Happy New Year's Eve Day, and best wishes to all for a very happy New Year!
I had a lot fun writing the post about visiting the new Ocean Wonders: Sharks exhibit at the New York Aquarium. I enjoy it when I need to do research for a post, I like tracking information down, and for that post I did a little digging because I knew Sandy had set everything back by a couple of years, and I wanted to talk about things like how long the facility was closed to the public and how the construction timeline had been affected.
I ran across some pretty interesting articles in the process and though I would share those here, including this video, created for the 2018 conference of the American Zoological Association. It offers a glimpse of the downstairs area of the Sea Cliffs exhibit, where I used to go play with the scarf-chasing fur seal, with a couple of feet of sea water in the exhibit area, plus a pretty complete walk-through of the new exhibit. I see that I really did zip by a lot of information. Unfortunately the one I really did notice was with the types of shark teeth, it was quite interesting but I say "unfortunately" because what really caught my eye was that knuckleheads have already broken off most of the teeth and the entire lower jaw set of the seal-catching teeth was missing entirely. Maybe the exhibit was designed that way so that they can replace the teeth, not the whole head, when too many get broken, but it looked like poor Grandpa Shark lost half his dentures. Why must knuckleheads be such knuckleheads? Sigh.
On a cheerfuller note, it was fun to see an aerial view of the beach grass plots that I'd mentioned in my boardwalk stroll post as being planted by some of my swimmer friends and lots of other volunteers from the Coney Island community. You can see those really well in the flyover shots in the 2nd minute of the video.
Anyways, I also found some good articles that I wanted to share. I started with Wikipedia, of course (just donated to them as I do use that site a lot!), and they have a pretty solid article about the aquarium. That's where I got the bit about staff actually staying on-site and being able to save an impressive 90% of the animals who lived there, and fortunately the authors of that article did a really solid job with their references -- you know how I said "speaking of terrifying, I can't even imagine what the scene there must have been like as the Atlantic's cold October water came washing through the facility"? Turns out that I don't have to imagine it, the director told the whole story to the Times not long after Sandy. Click here to read that article, and then there was an interesting follow-up on the repairs and new construction in May of 2017. The Times of course also did an extensive review of the opening, but that repeats a good bit of the info from the older articles, so here's a shorter review from Curbed NY.
Will be watching for what comes next (maybe repairs to downstairs in the Sea Cliffs?), and just can't resist closing with a video that was not part of my low-key research, but is linked to in the first Times article after Sandy, and I just had to share. Enjoy!
I had a lot fun writing the post about visiting the new Ocean Wonders: Sharks exhibit at the New York Aquarium. I enjoy it when I need to do research for a post, I like tracking information down, and for that post I did a little digging because I knew Sandy had set everything back by a couple of years, and I wanted to talk about things like how long the facility was closed to the public and how the construction timeline had been affected.
I ran across some pretty interesting articles in the process and though I would share those here, including this video, created for the 2018 conference of the American Zoological Association. It offers a glimpse of the downstairs area of the Sea Cliffs exhibit, where I used to go play with the scarf-chasing fur seal, with a couple of feet of sea water in the exhibit area, plus a pretty complete walk-through of the new exhibit. I see that I really did zip by a lot of information. Unfortunately the one I really did notice was with the types of shark teeth, it was quite interesting but I say "unfortunately" because what really caught my eye was that knuckleheads have already broken off most of the teeth and the entire lower jaw set of the seal-catching teeth was missing entirely. Maybe the exhibit was designed that way so that they can replace the teeth, not the whole head, when too many get broken, but it looked like poor Grandpa Shark lost half his dentures. Why must knuckleheads be such knuckleheads? Sigh.
On a cheerfuller note, it was fun to see an aerial view of the beach grass plots that I'd mentioned in my boardwalk stroll post as being planted by some of my swimmer friends and lots of other volunteers from the Coney Island community. You can see those really well in the flyover shots in the 2nd minute of the video.
Anyways, I also found some good articles that I wanted to share. I started with Wikipedia, of course (just donated to them as I do use that site a lot!), and they have a pretty solid article about the aquarium. That's where I got the bit about staff actually staying on-site and being able to save an impressive 90% of the animals who lived there, and fortunately the authors of that article did a really solid job with their references -- you know how I said "speaking of terrifying, I can't even imagine what the scene there must have been like as the Atlantic's cold October water came washing through the facility"? Turns out that I don't have to imagine it, the director told the whole story to the Times not long after Sandy. Click here to read that article, and then there was an interesting follow-up on the repairs and new construction in May of 2017. The Times of course also did an extensive review of the opening, but that repeats a good bit of the info from the older articles, so here's a shorter review from Curbed NY.
Will be watching for what comes next (maybe repairs to downstairs in the Sea Cliffs?), and just can't resist closing with a video that was not part of my low-key research, but is linked to in the first Times article after Sandy, and I just had to share. Enjoy!
3 comments:
Happy New Year, Bonnie!
That video is too cute. Who knew these guys could be so adorable!
Happy New Year, Richard! I've gotten very bad about keeping up with my boat blogs, but I just went through my blogroll to see who's still blogging out there - great to see you're still sharing your adventures, I'll try to keep up better.
Haralee, isn't it adorable? You can see why I had to share. The funniest part of the "Hurricane fills aquarium with water" was how this guy thought the waves in his pool were so much fun!
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