You can watch the otters doing just this at the Oceanário. They are the only marine mammal to rely on their fur to maintain their body temperature so as a result they’ve got the densest fur in the animal kingdom and spend most of their day grooming their hair. The sea otters, which come from the North Pacific Ocean, were some of my favourite animals in the whole aquarium. We learnt that sharks often shed their teeth and that some of the sandbar sharks have more than 20,000 teeth throughout their lives. The sharks here are fed with ten kilos of fish twice a week.
Like most people, we were particularly taken with the numerous sharks. On the top floor we loved watching the graceful moray eels and the ‘devil fish’ Mantas whose horn-shaped fins work as giant spoons to direct small fish into its mouth. You can watch flatfish like plaice, sole and brill burying themselves in the sand and you can sometimes spot penguins diving in-between the rocks. On the ground floor you can get a better look at the fish that spend most of their time at the bottom of the sea, like the zebra sharks and the guitarfish that look like something halfway between a ray and a shark. Because it’s on two floors you can look into it from different levels which gives you the chance to observe some fish that you wouldn’t normally be able to see. The central tank is as big as four Olympic-sized swimming pools and contains 100 different species from around the world. There are lots of helpful signs all over the walls so that you can find out interesting facts as you look around. The four main areas around the central tank showcase four different habitats around the world: the North Atlantic rocky coast, the Antarctic coastal line, the Temperate Pacific kelp forests and the Tropical Indian coral reefs.Īs you wander in and out of the four habitats you keep coming back to the central tank and you’re guaranteed to see something new and fascinating every time. The tank is seven metres deep so that visitors can look into it at different levels for close ups of the creatures living at the top and the bottom of the ocean. The aquarium is on two floors surrounding a massive central tank. The eye-catching building appears to be floating on the water and you enter by crossing a footbridge.
My James Bond-obsessed 12-year-old said it looked “just like an evil villain’s hideout”. What’s more, the building itself is really cool. But it’s so well designed that it doesn’t feel too big to enjoy. The Oceanário is Europe’s biggest indoor aquarium, containing about 25,000 different fish, seabirds and mammals from around the world.
0 kommentar(er)
