Aqua Ring of Life (7/11/10)

July 11th, 2010: On a rainy Sunday there's nothing better than going someplace that's indoor. Especially if that place is the Kaiyukan Aquarium in Osaka City. The aquarium hosts many creatures from around the Ring of Fire (or more accurately, the Ring of Life), from Japan, Antarctica, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Pacific Ocean in general. Although many types of fish and other aquatic life make up the majority of the exhibits at the aquarium, there are a few mammals that live there. Overall, there was a lot to see on the 6 floors of exhibits and I really enjoyed it (I stayed behind to take pictures and ended the day with close to 300 of them).

We took the train from Sakurai station as usual and got to the aquarium area around 2:30PM. The area around the aquarium has a food court, a sketchy arcade, and one of the world's largest ferris wheels. We had a late lunch at the food court before entering the aquarium, and I got a double bacon, egg, and cheese burger from First Kitchen (it tasted just as good as the one we went to a few weeks ago). When we finished eating, we walked over to the aquarium and bought our 2,000 Yen admission tickets at the ticket vending machine.

The intended path for visiting the aquarium starts on the 3rd floor. There is a "tunnel tank" with a few types of fish that arches over the path, and then there is an escalator that takes visitors up to the 8th floor of the building. From there, the path is almost a spiral ramp down the building and around the main center tank in the middle of the aquarium. Rather than write about walking around the aquarium, I'll post a couple photos and some captions of what we saw organized into the floors they were on.

3F:
The tunnel tank with creatures swimming around.
Some type of ray.
A large starfish with very long limbs.
A hammerhead shark perhaps?

8F:
Animals from Japanese forests, I assume.
Little sea otters. They were moving around too fast to get good pictures of them. It seemed like they were doing something specific, because they were running back and forth, from the cave to into the water.
There were a couple in a little group on some rocks.
Some type of fish in the forest area.

7F:
A fairly large bird. There were some ducks in the same area, but there was only one of these.
Another type of otter washing his face. He's green because of the lighting (I didn't find the light correction option on my camera until afterwards).
Huge arapaima. There were several of them in the tank, and they were literally twice the size of that little girl.
A capybara! There were two in this area, but both were just sort of hanging out.
This penguin was washing his back or something, but he was really close to the glass. There were a bunch more on the other side of the tank. There were also two newly hatched penguins across the way from this tank.
There were a lot of dolphins swimming around, including a baby with its parent. The workers there came out to feed them as I was walking by and the dolphins were doing tricks (see the two videos here and here).

6F:
This lobster was extremely creepy. I believe that thing in his mouth is another fish from the tank!
Lots of different kinds of fish. All their eyes are glowing because the flash went off for this picture.
The main attraction of the aquarium, the whale shark. There were a couple in the tank, and it seemed like a lot of fish liked to follow them around. The shark acts as the mascot for the aquarium, and the gift shop has a lot of different sized plush toys of it.
One of the rays swimming around. It is pretty big, and it has a passenger on it's back.

5F:
A curious sea lion. This one stopped to look at some of the visitors, and later it stopped when one of the aquarium workers got its attention. It proceeded to follow her around when she walked back and forth.
A Napoleonfish resting on the tank floor. It doesn't look to happy.
A school of small fish.
A large sea turtle. It seemed like it was looking at the visitors.
One ugly fish. I was just floating there, looking extremely unhappy.
An ocean sunfish. It's a pretty neat looking fish.
Giant spider crabs. Pretty creepy; I wouldn't want to run into one of these in a back alley.

4F (and on):
A bunch of tiny jellyfish. This is one of the photos that actually came out well.
A pretty sweet jellyfish. I think this is one of my favorite pictures from the trip.
Another, different type of jellyfish.
It's hard to see, but this is a clione, or sea butterfly. They are really tiny but really pretty, like little ocean angels.
More jellyfish. I don't know if that's my silhouette in the back or someone else's behind me.
This jellyfish was stuck to the side of the glass, along with the others in the tank.
A group of jellyfish.
I'm not sure what this is, but it's possibly a type of crawfish.
Lots of clownfish swimming around.

And, no trip in Japan would be complete without a little bit of Engrish and delicious snacks:
I don't even know what it's trying to tell me.
Ice cream wrapped in kid's cone-type food with chocolate!

(Check out all of the aquarium pictures here and here!)

(Next time, we take our second trip to Kyoto for the Gion Festival: "Going, Going, Gion!")