Aquarium Day

This weekend was full of highs and lows. The highs included wonderful things such as brunch with friends and gardening and library book sales and cute men. The lows can all be contained in two words: stomach bug.

I found a copy of "Wuthering Bites" at the library booksale.

The backyard mystery bush is in bloom - it's a lilac!

So yeah. Today I used a library pass to go to the New England Aquarium with Joy and Mini T. It was awesome! And I think we picked a good day to go since it's a week day and Boston Public Schools are still in session until June so it wasn't very crowded. I don't own any ocean-themed clothes, but I did my best to dress for the occasion by wearing a bunch of blue colored things.

My favorite parts of the aquarium are the jellyfish, the seadragons, the touch tanks, the octopuses, and the giant ocean tank. The touch tanks are awesome for obvious reasons - who doesn't love being able to actually touch the animals? I like the jellyfish because they look so cool and otherworldly when they're floating about. I like the seadragons because they have the most amazing camouflage - it's really hard to find them in the tanks! Octopuses are just plain fascinating and I'll tell you a true octopus story at the end of this post. The other thing that's really cool about this aquarium is that it has a ginormous 200,000 gallon salt water ocean tank running up through the center. The tank is so huge it actually had to be built first and the rest of the building was built around it. I remember going here with my family as a kid and riding the back of my brother's wheelchair down the ramp that spirals around this tank.

Here are some pictures from the aquarium:

Mini T learns about horseshoe crabs.

Unidentified fish.

Aren't these cool?

Mini T and me at the touch tank.

Joy and me.

Eel.

Seahorse.

This camouflaged fish scared the crap out of me.

Penguins with their egg.

Weedy sea dragon.

Octopus.

Joy and Mini T at the ray tank.

Joy and Mini T touch a ray.

Isn't this pretty?

Ok here's the promised octopus story. When we were looking at the octopus tank, we spoke to a random older gentleman who was also visiting the aquarium and he told us about an octopus escape that happened at our same aquarium in the 1980s. The man we spoke to said that the escape was caught on the security camera footage. I couldn't find any video online but I was able to go back and verify his story - it's basically true. Apparently, the aquarium workers were growing increasingly confused and concerned because some of their fish were going missing (in the man's version it was sharks but I can't find anything specifying which fish were missing). Nobody could figure out where they were going or how they were disappearing. Then one day a researcher showed up to work really early and found the octopus climbing into the fish tank across from it for a snack. It turns out the octopus had been waiting until nobody was around and then climbing out of the tank, sliding across the aisle, and scaling the other tank to grab some extra food. It would eat its fill of captive aquarium fish and then come back the way it came - a total distance of about three feet.

Now we know that octopuses are smart. In fact, they've got the largest brain to body mass ratio of all of the invertebrates humans have studied so far. They can find their way through mazes, solve problems, and remember the solutions. They can unscrew lids, undo fasteners, open boxes, and because they have no bones they can squeeze through any space large enough to fit their beak. Back then nobody knew that octopuses were capable of all of that so the tank wasn't nearly as secure. At the aquarium now they have multiple locks and latches securing the octopus tanks.