The Atlantic: Chicago is 800 miles from the nearest ocean, so when the world’s largest aquarium opened there in 1930, its director decided, logically, that the ocean must come to Chicago. The Shedd Aquarium sent a series of railway tank cars down to Key West, Florida. There, they siphoned up a million gallons of ocean water for Chicago’s “magnificent marble home for fish.” Visitors in the 1930s were greeted by seahorses, sawfish, baby sharks, and a 585-pound manatee.
18 comments:
It's interesting that even with fish some of the same things are true as they are for humans. Just like we need microbes and bacteria to be healthy, fish need that to. When I started the article the first thing I thought was that making artificial sea water might set off the balance of the fragile ocean eco system. so I'm actually surprised that the artificial sea water works at all. It makes complete sense to me that they would be healthier with those microbes present, just like we aren't healthy without our microbes. I'm honestly surprised it took them that long to realize that the health of the tanks would go up with the presence of micro organisms, because to me it only seems logical. I guess it's really just a testament to the obsession with the tanks being pretty over the health of the fish, because if it were filled with what the real ocean is filled with the water would not be crystal clear. I think Monterey has a good balance between the two, by making it pretty for the visitors but attending to the fish health in the evening.
This article is so incredibly intriguing. I am from the East Coast, and have never paid much thought to the water-related challenges that come with being landlocked in cities like Chicago. It is especially interesting for me, being from Maryland, because Baltimore is so close to the water that it seemed easy to get necessary amounts of it for their aquarium. I suppose I always just assumed aquarium construction teams either created salt water mixes in a lab or pumped seawater into trucks and hauled it inland. I never actually knew the process, let alone some of the cleaning procedures that are required for the water’s upkeep. I can’t even begin to imagine how careful the people working at the aquarium have to be in order to preserve their water’s integrity. Tap water can have pretty much anything in it, and balancing that out to keep the fish from being harmed must be a pretty massive task.
I never thought I would read an article about people making water, but here we are. As a native Chicagoan I love the Shedd Aquarium, after the Field Museum. Mr. Shedd was the second president of the Marshall Fields Company and created this amazing aquarium and piece of architecture. The building’s turn of the century architecture has sea life designed into the building like sea-star sconces and fish in the friezes. Not only is it a beautiful building they seem to truly care about the animal life, not just making money. Shipping all the water in the early days is truly dedication. The water is something very important into the design of the Aquarium, in the large mammal exhibits the rooms are backed by giant glass windows that are right against lake Michigan. On a stormy day the waves crash against the window creating this seamless effect of the sea water and the lake water being one. Oh yeah, and it is cool they can accurately reproduce salt water.
I too never really thought I would be reading an article about how aquariums get water for their tanks when they are not very close to an ocean. Being from Los Angeles, this isn't something that I ever really thought of. I have been intrigued by fish and thus aquariums for quite some time. I got my first fish tank when I was just about 10 years old. My family had always been very intrigued by animals and thus always had pets. I've never grown up in a house without a dog...or two. And often my family had other pets. For a while, my sister dad and I used to bond over taking care of hermit crabs, small land-based crabs that never seem to live too long in captivity. After having a few of those, we got fish. I had always wanted a fish tank. I used to feed them every morning, clean there tank often, and make sure they were happy and healthy. For a short period of time, I had a small saltwater tank. When it was time for cleaning I used to just go down to the fish store and buy a gallon or two of salt water. I never once thought about where it came from or how someone not living on the coast would get some. This was a really interesting article to read. As they say, you learn something new every day.
Like most people commenting on this article I really never thought I would read anything about making false seawater for aquariums. I found the process of how they make the seawater very interesting and I am very glad that they spend such close attention to making sure the seawater in the aquarium is very close to the actual ocean water in their natural habitat. Something that I do wonder, however, is if this water really is identical to natural ocean water and whether or not the fish are harmed or changed in any way from being in this synthetic seawater, and I wish the article would have touched more on the implications of using this water. The article did mention that they have to compromise the health of the creatures and they mentioned that they found a way to keep fish alive and not necessarily to keep them healthy, so I kind of think that they are not keeping the fish as healthy as they should be.
You know it is interesting to think that we have desalination plants that are taking out the salt in Australia and here in the US we are thinking of new ways to add it back in! Overall, I am very intrigued because I grew up in Boston where the aquarium was always planted right next to the ocean. It makes me wonder if Boston too makes their own water even though they are so close to the ocean. I wouldn’t be surprised, with recent technological advances, if engineers prefer these methods because of the control over what they are making and generate a better product than the polluted Boston water.
I can’t imagine how difficult the day to day operations at an aquarium must be, it is one of those things that needs to be monitored at all times and needs constant attention throughout the day. After all, you can't just turn the animals off at the end of the day.
So to start, I love aquariums. Specifically, I love the Monterey Bay Aquarium, since that is the main aquarium I’ve gone to. However, in general with zoos and aquariums, I always wonder if they are net harmful or net good. In general I feel like that has a lot to do with how much effort they put into conservation. In the case of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, they do a lot of conservation work, but that is very easy for them to do thanks to their geographic location. Not every aquarium can easily rescue otter pups and then have their own otters trained to teach them how to be successful wild otters before releasing them. But, even for aquariums that don’t have those programs, I think there is still something to be said for making people have an appreciation for oceans and aquatic life, which in turn will inspire them to make decisions to try to minimize their negative impact on the ocean. But maybe I’m being over-optimistic and to most people it is just pretty fish and nothing more. All I know is I can’t help but wonder if all this upkeep and the environmental impact of it is actually a lot more problematic than we’d like to believe. I feel like the resources to maintain an aquarium is only offset if they put enough focus on teaching visitors about what they can do to help with ocean conservation.
I really love aquariums. The vast ocean is the most fascinating natural phenomenon on this planet and the fact that there are things on this planet that we still do not know about everything in the ocean blows my mind. The problem of getting ocean water to aquariums is something I have never really thought about. I never initially thought that aquariums would send tanker trucks to collect sea water and then bring it back to the aquarium to put into the tanks. I have also loved watching the tv show, “Tanked” and they use the same type of salt water called Instant Ocean that clearly is an industry standard in commercial sea water fish tanks. The logistics, however, that go into creating your own synthetic sea water must be astronomical because the amount of work that goes into stabilizing levels of salinity and pH takes a team of people.
When I was tagging articles, this one stuck in my mind quite heavily. Digging into the article and looking at what they did many years ago in order to get salt water to Chicago is absolutely astounding. Firstly I am truly surprised that this is the first time I am hearing about this considering how much of an undertaking it must have been. Secondly, it is an impressive logistical task to be able to coordinate the retrieval and shipping of that many gallons of fresh saltwater over such a distance and to have it arrive and still be usable. Thirdly I am always astounded that when people in this country put there mind to a task and wanted to make something seemingly impossible possible that they somehow made it happen. Juggling that many different things to make it happen utterly impress me. As well as nowadays where they mix there own treated water with a saltwater mix that has been engineered to properly reproduce the same effect at a much more efficient cost.
I love that this article was posted on the Atlantic. Anyway, I’m curious about the environmental implications of making, shipping, or pumping seawater. Is the power used to make seawater from the various salt mixes less than the power used to send it up by train? How much energy is used in pumping as much seawater as Monterey Bay does every day? On the flip side, if they’re replacing that much salt water all the time, the used salt water must go somewhere. For aquariums on the ocean, it seems likely that they’d pump their premium salt water straight into the ocean (I imagine it would be like pouring Fiji bottled water into a full bathtub). Landlocked aquariums, though, probably have no choice but to pump into the sewer. Does all that salt have an impact? I have no idea how much water an average building uses, but I imagine that aquariums use a great deal more--what is the impact on the water supply and treatment plants?
This is a really interesting look at a process I’ve never thought about or had reason to think about. I’m from Indiana, which is about as far from oceans as you can get, and yet going to our zoo or aquarium, I’ve never wondered about the salt water. Of course there’s salt water in the tank, it just exists like that. Learning that there is an entire process of manufacturing artificial seawater is fascinating to me. This article was really interesting, but at first I was confused as to why it was on this blog. But I realized that I actually imagine that people could say the same about tech theatre. People go see a show, and most of them will not walk away thinking about the building and programming and management that allowed the show to happen, only the finished product. Someone with no experience in the industry learning about all the work that goes into, for example, lights programming or stage management, might feel the same way- like learning something they thought just ‘happened’ actually has a lot of thought and work put behind it.
I was alarmed when I read this article, there were so many red flags that I can’t ignore. The first and largest is with the Monterey Bay’s Jellyfish problem. As an aquarium you would think they would care even remotely for the lives of the sea creatures in the neighboring body of water. I was upset by the lack of care given to the lives of the jellyfish being caught in their filtration system going as far to complain how the murdered jellyfish are hurting their system. The second aspect that was disappointing was when the article talked about balancing the health of the animals and the visitor experience. Philosophically I believe the animal’s welfare should always come first and I am frustrated by animal tourism thinking otherwise. If it is healthier for the water to be a little murky then let the water be a little murky and start an educational program to inform visitors why. Let animal welfare drive animal tourism not the other way around.
I'd like to respond to Maggie Q's concern for jellyfish in an earlier comment and just say that I think that her concern is very misplaced. Not to sound callous, but being horrified at the death of jellyfish is akin to being horrified at the death of ants, and even then I think that the ants might deserve a little more consideration because of their hive-mind structure. Jellyfish while cute, are really just bags of cells and nerves only a couple steps removed from plant life, and as the article states, the bay is quite literally swarming with them in the seasons where these concerns happen. For my part, I think that whoever came up with this "Instant Ocean" product is a business genius who found a gap in the market and filled it efficiently with a single product. I am actually very curious though how they fill the water they use with all the little micro-organisms that live in the sea and which many smaller sea creatures survive on. I wonder if they have phytoplankton growing tanks or some such devices, or whether they simply have to import those from the sea.
Learning the way aquariums get water is extremely interesting. I am concerned that they feel that there must be a compromise between the fishies health and the spectators enjoyment, however. I am curious if it would be worth further researching if there is another way to set up tanks, or treat the water that allows the people working at the aquariums to be able to avoid the cloudiness. It is also concerning that he tone of this article indicates that the jellyfish getting clogged in the drains are of an annoyance, rather than a problem that requires a different solution. Yes, Jellyfish are abundant however sucking them into nets when it isn’t beneficial to either party doesn’t really seem right to me.
I also find it interesting how different aquariums, have so many different issues they must tackle, even though they are a similar attraction. This feels similar to learning to “make do” in low-budget theater. We have to synthesize our own water, in the sense of material availability and labour availability. This is an intersting story of a continuous struggle that should be acknowledged, to make sure there is continual growth and research being developed to improve both spectators and aquatic life, to maintain the presentation of ⅔ of our planet to the biggest destructors:)
It is interesting to think about the logistics of certain organizations. Most of the time it seems that the one part of making something work well is something that not many people would actually have on there radar. For instance this article on the water in large aquariums and not necessarily the actual fish and mammals in the tanks. It makes sense as soon as it is pointed out that making sure that organisms that need to live in salt water conditions would cause a strain on the infrastructure of aquariums. It is also interesting to note that the solution to this problem used to be just shipping salt water from Florida to Chicago, but with the advent of new technology we are able to more closely mimic the make up of ocean water by using synthetic materials. All in all this was pretty cool article in regards to large scale logistics.
Fish are some of my favorite animals, and so I’ve always really liked visiting aquariums and seeing all the different kinds of sea life. Since I have family in Chicago, I’ve visited the aquarium there a few times, but I haven’t really thought too much about how they actually get thousands of gallons of water in there. I found it much more interesting than I would’ve assumed reading about the process of making the water for the fish safe for them to live in. I knew from having a fishtank of my own from when I was younger that you needed to control certain levels in the water to keep the tap water from being harmful; but how much more goes into the microbial balances and making of aquarium seawater. I can’t imagine how much more taxing or inefficient it must have been to have needed to siphon water from the actual ocean and send it to Chicago.
I have always loved aquariums, but i never considered how on earth they got all that water. When I first saw this article, my first thought was trucks or trains, but that is definitely much more difficult than bags of salt. I think this is an amazingly creative solution to a pretty big, and definitely expensive challenge. I was also really intrigued by how the whole mixing process works. I would never have thought that aquariums have to mix their water at all, and the use of compressed air to agitate the water seems like it would be really cool to watch. I can't imagine how much more difficult it would be to cart actual seawater across the country just to fill aquariums or people to stare at fish. Especially with the frequency with which aquariums have to mix water, I had no idea how much time and labor went into maintaining something as simple as water in wan aquarium.
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