Sunday Six: Week 10

Okay, this is a Recap Six from yesterday. Although, I ended up at the Georgia Aquarium rather than the King Tut exhibit. First, I'd really been looking forward to seeing the behind the scenes area all week. Second, I learned you cannot take any photos whatsoever inside the Tut exhibit. No cameras allowed. Period. While this makes sense, it's not a great spot to visit for a photo challenge.

So, today we have six photos from my visit to the aquarium, although only one is actually from my behind the scenes tour. There are a few others that will pop up for the 365 in 2009 challenge.


This is a cuttlefish. This type of cuttlefish (the common cuttlefish) only live one to two years. Cuttlefish are photochromic, having the ability to change their color to camouflage them from predators. Another interesting fact, sepia ink was originally obtained from cuttlefish rather than the artificial dyes currently used. They are hard to photograph, too!


This is part of the lobby area of the Georgia Aquarium. I just liked the lines and colors.


This wall includes the names of many donors to the Georgia Aquarium. It's cased in acrylic, so it provides pretty neat reflections of other parts of the aquarium.


The Georgia Aquarium currently houses four adolescent whale sharks. They have two females, Alice and Trixie, and two males, Taroko and Yushan. The females are a bit older, and larger, than the males, however they don't actually know how old these fish are. Whale sharks can grow to be around 25 to 35 feet long. If I remember correctly, Trixie is the longest one here, at 22 feet. To be so large, they actually have a throat the size of a quarter, which means they're filter feeders.


This is a Largetooth Sawfish. I have visited this aquarium three times and this is the first time I've been able to get a photo of this guy that wasn't blurry!


The whale sharks, largetooth sawfish, and many, many others all live here . . . in the Ocean Voyager tank. It's referred to as the one ocean tank because it houses species that you'd mostly likely not find together, and is meant to represent the fact that our oceans are all one big ocean. The tank itself is enormous and it holds 6.3 million gallons of water. The habitat dimensions are 284’ long x 126’ wide x 30’ deep at its largest points. It is the largest single aquarium habitat in the world. I took this picture standing on a piece of scaffolding that runs across the tank and it captures all but about 1/3 of the tank.

One of the neat things about the aquarium, at least I think, is that all of the species housed here were either rescues or born in a zoo or aquarium. Many animals have been rehabilitated and returned to the sea. Additionally, the aquarium is involved in many different areas of marine research, especially with regard to whale sharks.