The Seattle Aquarium

[elfs]

The first day of our staycation, necessitated by my injured leg, involved hitting the Seattle Aquarium. If we're stuck anywhere without much walking, doing the touristy things with the kids is definitely the way to go.

Kouryou-chan and diver

Our visit started with a nasty surprise: a dead cocker spaniel floating in the water under the aquarium. (We later confirmed with one of the staff that that's what it was.) Once inside, though it was a much cleaner world. Inside the foyer is a huge plexiglassed-in aquarium and through it we watched a diver feed the fish and anemones while she talked to the kids about what she was doing.

Yamaarashi-chan touches a starfish

Further inside there was the tidepool area, where the kids entertained themselves touching the starfish and other tidepool life the aquarium had determined was safe to touch, plus a large octopus and other miscellany. We walked among the "weird fish" exhibit and the tidal reef exhibits, and learned that one of the staff at the Seattle Aquarium is the "official studbook keeper for the seahorse," which doesn't sound like a very effective pick-up line, if you ask me.

We went to lunch at a fast-food joint further down the waterfront from the aquarium, then headed back for the afternoon shows. We sat in the underwater dome (which at its top is less than a foot underwater, but it's still a cool feat of engineering) and watched another feeding. I watched a starfish eat, that was pretty cool. Then we went to the mammals section, saw the otters and the seals and the sea lions. There was a demonstration with the seals about feeding them and habituating them to medical attention.

I had a chance to speak with three of the biologists on staff at different occasions. All of them said we ought to be very worried about the acidification of the oceans and the loss of phytoplankton on the surface. As in no-shit-the-70's-ecodisaster-folks-were-right worried.

But there was very little of that visible within the aquarium. It was all very much a happy place, with the only concerns being minimized throughout the exhibits. It was one of the things that annoyed me the most: there wasn't much of an attempt to educate the audience, just entertain. Look at the octopus, isn't he big? Look at the otter, isn't he cute? There were a few child-friendly "You can help save the watersheds!" scattered here and there, but right outside, under the pier, you could see a vast wasteland of plastic and waste wood that belied the cheerful reticence of the aquarium to be a bummer. The cynic in me says that the board, made up as it is of people from Boeing, Microsoft, and other corporate interests, don't want to alarm the people too much. Omaha says I'm too cynical: it's just that they believe the audience doesn't care.

They're probably right. And they won't care until soylent green is people.

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

It never ceases to amaze me that the lessons children take away from education about the poor state of the environment is "recycle more", "use less electricity" and "don't drive as much", as indicated by asking them the question "What would you do to stop global warming?" as if asking 8 year olds would somehow reveal the answer through some kind of brilliant brainstorming experiment.

The real answer of course, is that *everyone* needs to "stop consuming", "stop driving" and "stop using electricity". Of course, this course of action is so repulsively vile to society today that it will never happen. But we wanna inspire hope in our children, right?

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

It's actually a different reason than either of those. I volunteer there and give talks in the bird exhibit. Getting out information on preservation of the marine environment is part of the mission statement and something we're supposed to work into every talk. The difficulty is getting it in there, at all or especially in a useful, non-soundbite way. It's fairly easy to pass on to an adult in a one-on-one conversation, but communicating it during the chaos of presentation. I can say it, but if they didn't even catch the name of the animal, will they hear it? Admittedly, the talk at Windows on Washington Waters is often rather simplistic.
The other challenge--one that I want to talk with the education department about--is just how little the general public knows about marine organisms. Folks see the rockfish in the exhibit eating the sandeels fed to the birds and are shocked by the "cannibalism." For a lot of people, a fish is a fish--how much difference could there be? I had one person who didn't know that octopus weren't fish. If there's this much lack of knowledge about macrofauna, there's some teaching that needs to happen before the general public can get much understanding of what less flashy things like ocean acidification and loss of phytoplankton can do. I'd like to set up a general marine-bio-lite exhibit somewhere (probably the entry hall since there's space there) to try to get some of this across.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Actually, the real answer to all of this is, unfortunately, population reduction. There are simply far, far too many of us humans on this planet not to have a noticable impact.

Barring that, true, comprehensive education that additionally teaches kids how to think would go a long way towards remedying the problem. Of course, our Owners don't want that, and will do anything possible to keep as many people as ignorant and unthinking as possible.