Melbourne Aquarium visit to Melbourne Aquarium, 22 May 2014

I visited the Melbourne Aquarium back in 2007 and I don't remember much about it except that there was a great mangrove tank filled with elephantfish, the touch tank, the circular coral reef tank, the Creepy Cave, and some other bits and pieces. This was back even before they got the penguins in. I re-visited yesterday and I am happy to go against the opinion of almost every other Australian Zoochatter and say that I loved it. I thought it was great. I went round twice and was there for three hours total. It is a hundred times better than Kelly Tarltons in Auckland. However, having said that I loved it, I will also say that Sea Life have gone ballistically overboard with the theming, so over-wrought that it overwhelms everything else there, and there are relatively large sections with no animals at all, just painted walls and mock-nature. There are regular “conservation” messages which come across as completely hollow. I'm not questioning the integrity of the staff who look after the animals of course, and I know the aquarium does do important work (for example, rehabilitating sea turtles), but the Sea Life presentation of the ideas smacks of a very superficial “we care” attitude. Unfortunately the freshwater speartooth sharks and the freshwater sawfish are gone, as has the Creepy Cave (which had coconut crabs, Christmas Island crabs and other cool species). I didn't see any of the Tasmanian giant crabs either which used to be in one of the tanks now in “Seahorse Pier”.

The location of the aquarium is good, right in the central city, but the building doesn't look like an aquarium at all. If it wasn't for the giant SEA LIFE sign you'd walk right past without finding it. It is also whoppingly expensive at AU$38, but you can get 20% off vouchers everywhere, and I think if you buy tickets online you get the same 20% off. So I paid $30.40 and I considered that well spent. The staff were friendly, the place was clean, the toilets were clean, the tanks were well looked after, most of the fish were in good shape, there was a good variety of species. Signage was often poor with basic information, but I did like how there was a lot of big signage painted directly on the walls: it looked much better than little signs, especially given that many of the other signs were of the touch screen variety, often not actually near the tanks in question and so small that if the place had been crowded you'd be out of luck finding out anything at all. Not all of the big wall signs were particularly relevant – there were spreads for cuttlefish and octopus, for example, which were not even at the aquarium and I couldn't really see how (if they had been) they could have been housed near those particular signs.

At the exit was a screen for inputting your satisfaction with your visit. I filled it all out amicably. But my favourite screen asked why I didn't buy any food on the premises but didn't have an option for “I wasn't hungry”, and the question below asked if you learned any conservation messages but only gave you the choice of answering “yes” or “yes”!

I haven't done a walk-through review of a zoological collection for a while, so that is what this one will be like. A lot of this will probably sound really critical and make it sound awful, but as I said I did really enjoy the aquarium overall. There were just quite a few individual elements I didn't like, which were mostly to do with it being Sea Life and all that that entails.

First the obligatory “photographer of visitors” which I declined (you get this everywhere now as a means of additional income, and I find it offensive frankly – I don't want somebody trying to take my photo to sell it back to me when I'm trying to go look at the animals!), then a cylinder tank for puffers and such in a short corridor to the elephantfish tank. Sea Life does like their cylinder tanks! They were everywhere. They also love their pop-up bubbles within tanks – it seemed like every second tank had a visitor bubble or tunnel inside it – and all the corridors were painted in garish 70s-hippy designs (that's what the sea is like you know). I don't mind cylinder tanks but they are best used in moderation, and they are also best if they are large enough that the curve isn't too strong (i.e. the larger the cylinder the flatter the viewing angle will be). However I think that for Sea Life the actual viewing of the animals in the tanks is not anywhere near as important as the way the tanks themselves look.

The elephantfish tank is not the elephantfish tank from 2007. That was the tank which was later turned into the freshwater shark tank and is now the archerfish tank in the Rainforest section. (Or maybe it is the same one and I am getting two different tanks confused). Anyway, the elephantfish tank of today is what Sea Life have for their requisite “Bay of Rays” exhibit. There are no rays in it as far as I saw but that's no reason not to keep the traditional name right? Fortunately it is not the tropical disco beach of the Sydney Aquarium's “Bay of Rays”, but instead a more placid Brighton Beach sort of scene. This tank has some pop-up bubbles at the shallower end.

Passing by the touch tank which appears to be the same as from 2007 (from memory), you enter the “Mangrove Swamps” section with mangrove roots and trunks coming out of the walls which are themselves painted with mangrove forests. A bubble-shaped tank (as opposed to a tank with a pop-up bubble inside) made for some awful viewing of packhorse crayfish. The only signage anywhere around was for cuttlefish and mangroves – the visitors I saw were reduced to calling the crayfish “some sort of giant yabbies” for want of any proper identification! Past a “mangrove nursery” tank (with a pop-up bubble inside) you find an escalator down to the “Coral Caves and Jellies” part of the aquarium. I really dislike one-way systems in aquariums. It is alright if the way is via ramps and stairs because it is easy to back-track if you want to see something again, but with escalators you have to go through the entire aquarium all over again – and in one aquarium I visited (the KLCC Aquaria in Kuala Lumpur) I wasn't allowed to go back through because I had “been in there for too long” already! That aside, I do think a winding path through several floors makes an aquarium seem much larger than it really is and that is a good thing.

The first tank at the bottom of the escalator is the Finding Nemo tank. That is actually what it is called, “the Finding Nemo Tank.” It is filled with luridly-coloured plastic plants – a mix of freshwater plants and seaweed – and the fish species are those from the movie. It was simply horrible and tacky. The families and couples passing by when I was standing there were all saying things like “wow, I love this tank! It is so colourful.” And that is why Sea Life is so successful I guess. This whole tropical marine section is a very narrow hallway with cylinder tanks, gaily-painted walls, fake coral-adorned rockwork scattered randomly along. There weren't many tanks in here, all were rather small, one had a child-sized tunnel right through the middle of it. There was a big octopus informational sign on one wall (and there's an octopus depicted on the map here) but I shudder to think that one of these tanks might usually have an octopus stuffed inside it. At the end of the corridor are two almost-empty jellyfish tanks, and then you're into the “Shipwreck Explorer” section which consists solely of a big cylinder tank for lionfish and a whole lot of theming (although I didn't realise it was a shipwreck until afterwards when I looked at the map again – I thought it was meant to be an old dock-house or woodland cabin or something). Actually this is something else I don't like about the Sea Life theming – they will have an entire section based around some idea or other, a tonne of artificial elements, but only one or two tanks. It just seems so pointless and space-wasting.

Past the “Shipwreck Explorer” is the shark-tank-with-tunnel, except here it is called the “Mermaid Garden” because mermaids. There is a big flat viewing pane, six metres across, before you enter the tunnel. There is tiered seating here and it is a good place to pause for a while and watch the fish. There are a lot of sharks in here of a number of different species (leopard, sand tiger, sandbar and others – as elsewhere the signage does not exactly keep up with any visitor's silly need to know what is actually on show!), as well as many other elasmobranchs such as southern stingrays, eagle rays, sawfish; and a lot of bony fish. I think most species in here are tropical or subtropical rather than local as in former times. There was no sign of the hammerhead sharks which they got in a couple of years ago, and I assume the last one has died in the meantime. I'm not actually a big fan of tunnel tanks. I tend to browse through them but not really stop. You need a big tunnel tank in today's aquariums because that's what people expect but I do wonder how many visitors really spend much more time in them than they would in front of a regular tank. This was a far more engaging tunnel tank than many I have seen, I think because you have first the viewing pane into the deepest part of the tank and then the tunnel which isn't very long and then a big circular viewing room with couches in the middle and the tank all around you. But it also now has all the Sea Life tack inside with huge golden statues of mermaids draped over the rocks and playing lyres. Just really bizarre and unnecessary.

From the “Mermaid Garden” (can anyone who works there even say that without a grimace?) you head up a ramp/stairs, passing the “Ocean Explorer” section which is one tank (where they put rescued sea turtles until release) and come up to the “Croc Lair” which is fairly new and houses a truly humungous saltwater crocodile. This exhibit is viewed from multiple levels in several different ways including – can you guess? – pop-up bubbles. The first viewing area has a flat viewing pane, a forward-facing bubble and an overhead bubble. There is also a fake crocodile “fossil skeleton” with literally no explanation. Is it meant to represent that crocodiles are ancient? Is it a photo prop and nothing else? I don't know. I do know it was ugly! Oddly there is another “fossil skeleton” inside the crocodile's enclosure as well, embedded in the floor of its pool in front of one of the pop-up bubbles. Moving around the fake-rock walls of the tank you find another pop-up bubble, another flat viewing pane (where you can appreciate the croc's size), and then you head up another ramp to the “Rainforest Adventure” where you can look down into the croc enclosure and appreciate even more how gigantic the animal is! There are a few different signs around about crocodiles but it is all sort of half-hearted and disconnected, like whoever made them didn't really have any clue about what he was doing.

[Before going up the ramp you would normally have stopped at the “Coral Atoll” tank but this was covered up for renovations; they are probably putting smurf statues in it or something].

The first part of “Rainforest Adventure” has the temple theming beloved of Sea Life but it is very patchy here, as if they didn't have enough money or tanks to fill the space. There are a few herptile exhibits, none very attractive at all. Some are frog tanks, some are nasty rock-walled pens for lizards. The lizards were blue-tongues and stumptails – also land hermit crabs – but the signage was all on one rotating computer screen, while the frog tanks had simple circular stickers on the glass with just the name. Once you get past this area though, the “Rainforest” gets much better. I really liked how the floor is covered in fake leaf-litter, made out of some sort of vinyl or rubber or something, all in one mat but which looks like actual leaf-litter or bark chips. Really clever. What I think used to be the elephantfish-then-later-freshwater-shark-tank now houses archerfish and rainbowfish, which is an odd choice (it can now only be viewed from the surface, and it is huge for those species). Around the perimeter are smallish vertical lizard tanks, and a wall of small invertebrate tanks very similar to the wall of tiny tanks at KLCC Aquaria but here only housing (interesting!) invertebrates so more acceptable. The signage for these simply had the name of the animal and then says to consult the digital display for more information – the monitor is tiny and on the far side of the room. There's a paludarium (with a pop-up bubble...sigh) which has tropical American fish including freshwater stingrays and plecostomus but with signage for Australian reptiles (in this paludarium I did see a snake coiled on a branch which may have been a water python but I'm not sure); also a quite big tank for Australian lungfish and a couple of other tanks.

Then it is down another escalator into “Seahorse Pier”. When Sea Life redesigned Kelly Tarltons in New Zealand they made a “Seahorse Temple” which made about as much sense as a dog-flavoured popsicle. I have no idea what they thought they were doing, other than that they presumably decided they “needed” a temple in there somewhere. A “Seahorse Pier” works much better and unlike temple theming (anywhere!) the “pier” theming looks good here. I still don't know why aquariums insist on displaying sea dragons from kelp forests in an “under a wharf” setting though. There are quite a lot of seahorses, sea dragons, pipefish here – I think there must be at least ten different species on show – as well as snipefish and pineapple fish (although I couldn't see any of the latter species). I'm not really sure how much this area has changed from the original – I definitely remember the “under the wharf” tanks because that is where the Tasmanian giant crabs were kept.

“Conservation Cove” is a promotional Sea Life video and a few bland and empty conservation signs in a hallway, not even remotely like what the name should imply, and then you reach the very last exhibit, “Penguin Playground” (“Penguinpalooza” must have been trademarked somewhere). This was the first time I have seen the penguin enclosure at Melbourne and it is pretty good. A bit small, no doubt due to available space when they put it in, but quite acceptable. It is in a long L shape, the land area having floor-to-ceiling glass and the short part of the L at the far end of the room being the swimming tank with underwater viewing. There is also a pop-up bubble. There were several baby king penguins in their woolly brown coats. I got there just as some keepers came in to feed the birds. It was interesting how the kings are trained to respond to hand signals so each penguin stands on a “feeding rock” in turn to receive fish. The gentoos on the other hand are fed in the pool by throwing fish in the water; the whole flock was swarming like tuna and porpoising like, well, porpoises. Really cool.

So there you go. That was a very odd review to write because while I thought it was great at the same time I was having to criticise so much in each section!! Overall though, in my estimation a very good aquarium. Possibly a very good aquarium ruined by Sea Life but still a very good aquarium. I don't know what the Melbourne lot are always complaining about! I would be proud to have an aquarium like that in New Zealand because it would be the best one there by a very long way!!

Interestingly, I just read Zooboy28's little review on page one of his Australia thread (http://www.zoochat.com/24/zooboy28-australia-313826/) and when he visited in March 2013 the penguin exhibit was first, then you went through the Seahorse Pier and upstairs to the freshwater zone – where the freshwater sharks were still in the now-archerfish tank – and then via marine tanks down to the oceanarium. So the entire route has been reversed (as well as much else added in the meantime).

 

yup, you thought it was just because I was a New Zealander didn't you?

 

yes it is a bit of a paradoxical situation.

 

Having now looked at an older map of the aquarium I see I was mistaken in these quotes.

Where they now keep archerfish wasn't "The Lagoon" (where the freshwater sharks were), it was "The Billabong" where I think there used to be barramundi etc. The reason I got confused is that "The Lagoon" tank no longer exists.

The new crocodile enclosure is built where the jellyfish were (next to the big round Coral Atoll tank), but the overhead view, looking down into the croc enclosure from the next floor, is where "The Lagoon" used to be. I doubt there was a structural reason for removing it, more likely simply to have the overhead view down into the croc enclosure for spectacle value.

 

I have now uploaded some photos from my visit into the gallery: Melbourne Aquarium Gallery