揭秘蒙特利尔海洋馆 Monterey Bay Aquarium
发布: 2009-1-05 12:56 | 作者: wind | 来源: 大风车中英文门户网站社区
Water covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and supports some of the most complex eco-systems and bizarre creatures on the planet. Yet we only know about a fraction (really, it’s roughly ten percent) of what’s swimming around down there.
But every day at Monterey Bay Aquarium, researchers are hard at work trying to understand what’s going on in the abyss. You may have been to the aquarium and seen the exhibit, but just like the ocean, there’s a lot more going on underneath the surface.
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The aquarium is home to the largest jellyfish exhibit of its kind. Currently, Black Sea nettles, seen here, call this 2500-gallon tank home. The apparatus includes a circulating water flow that mimics ocean currents and keeps the nettle’s delicate skin from rubbing against the acrylic walls.
Behind the jellyfish exhibit, the luminescent tank looks quite different. The massive acrylic walls were custom-made by Nippura, a Japanese company that specializes in acrylic aquarium design and fabrication.
The jellyfish in the exhibit are cultured on site. These dishes contain specimens in their polyp stage of life. The polyp stage of the reproductive process was actually discovered here at the aquarium.
Sustenance for the jellyfish is grown at the aquarium as well. Staffers create a mini-food chain by raising phytoplankton to feed brine shrimp, which in turn are fed to the jellyfish.
In the past, part of the difficulty in raising these jellyfish was due to containment issues. Bill Hamner, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, developed the circular jelly holding tanks that the aquarium uses. All designs are open source, and the technology has been shared with other aquariums.
Underneath the exhibits is an intricate water distribution and filtration system. 2000 gallons of water are piped into the aquarium from Monterey Bay every minute. All seawater is filtered upon entering this system and sterilized when discharged. The result? Monterey Bay doesn’t get contaminated with foreign organisms.
Roughly one billion gallons of water per year pulse through the aquarium. To handle this deluge, a full-time staff is on hand to maintain the plumbing. The large tanks seen here contain sand filters for water running to the Outer Bay exhibit, while the smaller pipes distribute both warm and chilled seawater to animals that require specific temperatures.
Of the two million gallons of water collectively held in the aquarium, roughly half of it is routed into the largest display: the Outer Bay exhibit. The viewing window is 54 feet wide, 15 feet tall and 12 inches thick and was the largest of its kind when introduced in 1996. The exhibit houses tunas, sharks, pelagic stingrays, mahi mahi, sea turtles and the occasional great white shark.
These African blackfoot penguins have been on exhibit since Y2K and are a huge hit with crowds — groups gather daily to watch aviculturist Danielle York feed fish to the flightless birds. This particular species is native to the cold currents off the coast of South Africa. To keep themselves warm in the frigid waters, they have dual insulation: tightly packed feathers coating a layer of soft down.
California sea otters are a threatened species and one of the most popular creatures at the aquarium. Rescued when they were no longer able to survive in the wild, all the otters are treated with positive conditioning, which enables the staff to work with the animals more easily when it comes time for veterinary exams and handling.
Otter Aquarist Stephanie Cantabene holds the "Otter-Vater," a winch system that the staff uses to lift otters (comfortably confined to crates) from the sea level observation deck into an elevated otter paddock.