Jay Hemdal
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Going to the Long Beach Aquarium/Aquarium of the Pacific "Adult Night" tonight. We went for my B-day last month on a Saturday during the day. OMG the screaming kids in an echo chamber! If you are a parent, you must have some skills to tune it out. Also when one starts, they all go off. LOL... So tonight will be nice.
Am I inspired? Yes! My surge tide pool tank was inspired by Cabrillo Aquarium. Am I sometimes disappointed and think some things should be done differently? Yes! But as @Jay Hemdal pointed out it has a lot to do with time and money and other limited resources. I also think as home aquarists we can be on the cutting edge of new developments or fine tuning old developments, because out systems are smaller (usually). It is hard to get funding for projects on what is "trending" in the industry and upscaling it to a large scale.
I will say this. Most aquariums are designed around the general public and not around aquarists. Most of the time I leave with more questions than inspiration.
For example; at LBA there is a sign that says most of their corals are confiscated from illegal coral traffickers/sellers. But if you look at their corals it is just normal corals that you can get anywhere. So it is confusing, because if the general public would see our tanks they would assume we have illegal corals. Another thing at LBA in there Babies display they have a bunch of (I assume) tank bred blue tangs, about an inch long. What happens in a month when they are not babies anymore?
When you say "illegal corals" you are likely thinking of high end, rare corals that were smuggled in. The vast majority of confiscated corals are just regular shipments that were brought in without proper CITES documentation. Or, one or two rare corals get hidden in the boxes and the whole shipment gets confiscated. Since they are near LAX, they get asked to house these confiscations quite often. Back in the 1980's, USFWS used to just dry confiscated corals out and use them as evidence. I've accepted confiscated corals from DTW - it is a LOT of work and heartbreak. First of all, the confiscation process adds time to corals that have already been boxed for 36+ hours. Lots of them die. You also have to house EVERYTHING that came in the shipment - I once had to take in 100 pieces of gracillaria algae because it was growing on illegal coral rock. Then, you need to track everything for USFWS through a chain of custody, usually for 90 days. I just heard that 30+ boxes were confiscated at MIA last week and were sent to public aquariums.
Jay