The Great Lakes Aquarium is currently undergoing renovations of one of its galleries. Out is the “Masters of Disguise” exhibit for a new theme of “Shipwrecks Alive!”. With this period of transition for the Duluth attraction, one begins to wonder: what happens to the fish from the old exhibit and where to the new animals come from? I reached out to the Aquarium’s own Operations Manager, Jay Walker, on this topic.
“The aim of the Great Lakes Aquarium is to have a rotating exhibit that changes every couple of years,” Walker said. “We try to find a theme centered around the animals, then we start the process of acquiring them.”
Shipwrecks Alive! will focus on displaying habitats formed by sunken vessels not only in the Great Lakes but in the Pacific Ocean as well. Walker told me that, while the Great Lakes Aquarium is closest to the Great Lakes, it realizes that it is a part of a more global picture and wants to bring in fish from all over to show that.
“We want to show that we don’t live in a vacuum,” he said.
Once a theme is decided upon, the Aquarium then looks through its own stock of fish to decide what they can keep and what is to be shipped out.
“Collectors, breeders, other aquariums; we pretty much tell people what we have available and what we are looking for,” Walker said. “Sometimes we trade for fish. Other times we just ship them out. It’s kind of like the NFL draft that way.”
Having found homes for their unwanted fish, the Aquarium then ships them out in plastic bags.
“They’re put in bags with water and filled with oxygen, then sealed up with rubber bands. We put those bags in Styrofoam boxes and some boxes get small heating pads depending on the fish.”
The Aquarium recently received a load of 43 crates holding 178 fish for Shipwrecks Alive!, the entire shipment finishing a long journey all the way from Australia. The crates traveled across the ocean to California where the permits for the fish were cleared while the bags were refilled with oxygen before being sent on to Duluth.
“We also got two new otters recently,” Walker said. “One of our previous pair died from stomach cancer while the other needed to be retired from old age. We put the word out to other aquariums and rehabbers that we were looking for some more. We got the new pair from New Orleans where otters are considered a nuisance species. They were live-trapped so they needed to be shipped out or put down because it’s against the law to release them back into the wild, so we were more than happy to give them a home.”
“Back to the fish, once we get them we begin what’s known as acclimatization,” Walker said.
In acclimatization, water from the tanks the fish are going to be staying in is slowly introduced into the water the fish had in their bags. While this is going on, the fish are being checked for parasites and signs of stress by Aquarium staff.
The whole acclimatization process takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour,” Walker said. “It’s all an effort to make the transition for the animals as stress-free as possible. We could just throw the fish into their new tanks and let them deal with the shock of new water, new chemicals, and a new temperature. But acclimatization calms the fish, helping to ensure that they are healthy before we put them on display.”
All newly arrived animals need to spend 30 days in the Aquarium’s quarantine area before being put on display. This area will serve as the fishes’ new home while Shipwrecks Alive! is being built. In quarantine, the fish are under constant watch to make sure they are free of viruses, parasites, and to make sure they are eating.
“We should have one system up and running by the end of the month,” Walker said in reference to the tanks being installed in the new exhibit. “We need to run the tanks for 30 days to make sure they’ve undergone enough of the nitrification cycle.” The mentioned cycle is a process by which special bacteria are introduced to the tanks to break down the ammonia in fish waste into nitrates which can be absorbed by water-dwelling plants and removed with water filtration. If this isn’t performed before the fish are introduced, there could be a dangerous build-up of ammonia in the tanks that could be toxic to the fish.
“Our plan is to get fish into the gallery near the end of June. They’ll be in the exhibit for two to three weeks before the opening of the gallery on July 2.”
All of the fish coming to Shipwrecks Alive! are new salt-water additions. People can look forward to seeing aquatic fauna such as peacock and panther groupers, the smooth-hound shark, the guitarfish, the zebra shark, and many other reef fish.