I stopped by again today. The only 'news' addendum is the sea otters were still off display. I asked the educators and one of them said pretty directly that it's just "annual routine maintenance" and nothing more.
I also saw the harbor seals in with the belugas.
I know many of you will think 'duh' but there was such a world of difference in crowding between Sunday and Monday, more drastic than I've seen at some other institutions. River Scout in particularly benefited a lot from not being crowded.
They’re trying to breed the sand tigers down in Marineland. Going to guess that’s what the research project is.
I had heard the same of late, so good to have it corroborated. I imagine
@Persephone is correct about the specific content of the research - there’s a lot of aquaria participating in that breeding effort through the AZA. Ripley’s Myrtle Beach was the first one to do it successfully here in the US.
That's really cool and I hope that's the case. It would be great to have more captive breeding programs for sharks, especially as sharks overall and Sand tigers in particular are such charismatic species.
Excellent, yeah that would be consistent with the info I have - Talulah and Blue are Atlantic mantas (Mobula yarae), while Nandi is a reef manta (Mobula alfredi).
It's great that the aquarium is already integrating this into their education efforts. I was a little impressed they had brought it in so quickly!
Yeah, it seems like it’s probably semi-daily in some form or another, because they allow paying customers to dive in the tank about twice or thrice a week and probably have their staff in there every other day in some capacity.
Yeah, this is the real reason I asked - I knew they had dive programs but I had been wondering more about the frequency.
Always excellent to hear. Honestly, I fully expect her to be there a long while barring any surprise health issues (and very much hoping for that not to come to pass). As I mentioned before, tigers can live quite a long time in captivity; all the previous ones that did so were not in as specialized a tank as S: POTD, nor were they provided as advanced of care as it was decades ago. Here’s to many more years and many happy returns for her and all of us who love visiting her.
That's great to hear. She was a little more showy today - she's very much a highlight of the complex for me, I felt a little bad how often I'd drop attention on the hammerheads, also a rarity I was excited about, to get another blurry shot of the tiger shark.
Out of the vaguest curiosity, did they happen to say how big she’s gotten now? When I visited in ‘22 she was stated to be 9 feet, but smart money says she’s grown larger in almost exactly 3 years.
I wish I'd seen this before I went in, I would have asked! No, unfortunately that did not come up.
Fwiw, if it's of interest, they told me there are's the one tiger (well-known) three silvertip sharks, and I believe fourteen great hammerheads, at least two of which were males, and that pretty much all of the current sharks are the same from the exhibit's opening..
The skeleton diver is probably there because when it gets around Halloween, Georgia Aquarium's take on the holiday is a sunken ship / ghost pirate theme. When it's Christmas, they have diving Santa and elves in Ocean Voyager for that season.
I saw a lot of the Haunted theming, yeah -- Santa in Ocean Voyager sounds like it would be pretty fun though!
Last I was there, I also got to see that the divers in Ocean Voyager can help with marriage proposals by holding that one crucial sign.
I have been having trouble trying to see the Asian small-clawed otters too, but I thought it was because they get put up for the night, since the aquarium can have varying closing times.
Sounds very cute about the proposal!
Whatever is up with the small-clawed otters, they weren't around yesterday all day or today from 4pm to 6pm.
