Why Are Aquariums So Expensive?

snowleopard

snowleopard

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15+ year member
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I've had this discussion privately with ZooChatters before, but it always intrigues me that aquarium prices in North America are consistently more expensive than zoo prices. Other than San Diego, Bronx and the "theme park zoos", for the most part it costs about $15 U.S. to visit a typical zoo, while a lot of aquariums are around $30 admission. That is obviously a generalization, but it is also quite close to the truth. However, aquariums are consistently much more costly, often double a zoo in price, and I was told once that it was because apparently aquariums attract far more tourists than zoos. Zoos have approximately 75% or more of their patrons living within driving distance, while 25% (at most) come from out of town and are thus classified as tourists.

Aquariums are usually on waterfronts or in the heart of the downtown core of a city, and are thus easy to get to for a family visiting the area. While some zoo locations are relatively urban, for the most part they can be found outside of a city centre. It seems somehow unfair that the price of aquariums is so high when in terms of size they are rarely more than 2 acres, and also the time spent in aquariums pales in comparison to almost every zoo. Is this the same throughout Europe?
 
Just for comparison, I've just done a little bit of "market research" regarding the prices of some UK aquariums and a zoo which is close to them.

£14.50 - Blue Planet Aquarium
£14.95 - Chester Zoo

£8.95 - The Deep Aquarium
£23.00 - Flamingo Land (incl Theme park) or £8.50 - Yorkshire Wildlife Park

£16.00 - Sealife (London)
£16.80 - London Zoo

£11.00 - National Marine Aquarium
£8.95 - Dartmoor Zoo or £13.60 - Paignton

£8.75 - Lakes Aquarium
£11.50 - South Lakes

£9.00 - Blue Reef Aquarium (Portsmouth)
£16.00 - Marwell Zoo

The prices of our aquariums seem to be comparable to our zoo's entry prices, but judging from photos, our aquariums don't appear to be on the same level as Georgia or Monterey Bay f.e.
 
Add to that, much higher initial construction (and therefore financing) costs. Zoos can grow slowly...often over decades or a century. Aquariums spring up fully developed on opening day (although some expand later).
 
another aquarium near flamingoland, scarborough

so

The Deep £8.95

Flamingo Land (inc theme Park) £23.00

Yorkshire Wildlife Park £8.50

Sea Life Scarborough cant find info
 
Take into consideration the cost of running it is easy to say but believe me (being an aquaist) the cost of filtration alone for a small tank would be about 2 million a year for a large tank, just one. Then there is the electrical bill which would be even more on top of that because filters, heaters, special lights require energy and all those things are extreamly expensive. With the addition of water bills and seafood is generally more expensive then dried pellets and lettuce, etc.

I know you mention about the cost on running but its more then three words. I know some zoos have aquriums but not to the size and scale that ture aquariums have.
 
Aquarium prices in England are intriguing, as they are neck-and-neck with the cost of visiting a nearby zoo. However, I'm sure that in general ZooChatters spend two to three times longer in a zoo in comparison to an aquarium. The big American aquariums are amazing places to visit that are surely amongst the best in the world, but I still feel as if the admission costs are far too expensive. A few hours spent within a tiny space looking at tanks, which is all wonderful, but a typical zoo offers far more "bang for the buck".

North American Prices:

Georgia Aquarium (including 3-D Show) = $29.50
Shedd Aquarium = $24.95
Monterey Bay Aquarium = $29.95
Vancouver Aquarium = $28
National Aquarium (Baltimore) = $29.95
Tennesse Aquarium = $21.95
Ripley's Aquarium = $22.34

Australian Prices:

Melbourne Aquarium = $31.50
Sydney Aquarium = $31.95
AQWA (Perth) = $26.50
 
Hey, don't kid yourself--Bronx IS 15 for entry.

I never saw the aquarium cost as justified as well...my aquariums are subpar. I've only been to one where I spent more than an hour. These parts, Cincinnati Zoo is $13...the aquarium is $20 and NOT worth it. I assumed in our case it was just that Newport is in a trendy/hip/expensive area.
 
Interesting discussion. I think we have covered many of the factors here. I think the key point is the capital cost - you can't usually open a small aquarium and then expand it little by little. I also think that the average visit is likely to be shorter at a public aquarium than at a zoo, so there is less demand for refreshments and perhaps lower gift shop sales too.

Alan
 
As others have said, it's the much higher start up and maintenance costs. Not only do large aquariums have to deal with the same costs an average zoo does (food, staff, etc) they have to deal with the specialized needs of marine life. They have to cover their costs somehow, and that is by charging the admission they do. If Georgia didn't have as much corporate sponsorship as it does, it probably wouldn't exist as it would have needed to charge over $50 for general admission to try and cover themselves.
 
Aquariums are very expensive to maintain because the water has to be kept just right (temperature, salt level for sea aquariums, filtration of animal waste, etc) which is hard to do for large bodies of water. I saw a televison show several years ago, when many U.S. cities were building aquariums supposedly as revenue-generating attractions, and they actually cost the cities lots of money rather than generating money. I know the Denver Aquarium had to be sold by the city to Landry's seafood restaurants, who only made it profitable by adding one of their fancy fish restaurants.

Ten years ago my city of Tucson passed a voter-approved downtown redevelopment plan which initially showed an aquarium as part of the plan. After a feasibilty study, including the choosing of a firm to build it, the city decided it would cost too much and scrapped the idea of an aquarium here. (Which is probably good, since we are in a desert and in the midst of a 20-year drought).
 
That is not entirely true Arizona, it depends who you use for construction and the aquarium's location... Marinescape one of the world's oldest aquarium construction companies and will even do feasibility estimates, supply of animals, staff training, etc and their aquariums usually have paid for themselves after 3 or so years...

As to the original question, construction costs, the fact most zoos are society or local government run while most aquariums are "for profit", running costs etc are all factors that increase admission but I believe it is much more complicated than that... The time passed since the first "modern" aquariums (with curved tunnels) were made is coming up to thirty years and people have been very cautious to experiment for fear of upsetting the formula...

Consider the template for the usual public aquarium, it usually sits adjacent to the sea, pumps in seawater and forces it under pressure through filters which makes it quite sterile (lacking the nasties but also strips it of some the natural elements of sea water) and then pumps the water back out to the ocean... This essentially makes the aquarium an extension of the sea and very clean but is very, very energy intensive...

Think of the lighting in all the aquariums you've visited, very little natural light (to protect the water in most cases) and therefore a large air con and heating bill, all this uses heaps of power too...

Think of the building design, very monolithic as it needs to keep out light, support large pumps and of course the heavy weights of water, not very eco-friendly when you think of sustainability design principles (I guess with the exception of the California Acedemy of Science, CAS), acrylic is incredibly expensive, again these types of buildings are very electricity intensive...

Feeding costs as already mentioned can be high, I know when I buy fish from the supermarket..!

So what is the solution to these problems, well quite simply a new type of aquarium design... In Leigh in New Zealand a Marine Biologist started a very small scale aquarium which instead of sucking water from the sea and sanitising it, he filled a set of tanks with sea water in an enclosed system and cycled the water between all the tanks using a bacteria sump and lots of natural light, after trial and error he managed to get the system to replicate all the processes the sea goes through naturally and all the different tanks were inter-relateded, i.e. he had 2 tidal tanks which while one filled the other emptied surging the mud in the bottom of the tank, this feed into different coastal reef tanks, deep sea tanks and finally into a bacteria sump tank with no light whatsoever to deal with the waste... These systems are called temperate eco-system tanks by aquarists...

How is this type of system the answer..? Well firstly you save all the money of large pumps drawing in seawater (buying and operating them), you save all the money of filtering the water, in fact all you need are comparitively small pumps to circle the water... Secondly natural light is not only okay in a system like this, it is needed..! Which means better, sustainable, energy efficient building designs are avaiable, lots of glass, skylights etc all saving on heating costs, with sustainable design like CAS, solar panels etc, basically the only heavy, concrete intensive part of the building would be the tanks themselves... An aquarium like this would use very little electricity compared to a normal one (if you got really serious about solar panels and energy efficiency it could be almost a net zero user of electricity) and be far cheaper to construct, basically tanks surrounded by a facade... Finally this type of enclosed design means the same sized aquarium can support far fewer animals (saving on food costs) which would seem a disadvantage but the plants and environment in the tanks are vitally important to the animals survival and interact with the fish in much more engaging way (i.e. not just fish swimming in a sterile tank) these systems require filter feeders, crusteaceans, coral and plant life, visitors would spend much more time watching as the animals behaved more naturally and in concert with the tank as a whole and the nature of the progression of the water from tank to tank leads itself to a much more engaging "story" as you move through the aquarium...

Of course there are many disadvantages to such a system, one it takes time for the natural processes to start cycling in the tank meaning animals can only be added slowly, the system can "crash" killing the animals and causing the cycling process to start again but all in all I think you would be able to bring the entry price down significantly and provide a much better and longer visitor experience (good for those gift and food shops)... Essentially though it is a far harder and risker system to set up and maintain and this is why I don't think it has been tried on a large scale yet...

Here are some links if your interested, the first is the amazing seafriends ecosystem aquariums:

Aquarium studies

This is Marinescape a pretty fantastic NZ aquarium company:

Marinescape
 
Sun Wukong said:
To answer the initial question: because of much higher maintenance costs.
Click to expand...

Believe it or not, I think Sun is on to something here. Aquariums are quite expensive to maintain -- and they have a much lower "margin of error" when it comes to maintenance. It's similar to maintaining an automobile, compared to maintaining an airplane. If you make a mistake with an auto, there's a good chance that it'll simply break down and you'll roll to the side of the road, unharmed. But if you make a mistake with a plane, "rolling to the side of the road" means crashing and dying. Same thing with zoos vs aquariums. Make a mistake in maintaining a zoo and they usually just get dirty and the animals go hungry and get cranky. Make a mistake in an aquarium and an entire tank full of fish dies (as happened last year at Moody Gardens in Texas). This lower threshhold for errors means having to invest more in maintenance.

But I think there's an even bigger reason of aquariums' higher admission prices: the simple economic laws of supply & demand. I've seen AZA survey information that says that about 90% of visitors to American zoos are locals coming from within 2 hours of the zoo's location. Only 10% are tourists, visiting the area from out-of-town. But with most of America's aquariums, the statistics are reversed, with the majority of aquarium visitors coming from out-of-town tourists. This explains why many aquariums are located in high-visibility tourist locales, such as Baltimore's Inner Harbor, near Chicago's Navy Pier, at Monterey's Cannery Row, New York's Coney Island, or even on San Francisco's Pier 39.

Simple economics says that vacationing tourists are more willing to spend money than local families. Tourists are looking for something to do and, if not spending their bucks at the aquarium, they'll be spending them on cotton candy or smoothies at a tourist shopping mall.
 
It's important to remember that most U.S. zoos are heavily subsidized by the local government in staggering amounts and percentages. For example, the New York Zoos receive over 50% of their operating budget from the city. St. Louis Zoo and Lincoln Park in Chicago receive 100% (which is also why they are free).

Other than the New York Aquarium (which is a part of the New York Zoo system; Wildlife Conservation Society), I cannot think of any modern aquarium that receives ANY operating subsidy from the government. As such, they must charge more. Additionally, aquariums are largely if not exclusively indoor facilities with AC & heating costs and huge Life Support Systems which consume a lot of power. Zoos have it lucky…Mother Nature provides the sun and the air, etc.
 
Casaflamingo said:
It's important to remember that most U.S. zoos are heavily subsidized by the local government in staggering amounts and percentages. For example, the New York Zoos receive over 50% of their operating budget from the city. St. Louis Zoo and Lincoln Park in Chicago receive 100% (which is also why they are free).

Other than the New York Aquarium (which is a part of the New York Zoo system; Wildlife Conservation Society), I cannot think of any modern aquarium that receives ANY operating subsidy from the government. As such, they must charge more. Additionally, aquariums are largely if not exclusively indoor facilities with AC & heating costs and huge Life Support Systems which consume a lot of power. Zoos have it lucky…Mother Nature provides the sun and the air, etc.
Click to expand...

While many zoos receive some subsidies, this statement is simply baseless. While the New York City Zoos (three of which are owned by the City but operated by WCS) receive approx. 25% of their operating support from various governments (WCS Annual Report 2008), few zoos around the country are so lucky. And cities and states have been cutting their support of zoos for many years.
 
NZ JEREMY - excellent and interesting info. Maybe it is time for an entirely new approach to aquariums.
 
If you go onto the marinescape website Arizona and have a look at the Ecoaquarium pages you can see they are thinking along the same lines as I am but by using the existing formula more energy efficiently rather than changing the formula and by designing the buildings better but still with the same lighting and heating constraints... Polishing a turd I'd say but at least an improvement...

If you consider the power use of aquariums in countries like the US, China, Australia etc where lots of the power is generated using fossil fuels, aquariums are big contributors to climate change and air pollution...
 
Ok, I'm a little slow on the uptake, I admit... can this system be used for large-scale tropical marine aquariums, Jeremy? And does it still require a lot of water changes?
 
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