behind the scenes

I’ve never understood why people get so excited about the idea of backstage passes, at least for theatres and concert halls.  Having more or less grown up in such establishments, I find nothing glamorous about wings and fly spaces, dusty stage curtains (and they are always dusty), green rooms (usually tatty and often dirty, with uncomfortable seating), dressing rooms, and so on.  I like visiting the theatres where friends work, but that’s more about seeing my friends’ workspaces than anything.  In general, though, offer me a backstage pass and I’ll suggest that maybe it be given to someone who, y’know, thinks there’s something there worth seeing.

Then I was fortunate enough to be invited on a backstage tour of something whose backstage is really fantastic and fascinating and worth every nanosecond: the Georgia Aquarium.  No grungy green rooms with cigarette burns in the upholstery on the couches around that place, let me tell you what.

That’s the coral reef tank from the topside.  The tilting buckets to the right create the effect of surf, dumping water into the tank every 20-30 seconds or so.

I got to get this close to a whale shark.  I was practically shivering, I was so excited.  Whale sharks have been an object of fascination for me for a long time and I had never actually seen one that wasn’t in a photo or on film… today I saw four.  The Georgia Aquarium has a 6.5 million gallon tank in which four of them live (it’s the only aquarium outside of Asia that has whale sharks, and apparently the aquarium was designed around their enormous habitat) along with a number of manta rays, groupers, a devil ray, and many, many other fantastic fish.  If memory serves, the name of this whale shark is Alice.

I really, really, really want to swim with whale sharks now.  Oh my, yes.

Another view of a whale shark, this one from the visitor side.  Yes, they are really that big.  Unlike most sharks, though, they’re filter feeders, and eat mostly krill, tiny shrimplike creatures.  Their mouths are enormous, but apparently their esophagus is only about the diameter of a US quarter.

Underneath the enormous tank in which the whale sharks and manta rays live is this gobsmacking filter room, which keeps 6.5 million gallons of water clean, oxygenated, and appropriately saline.  The hum is bonestirring, though oddly quieter than I’d expected.  It felt like being in the bowels of a submarine might, though a whole lot more spacious, I expect.

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In the filtration room you just saw, and along the walls of the loading dock nearby — a loading dock which is, by the way, big enough to bring in a whale shark in a specially-built UPS shipping crate, as this is apparently how you get a whale shark into an aquarium — are these cryptic inscriptions on the wall.  On the other side of that wall is that 6.5 million gallons of water I have mentioned.  The “1 HR” is how much time you have before the wall collapses if it starts leaking.  Yes, I imagine you would want to make sure anything that penetrated that wall was well and duly sealed…

There are also beluga whales, which I adore, for all the reasons everyone adores belugas.  I like a charismatic predator, myself, and smart ones like belugas are even better.

This is apparently what I look like when I am mesmerized by beluga whales.

There was lots more.  But you get the idea.  And we (that’s my Philosopher on my left, and a bit of Youngest Stepson’s head to his left) had a glorious time, and I feel very fortunate that I got to go both backstage and all around and through what is, without question, the most impressive aquarium I’ve yet been in.  Thank you, Jay, for the private behind-the-scenes walkthrough… what a wonderful gift.