals are rescue cases, and are alone in their tanks or cages. That always makes for a kind of sad milieu.
Inside there are several different areas, focused on different things: jellyfish, reefs, the Amazon. One tank held about ten lion fish with a map nearby showing the spread of this venomous invasive species in the Western hemisphere over the past ten years. Scary.
The jellyfish were my favorites. So elegant.
There were several tanks with large and small tropical fish, and lots of opportunities for close inspection.
The Amazon exhibit seems to be the newest. Above is a piranha and below are tiny colorful frogs (obviously).
One last look at the otter who wants a playmate…(see us in the reflection?)
Over the next few days I'm going to try a new style of shorter blogs. Hope you'll check them out and let me know how you like them.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Want to leave a comment?