In keeping with our recent tradition of investigating this amazing city, Ivan and I visited the New York Aquarium a couple weeks ago in Coney Island.
We bought our tickets online to save a little money and bypass the admission lines. We arrived at the aquarium around noon and were out in less than two hours.
The brevity wasn’t due to the small crowd at the aquarium. (There was a respectable amount of visitors.) Rather, we quickly ran out of aquarium… That is, the park had very few exhibits.
The reason for the lack of exhibits became obvious once we reached the end of the park and found a construction barrier. On the other side was a construction site larger than the entire current aquarium.
The aquarium is rebuilding after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. Flooded and facing over 65 million dollars of damage, the aquarium is actually not doing too terribly in its presentation.
We saw some marine fish in a huge tank and a handful of smaller tanks with freshwater or marine fish. There were little feeder tanks and an intimidating tank full of piranha with a presumably knowledgeable worker standing nearby creepily running a dried piranha along her neck (No, seriously, this happened). There were manta rays and about half the cast of Finding Nemo. Though, we saw no eels, sharks, jellyfish or aquarium caves (you know what I mean—when you walk through a hallway that is essentially a tunnel through a massive tank? I want to go to one!).
Outside, the bloated walruses were sunning themselves; the seals were popping out of the water and diving back under; the fat otter was floating near a crowd of visitors, scrubbing its fur clean adorably; and the penguins were standing particularly still as if they didn’t quite trust the throngs of babbling New Yorkers huddled around their exhibit.
There was an area for live shows with the sea lions and/or seals, but we opted out since we hadn’t thought to apply sunscreen and that Sunday was particularly scorching.
