Bristol Aquarium

This Sunday, I visited the Bristol Aquarium with a couple of friends from school. I had never been to an aquarium before, so it was quite an experience!

It was frustratingly difficult to take even decent photos through the glass tanks of the fish that just wouldn’t stay still. Consequently, most pictures were something like this:

Of course, I will only show the least blurry photos in this post. For that reason, the post will also be quite short – for better or for worse.

Among the animals that were easy to photograph was the colossal lobster that seemed too large to be bothered to even move. You can see the camera casing I placed outside the tank as a scale.

As my friend Joe pointed out to me: note that the lobster has two different claw types, probably adapted for different forms of food manipulation – the more robust one may be for crunching hard shells, and the more slender claw could have a flesh-cutting function.

Fluorescent invertebrates made rather spectacular sights. Here is a medusa (medusozoans) called Aurelia (looked it up on Wikipedia).

 

And here are some sea anemones (anthozoans):

Both are cnidarians, invertebrates with a radial symmetry (which more or less means that they are symmetrical along various different planes round the centre of the organism); most have tentacles with sting cells (called cnidocytes; hence the name) that are used to capture prey. The group also includes corals, within the subgroup Anthozoa – so they are put together with the sea anemones. If memory serves, the characteristics that define the group has to do with their reproductive cycle, but I have not looked much into it yet…

Corals there were plenty of in the coral reef tank.

All of those creatures are not corals. There are also some poriferans – simple clusters of specialised cells with no symmetry, no mouth and no anus; they feed by filtering food particles out of the water that flows into their many pores (hence the name). These are probably the most primitive and dull animals you can imagine: they really don’t do much more than sit in place and filter food from the currents. Regardless, they can be nice to look at.

For the next picture, I will not say what type of animal it is – just try to see for yourself.

The aquarium also had room for an array of plants, out of which one was particularly fascinating: a plant with bipinnate leaves that fold inward when you touch them!

To really appreciate the marvel of this phenomenon, you have to see it for yourself. It’s just incredible!

Moving on to vertebrates, but sticking to the theme of non-aquatic life forms at the aquarium, there were a few terraria (a terrarium is… like an aquarium without water, where you keep land creatures) with a few terrestrial arthropods (including a creepy tarantula spider) and a bunch of amphibians, most notably these poison dart frogs:

The bright colour patterns are a natural signal screaming: “I am full of poison; if you touch me, you will die!” Indeed, the name comes from the fact that tribesmen use the venom for highly lethal (or at least paralysing) poison darts.

Also famous for being deadly, the piranhas were ominously peaceful in their tank.

This meant not only that I could get some decent pictures, but also that we could play stare-out with them! (The problem, however, is that fish don’t have eyelids…)

The others were excited to see the sharks they had heard about, but they turned out to be less than a metre in length… not very impressive, in other words. Far more interesting, however, were the many moray eels there and about. These miniature leviathans look very much like dragons, and apparently have two sets of jaws, the pharyngeal jaws being located further back in the mouth, probably used to aid swallowing by dragging captured pray down the throat.

Finally, the tank whose magic had me completely mesmerised:

I could just stand there and stare at it for minutes without many thoughts going through my head. It was calming, rejuvenating and just plain beautiful. Mind-cleansing and stress-removing. Even the sea urchins (echinoids) seemed serene, despite their uncanny appearance.