57 Fun Facts About Aquariums

In which city did the first public aquarium open, in May 1853?

London. The Fish House at the city's zoo in Regent's Park was built much like a greenhouse, and aquariums in Naples and Paris soon followed its lead.

Which showman opened the first American aquarium in 1856 as part of his Broadway museum?

P. T. Barnum saw there was money in live sea creatures: the circus man showed them at his American Museum, beluga whales among them, until the building burned down.

In 1850 the chemist Robert Warington showed that a tank's water plants could supply its fish with enough of what?

Oxygen. Warington kept goldfish, eelgrass and water snails together in a glass vessel, and told the Chemical Society that only the evaporated water would ever need replacing.

Which French marine biologist created the first experimental aquaria in 1832?

Jeanne Villepreux-Power. Working in Sicily, she used her glass tanks to show that the argonaut, a relative of the octopus, grows its own shell instead of taking one from another animal.

Goldfish were first bred as ornamental pets, from drab wild carp, in which country?

China. Under the Song dynasty yellow goldfish were reserved for the imperial family, and commoners were forbidden to keep them.

Which undersea explorer ran Monaco's Oceanographic Museum and its aquarium from 1957 to 1988?

Jacques Cousteau. He had co-invented the Aqua-Lung in 1943, which let divers swim freely underwater for long spells, and he ran the museum for 31 years while filming what he found down there.

The New York Aquarium began in 1896 in a Manhattan fort and reopened in 1957 in which seaside neighborhood?

Coney Island. The fort, Castle Garden, had been America's first official immigrant processing center before Ellis Island, then spent 45 years as a fish house until the city closed it in 1941.

Which Indo-Pacific fish, now overrunning Caribbean reefs, is thought to have spread from dumped home aquarium pets?

Lionfish. Almost nothing in their new waters preys on them, so they have spread from the US southeast coast through the Caribbean and the Gulf, eating the young of native reef fish as they go.

What material finally allowed all-glass, frameless aquariums in the 1960s?

Silicone sealant. Earlier tanks held their glass in putty-sealed metal frames, and seawater corrodes metal; silicone bonds glass straight to glass, so a tank needs no supporting frame.

Which algae-eating crustacean, popularised by Japanese aquascaper Takashi Amano, is now sold under his name?

A shrimp. Amano kept armies of them grazing in his planted tanks, and the Amano shrimp cannot multiply in a home freshwater tank because its larvae need salty water to survive.

A kreisel tank's rounded walls and gentle circular current are designed for displaying which animals?

Jellyfish. They drift rather than steer, so in a square tank they get trapped in corners or pulled onto filter intakes; a kreisel, named for a spinning top, keeps them circling gently in open water.

What is a 'Macquarium'?

A tank in a Macintosh computer shell. Columnist Andy Ihnatko joked to a reader that the best upgrade for an old Mac 512K was to gut it for fish, then readers wrote in asking how, so he drew up plans.

Roughly what does one litre of aquarium water weigh?

1 kilogram, by design: the kilogram was first defined in 1795 as the mass of a litre of water. A modest 200-litre tank therefore holds 200 kg of water before you add glass, gravel and a stand.

What toxic compound do fish excrete that nitrifying bacteria must convert in a tank?

Ammonia leaves a fish mostly through its gills, not in its urine. Filter bacteria turn it into nitrite, still toxic, and then into far milder nitrate.

What name do fishkeepers give the water-quality crisis that hits a freshly set-up aquarium before its bacteria establish?

New Tank Syndrome strikes in the first few weeks because the filter bacteria that clear fish waste need six to eight weeks to build up, which is why keepers add fish a few at a time.

Which popular aquarium fish is named after a man who sent specimens from Trinidad to the British Museum in 1866?

Guppy. The fish was named in honour of its collector, Lechmere Guppy, but the species had already been described in 1859, so the scientific name was dropped and only the nickname stuck.

What usually provides the primary biological filtration in a reef aquarium?

Live rock is not alive itself: it is dead coral skeleton, and the name comes from the bacteria, algae and tiny animals living on and inside it, which do the filtering.

In Finding Nemo, the captured young clownfish is dropped into an aquarium in what kind of place?

A dentist's office. The tank's scarred leader Gill, himself taken from the ocean when young, hatches the escape plan: jam the filter so the dentist has to bag the fish while he cleans it.

Bernard Marcus, whose gift paid for most of the Georgia Aquarium, made his fortune co-founding which chain?

Home Depot. Marcus and Arthur Blank started it in 1978, just after both were pushed out of a Los Angeles home-improvement chain called Handy Dan; 27 years later the aquarium opened as his gift.

Georgia Aquarium's first whale sharks, Ralph, Norton, Alice and Trixie, were named after characters from which sitcom?

The Honeymooners. All four came from Taiwan, where they had been caught under the yearly fishing quota and would otherwise have been sold to be eaten.

Which corporation donated the land on which the Georgia Aquarium stands?

Coca-Cola gave the downtown site and then became the neighbour: its own museum, the World of Coca-Cola, moved in next door in 2007, on a campus named after the drink's inventor, John Pemberton.

What was Monterey Bay Aquarium the first to exhibit when it opened in 1984?

A living kelp forest. Nobody had grown giant kelp in an aquarium before; it works because a custom surge machine keeps the water constantly moving, and the kelp now grows about four inches a day.

Monterey Bay Aquarium was built on the site of what kind of former factory?

A sardine cannery. The Hovden Cannery, once the biggest sardine packer in town, shut after the fishery collapsed; the aquarium was built on its footprint and kept the old plant's roof line.

Which tech co-founder's family funded Monterey Bay Aquarium?

David Packard gave $55 million and his own engineering: the Hewlett-Packard co-founder personally designed the surge machine that keeps water moving in the aquarium's centrepiece tank.

What sustainable-fish advisory list has Monterey Bay Aquarium published since 1999?

Seafood Watch began by accident: during a 1997 exhibition the aquarium's restaurant set out table cards listing fish to choose or avoid, and diners pocketed so many that the list became a programme two years later.

How did Chicago's inland Shedd Aquarium get seawater for its 1930 opening?

Railroad tank cars from Key West: twenty of them shuttled back and forth until a million gallons had arrived, and the aquarium's own rail car, the Nautilus, went on fetching live fish from the coasts for decades.

Granddad, who lived at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium from 1933 to 2017, was which kind of fish?

Lungfish. Granddad, an Australian lungfish, arrived from Sydney for Chicago's 1933 World's Fair already full-grown, so his age was a guess until DNA put it at about 109 and traced him to Queensland's Burnett River.

John G. Shedd, who gifted Chicago its aquarium, was a protégé of which retail magnate?

Marshall Field hired the New Hampshire farm boy at $10 a week and later told a Senate committee that Shedd was the best merchant in the United States; Shedd went on to run the company after him.

Which popular aquarium fish was first domesticated in Thailand for staged contests between males?

Betta. Better known as the Siamese fighting fish, it was a dull-coloured fish in the wild; the flowing fins and jewel colours of pet-shop fish were bred in later by fanciers.

The 'umi' in Okinawa's Churaumi Aquarium means sea, so what does the Okinawan word 'chura' mean?

Beautiful. 'Chura' is the Okinawan cousin of an old Japanese word, kiyora, meaning pure or clear: Okinawan speech turned the k-sound into ch, so Churaumi is the beautiful, clear sea.

The Kaiyukan, one of the world's largest aquariums, stands on the bay of which Japanese city?

Osaka. The Kaiyukan is laid out as a journey around the Pacific Ocean: an escalator lifts visitors to the eighth floor and they walk down past its habitats to the tank where whale sharks circle.

In which fish, a favourite of public aquariums, does the male carry the eggs and give birth to the young?

Seahorse. After days of courtship the female places her eggs in a pouch at the base of the male's tail, where they are fertilised and carried for weeks until he releases the tiny, fully formed young.

Which architect designed the Aquarium of Genoa for the 1992 Columbus expo?

Renzo Piano was born in Genoa, and used the Columbus celebrations to reconnect his native city's historic centre with its long cut-off old port; the aquarium became one of the new waterfront's landmarks.

Where was the AquaDom, the giant aquarium that burst in December 2022?

A hotel lobby in Berlin. The tank split just before six in the morning, sending a million litres of water and its 1,500 fish through the Radisson and out into the street, and two people were hurt.

Before it burst in 2022, what took visitors up through the middle of the AquaDom aquarium?

A glass elevator. Riders rose through a clear tube in the middle of the water, ringed by fish, and the whole tank had been refurbished only two years before it gave way.

A shark tank that sprang a leak in 2010 is the centrepiece of which city's biggest mall?

Dubai. The tank had opened with the Dubai Mall in 2008; when water began pouring onto the mall's floors, part of the centre was closed and evacuated.

In 1964 Vancouver Aquarium sent a sculptor to harpoon which animal as a model, then kept it alive when it survived?

An orca. Moby Doll was towed to a makeshift pen and lived about three months, long enough for some of the first close study of the species, as scientists arrived to record its calls.

Which salamander, a common sight in aquariums, keeps its feathery gills and never leaves the water?

Axolotl. Tanks and laboratories hold huge numbers of them, yet in the wild the species clings on only in a few lake canals in Mexico City and is critically endangered.

Which New Zealand city turned disused waterfront sewage tanks into the Kelly Tarlton's aquarium in 1985?

Auckland. Diver Kelly Tarlton built it on a small budget with family and friends, then died in his sleep seven weeks after it opened, the morning after its 100,000th visitor came through.

Merlin Entertainments, owner of the Sea Life aquarium chain, also runs which theme parks?

Legoland. In 2005 a loss-making Lego sold control of its theme parks to the investment firm that had just bought Sea Life, which merged the two under the Merlin name while Lego's owners kept a stake.

Cape Town's Two Oceans Aquarium is named for the meeting of which two oceans?

Indian and Atlantic. The name is a little generous: the official boundary between the two oceans runs through Cape Agulhas, Africa's true southern tip, about 176 km south-east of the aquarium's home city.

Ripley's Aquarium of Canada sits beside which Toronto landmark?

CN Tower. Ripley's had first planned its aquarium for Niagara Falls, shelved that scheme, and instead opened in 2013 on unused land at the foot of Canada's tallest structure.

L'Oceanogràfic, the oceanarium of the futuristic City of Arts and Sciences, is in which Spanish city?

Valencia. The complex stands in the old bed of the River Turia, which the city diverted after a catastrophic flood in 1957 and turned into a ribbon of parkland.

The National Aquarium in Baltimore opened in 1981 in which redeveloped district?

Inner Harbor. Mayor William Donald Schaefer christened the aquarium by wading into its seal pool in a striped Victorian bathing suit and straw boater, with a rubber duck under his arm.

Dory, the forgetful fish of Finding Nemo and its sequel, is which kind of reef fish?

Blue tang. In the sequel she tracks her parents to a California marine institute, part rescue centre and part aquarium, helped by a grumpy seven-armed octopus called Hank who keeps slipping his keepers.

An 1872 aquarium billed as the world's oldest still operating stands on the seafront of which English resort?

Brighton. When Prince Arthur opened its aquarium at Easter, only one tank had fish in it; the designer, Eugenius Birch, was better known for building seaside piers.

Monterey Bay Aquarium doubled as the Cetacean Institute, home of two humpback whales, in which 1986 film?

Star Trek IV. On screen the aquarium was moved up the coast to Sausalito, where Kirk and Spock find George and Gracie, the humpbacks they must carry forward to the 23rd century.

Why did many Victorian glass aquariums have a base of slate or steel?

To heat them over a flame. With no plug-in heaters, keepers set a small burner under the slate to warm the water, and some tanks had a domed metal bottom to spread the heat.

What do aquarists call water that is saltier than fresh water but less salty than the sea?

Brackish. It is what estuaries hold, river water mixing with seawater, so brackish tanks are stocked with animals from river mouths and mangroves instead of true river or reef species.

Letting tap water stand overnight no longer makes it safe for fish in many cities, because suppliers now add what?

Chloramine. Suppliers favour it because it is a longer-lasting cousin of chlorine that survives the trip through the pipes, which is exactly why it will not gas off from a bucket left to stand.

The 1960s TV series Flipper was filmed in the lagoon of which Florida marine park?

Miami Seaquarium. Flipper was a male on screen but was played by females, chiefly Susie and Kathy, chosen because they were less aggressive and their skin carried fewer fighting scars.

By one common stocking rule of thumb, how much water does each inch of small freshwater fish need?

One US gallon per inch is only a rough guide: keepers are advised to judge a fish's overall bulk instead of its length, since a deep-bodied fish makes far more waste than a slim one just as long.

Which Amazon fish, a showpiece of many public aquariums, must regularly surface to gulp air or drown?

The electric eel. Its mouth is lined with blood-rich folds that work like a lung, an adaptation to warm, stagnant swamps where its gills alone could never keep it supplied.

Which African rift lakes are among the most popular biotope aquarium themes?

Malawi and Tanganyika. Each lake evolved hundreds of cichlid species found nowhere else, so keepers build whole tanks around the fish of a single lake.

Snooty, born in 1948 and a Florida museum's star until 2017, was the oldest what ever recorded in captivity?

Manatee. Snooty was born at an aquarium whose owner's permit covered only one manatee, his mother, so in 1949 the calf was rehomed in a county that happens to be called Manatee.

Which aquarium feature, now found worldwide, did New Zealand diver Kelly Tarlton build in 1985?

A walk-through underwater tunnel. Tarlton's team heated 7 cm-thick acrylic sheets in an oven until they took the curve of a mould, then ran a moving walkway through the finished tube.

In 2004 Monterey Bay Aquarium became the first to keep which predator on display for months?

Great white shark. The young shark stayed about six months before being released, when none had lasted more than about two weeks in any aquarium; the aquarium's own first try, in 1984, had lasted 11 days.