A couple of photos from the Osaka Aquarium

[telophase]

Crossposted from Glamorous in Retrospect. Author: Stephanie.

Only a couple of photos because it’s a pain to edit photos on the iPad. I’ll wait til we get back to post more.

The Kaiyukan Aquarium is a five-story aquarium that features animals and habitats from around the Ring of Fire, the tectonically active zone that circles the Pacific Ocean.

It’s five stories tall, and after you buy your ticket they take you up a loooong escalator that deposits you at the top of the building. You then slowly spiral your way down, circling the tanks, which are each several stories tall. Everyone crowds up at the top even though they try to control the crowd a bit by letting people onto the escalator in batches, but for a while there we had to take it on faith that there were actual animals in the aquarium because we couldn’t get close enough to the exhibits to see anything. As you start walking down the ramps, however, the crowds thin out enough that you can easily wait a minute or two to get close to the plexiglass wall and peer in at the animals.

Concerned shark wants to open up a conversation with you.

Zen seal is Zen.

The aquarium docent here was entertaining kids by playing with the seal–she’d throw the glove up in the air and the seal would follow it around.

Anyway, they’ve got a whale shark in the Japanese-area tank, but it was swimming around pretty far away from the spots I was standing on my journey around the tank, so my shots are hazy enough that I’m going to wait til I get home and can clean up the haze in Photoshop to post them, otherwise you’ll just find yourself squinting at the blue haze going “Is that it?”

Comments

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

Tell me you didn't miss the "Super Kawaii!" area full of teensy sea animals. Some of them were so cute I thought I might explode.

That was also the aquarium with the sad beaked whale - it was an endangered whale in a small tank with literally zero enrichment material. I felt very badly for it.