My friend Sherry the air hostess secured a hat-trick of tickets from a
friend of hers called Mike. He used to work at Continental too but got sacked
and now works for the Tampa's Florida Aquarium. He reckoned doling out 3
x $13.50 free entries might warrant him one of those standby "buddy
passes" from Sherry in the future. The aquarium was a good lark. Jim
got off to a bad start in the very first corridor. Two large windows full
of fish, all shapes, big sizes, mainly dull silver and grey colours. He
wrinkles his nose, rolls his eyeballs, says it's cruel to have so many fish
banged up together in such a wee space, nowhere near enough freedom. I look
at the fish, their gaping gobs, pouting, opening and shutting. It didn't
seem to me like they gave a flying feck where they were.
Mike tells us the whole place has been designed so that as you go deeper
into the Aquarium, the creatures on display start to represent creatures
of greater depths. And so we arrive out into this vast soccer pitch sized
arena where there is a small and helpful sign telling us the name of the
duck that's presently sitting behind that sign. What's weird is that this
duck doesn't have to be sitting in that particular spot. There's no fence
or anything. It could be anywhere in the whole place. 10 minutes of waddling
and that duck could be living it large with the hammerhead sharks way down
the other end of the place. And yet there it is, chilling out behind its
sign, just like it should be. Jim and I probe around for signs of string.
Maybe it's got a foot tied to a wall. Or been frozen in liquid nitrogen.
Maybe its stuffed. But nope, the duck's real, free as you like. A goody
goody duck, not going anywhere it oughtn't to.
As we wander around, the same thing keeps happening. A sign says this is
a black browed heron, you look up and there winks the promised black browed
heron, again free as you like to be anywhere in this entire building other
than on this signpost. Same deal with the oystercatcher and a yoke called
a stilt, a pretty white fluffy featherbrain that sleeps standing upright
on a foot-long spindly leg, the other leg tucked discreetly up his bum.
And then there was the Great Egret, lesser spotted since their plumes became
a popular accessory to ladies hats in the early 1900s.
Even the predators seem to have succumbed to this conditioning conspiracy;
one sign tells us that the vicious tubby two-whit two-whoo owl perched above
us in the trees likes nothing better than to feast on duck, but how come
it ain't swooping down on the ducks sitting pretty all over this place?
The otters might've given us an explanation but they were crashed out when
we got to their abode and they weren't getting out of bed for anything less
than 10 million buckets of fish a head. We let 'em snooze on.
Fish are always weird gadgets. Sturgeon are exceptionally weird. They're
almost cute, teddy bear fish, a tiny wee cartoon mouth hupping and pupping
in the last place you'd expect it to be. They share a flat with a heap of
snapper and some of my old amigos, the Red Ear Slider Turtles, all the way
from the Mississippi Delta. Next door lives a herd of baby American Alligators.
These lads sleep in a standing up position with every part of their body
submerged in the water bar their nostrils and their eyeballs. They can get
big too - a male will push 16 foot, a female closer to 10, either can live
for 70 years. An unusual bedmate for the alligator is a minute fish no bigger
than a human thumb and known, enticingly, as a Mosquito Biter. These are
the maritime equivalent of the heroic furry-footed long-snouted anteater.
These guys eat mozzies. They source out the hideouts where mozzies have
stashed their larvae and they gobble the lot up. Each of the biters can
eat its own body weight in mozzie larvae every day. I'd have thought it'd
make sense to breed these fish by the multitude and release them into the
swamplands of this distracted planet and so assist in the extermination
of malaria, but maybe I'm on the wrong track. I am, after all, the same
ejat who reckoned breeding red squirrels for country estates and gold courses
would be a money earner.
Snakes are peculiar if only for the fact they rock up in Aztec, Christian,
Egyptian, African and Australian culture as a symbol of rebirth. Perhaps
it's the skin-shedding business. I'd never seen a snake shed its skin before.
What I got to see was something called a Reticulated Python claiming to
be the biggest python in the world and capable of devouring small boys whole.
He was sound asleep, surrounded by mounds of flaked off skin and a violently
large pile of freshly squeezed oozing snake log. If I looked in his cage
for 22 seconds, that was 17 seconds more than anybody else I saw.
You learn funny things in a place like this. Like I didn't know tarantulas
were harmless. Or that "blind as an electric eel" is an
apt expression for a creature that can still release a 650 volt jolt, enough
to cripple a horse. I knew about the frogs that mooed but I didn't know
there were frogs that went baa too. Or that vampire bats eat cow's blood.
I saw a Moray eel drift by with its sexy yellow tights on and I thought
that's where they found the mermaid. And I eyeballed what's called a shovelnose
guitarfish which was a first for me. The stingrays, some of them capable
of surfer-muching, floated around eerily, to all intents and purposes the
prototype for the Stealth bomber.
The seahorses are among the madder yokes on display. For instance, the thumbnail
sized pygmy seahorses scoffing crumbs from their underwater mangers. But,
without a doubt, the winner of the weirdest looking geezer award went to
West Australia's Leafy Seahorse, one of those mythological q-shaped gadgets
only amplified in weirdness because they look like branches and they're
covered in translucent frilly green and yellow leaves. It's almost disturbing
to look at because then you have to start questioning what's a plant and
what's an animal and, somewhere in the back of your head is the way that
catfish was calmly sizing you up earlier and the way Mike was saying all
the fish charge over to one end of the aquarium at feeding time because
they've seen their feeder's magic uniform and, yep, there's always JM Fennell
saying fish ain't all as stupid as they look. With the nations of Europe
sticking feet in their mouths all over the place right now, the last thing
I needed was hints of evidence that lobsters and cabbages are actually first
cousins with high IQs and sensitive souls. That said, I go and look at the
jellyfish later and I'm left with the conviction that these guys are also
more plant than animal. And then I remember my US Marine pal in Hawaii who
got stung on his dickydido while skinny dipping and I wonder do these wee
rubbery flubbery tentacled Pacman ghosts have a sense of humour?
We finish up in Shark Land. Mean looking buggers, no doubts. But Spielberg
has a lot to answer for. The PR of Sharks Unlimited went big time downhill
after "Jaws". Nobody gave a hoot about them. Kill 'em all.
Serves them right for tearing Bo Derek in two like that. How about this:
sharks kill approximately 10 humans every year; humans kill approximately
100,000,000 sharks every year. That's what it says in the Tampa Aquarium.
They kill 'em for shark fin soup and pharmaceuticals. Other titbits? Only
2 out of 3 shark attacks are fatal. Only 4 of the 29 species of shark actually
attack humans without provocation (they are the great white, the bull, the
tiger and the oceanic whitetip). I look at one of the more toothy buggers
and try and work out what I'd do if caught in a corner by one. I reckon
I'd try and stick my hand in its side gills and yank them off, like a pocket,
so it starts to bleed and runs away. Doubt it'd work but can't think of
much else that would.
The Florida Aquarium, 701 Channelside Drive, Tampa, Florida 33602. Tel:
(813) 273 4000. W: www.flaquarium.org