Marine Life Park first visit to S.E.A. Aquarium, 25 April 2014

The S.E.A. Aquarium on Sentosa Island in Singapore is one of the world's newest public aquariums. The publicity also claims it as “the world's largest aquarium” although that is obviously debatable. LIke the River Safari which I had visited two days before, I had been looking forward to seeing this place for quite some time, right through the planning and building stages which Zooish was keeping us updated on. I was not disappointed. In fact it is now at the very tippy-top of my list of aquariums I have visited. It is simply fantastic.


Some quick generalisations before the more specific discussions.

*The glass was very clean and algae-free on almost all the tanks which is always nice to see (it's always nice to be able to see!) but not always the case in aquariums. There were a few tanks where the job hadn't been done properly or for a while, but overall very clean.

*The aquarium really went for the “box in the wall” approach to displays. There were some more innovative ideas (albeit ones regularly used elsewhere) like globe tanks – no good for proper viewing or photography but give a nice effect with anemones and such – and a kids' pop-up viewing area in the moray tank, but mostly the tanks were just straight-edged, blue-walled boxes filled with water. Often no attempt at all was made to conceal this, just plonk a few (fake) rocks inside and leave it at that.

*All the hard corals were fake which of course is due to the difficulty of keeping corals in tanks with fish which destroy them, but they were really fake! I mean, you could plainly see each was a fake coral on a base just sitting on a rock, and they were clustered in completely unnatural ways. There were real soft corals in some tanks (much easier to keep alive than hard corals). Some tanks had fake seaweeds, but one tank (for razorfish) had real plants.

*The overall look was “clean and tidy”, tanks in plain flat walls: none of the artificial rockwork and temples and that sort of thing now in vogue. Actually I like the “clean and tidy” approach because it concentrates you on the tanks themselves, and there's lots of space for static displays on the surrounding walls (signage etc). It does give a sort of “museumy” feel though so I can appreciate people disliking it or thinking it is “boring”.

*The aquarium concentrates on Southeast Asia (hence the acronym S.E.A.) and as such there are a lot of coral reef tanks which unfortunately do tend to get a bit repetitive after a while. There are many other non-reef tanks though.

*The signage was a bit hit-and-miss. It was all very good, often quite basic of course, but varying in usefulness. Some signs were the usual info-on-a-board type, so straight-forward to see and read. Others were on video displays. Some of the video displays had a row of small photos across the top of the screen so you could see everything at once, but also touch to get the larger version of each below the row. This was quite handy, and even handier were the couple which were connected to a larger screen above head-height so while one person was looking at the smaller screen the people behind could still see the larger screen overhead. On other video displays you had to just stand there and wait for the different screens to come around on their own time. Many tanks were lacking in signage for some or all species, but this is common to all aquariums due to regular changeover of species.

*Most tanks were a good size. Only a few were too small, notably the tiny tank for the Pacific giant octopus.

*Right at the entrance (and also later inside) there was a stand selling candy floss (aka fairy floss or cotton candy, depending on which country you come from) on glowing sticks. Lots of sticky child hand-prints on the tanks from then on!!



So, on to the proper review.

The entry fee is $38 Singapore dollars which is expensive, but Singapore is expensive and public aquariums are always relatively expensive. I paid $38 but if you book tickets online it is only $33. On entry they gave me a $10-off voucher for a return visit (in May to June) which would make it $28 if I were able to use it. To get to the aquarium you have to walk through the entire Maritime Experiential Museum which I found really annoying because I was visiting in the mid-afternoon and I wanted to look around the museum properly but I also wanted to just get straight to the aquarium! I decided I would be able to see the museum on the way back out but never did because the exit bypasses it and by the time I finished the aquarium it was getting late. My suggestion is to visit in the morning which would allow you ample time for both museum and aquarium.

I visited on a Friday and it wasn't overly busy, more “steady”. There was a regular stream of people passing through but no crowds. It was difficult getting photos of tanks without people in front though. I stood at the octopus tank for twenty minutes waiting for a clear shot and never got one. I went round the aquarium twice (the exit to the aquarium itself is right by the entrance, so easy to repeat) to try and get some photos of various things. The whole aquarium is roughly in the shape of a long narrow rectangle. You walk up a corridor which runs the length of one side to the huge Open Ocean tank at the far end, and then back down the other side to the exit. Of course it isn't just a straight corridor from one end to the other, but that is the general shape.

The first tank seen upon entry is the “Shipwreck Habitat”. The first viewing point is a flat window, then you enter the tunnel through the tank. Unusually, but infinitely preferably, there was no travelator in the tunnel so you could move at your own pace. I'm not one for fancy theming (as in the Sealife type stuff) but I did like the shipwreck in this tank. Personal taste obviously – some people would think it was great, others horrible. On my second time past there were divers in the tank, one of whom was dressed as the Easter Bunny and had a basket of Easter eggs. The fish in this tank were sort of “general” tropical marine fish but also included some nice rays and adult marine catfish which I rarely see (the stripy ball-forming juveniles are common in aquariums, the dull-coloured solitary adults seemingly less so). The signage seemed poor in here. I'm not really a big fan of tunnel tanks, I prefer smaller tanks where I can look at individual species. With the tunnels I tend to vaguely browse and then move on. Most visitors like them though because of the spectacle.

Moving quickly past the photo station with the sort-of-but-not-too-pushy attendants taking photos of visitors to sell back to them later, I entered a hall of individual tanks. An interesting bit in here was that a large part of the floor was the top of a tank containing a lot of sharks (bamboo, cat and horn sharks) and rays. I did wonder about vibrations and the effect it would have on the tank's inhabitants (water acts as a solid when it comes to noise-transferral, which is why knocking on aquariums is such a bad thing for the fish). The signage here was also the annoying revolving video type. In the walls were the first of the really nice tanks of the aquarium. A large tank with real plants housed a shoal of razorfish amongst others, then there were three small tanks with circular magnifying lenses incorporated into the window. I haven't seen this done before in other Asian or Australasian aquariums and I thought it was a neat idea. One of the tanks had cat-shark egg-cases, one had seahorses and pipefish, and the third had leaf scorpionfish (Rhinopias). Also here was the seadragon tank (weedy and leafy) which was a fair size but rather empty. There were some wharf piles, a sunken dinghy, and a few bits of fake seaweeds. I'm not quite sure why it is so common for seadragon tanks to be furnished this way. If I was creating one I would make a proper kelp forest exhibit – you know, where they live, not a scene from under a jetty! You might need to look for more than thirty seconds to find the fish but it would give a real sense of why they look the way they do!

The next part of the aquarium is dominated by a huge cylinder tank for coral reef fish and a touch tank, which I was pleased to see was monitored to prevent too much abuse of the inhabitants. There was a roped queueing area for the touch tank with a line of people all waiting for their turn. I don't like touch tanks – too stressful for the animals and really just death pools in general – but the public like them and I do appreciate that it enhances the visit and it is undoubtably educational for people to actually be able to touch starfish and sea cucumbers and so forth. A continual rotation of inhabitants would be the way to go, so the public can be satisfied and the animals can survive. Here they really needed a bigger (longer) touch tank because for the number of visitors they can expect, even on a weekday when I was there, the small one they have is too cramped with too much waiting time; and of course with the queue nobody can spend as long as they want at the tank, they need to move on to allow the next person access.

Leading on into the next section of the corridor is a great mangrove tank, starting off at the “deep end” – with I guess about eight foot in water-depth – for larger fish, moving up a ramp/stairs all the way to the far end where there was no water, where the mudskippers were hanging out. I thought this was really well done and is something I would try to replicate if I had my own public aquarium. Just near here were a couple of globe tanks set in the wall, one for Banggai cardinals and the other for garden eels.

A bit past here was a viewing window into one of the dolphin pools, the only way to see them without paying extra. The pool here was nicely landscaped – not just a blank pool as often seen – and there was even sand on the bottom. I understand the other pools aren't like this because they aren't being viewed the same way. There are 22 dolphins at the Marine Life Park, and there were at least two or three visible here, making lots of passes right past the window.

The final stretch of this side, before reaching the Open Ocean tank, passes first a convex-fronted tank for Japanese spider crabs, spiny spider crabs, giant isopods, big roughies and snipefish (a very nice selection of species, but the curved view unfortunately makes photography difficult!), a box of a nautilus tank (a good enough size, but just so obviously a box!), a tiny tank for a Pacific giant octopus (unfortunately octopus are almost always stuck into tiny tanks, despite them being so intelligent and needing constant stimulation), and then the ubiquitous hall of jellyfish (where I wondered who first came up with the idea of always displaying jellyfish under neon lighting!).

The Open Ocean tank is brilliantly amazing. The viewing window is gigantic (the largest in the world), but again the tank is just one big box so you can see the whole thing at once. Not a bad thing or a good thing, I just thought I'd mention it in relation to some other giant aquariums (which I haven't been to) where the ocean tanks are arranged in Maltese cross shapes or whatever so there are multiple viewing areas. Although big I really don't think I'd want to see a whale shark in here as is/was the plan. It would just look awkward and cramped I think. I didn't think the hotel room windows in the opposite wall to the main viewing window were distracting or even particularly obvious myself. The main viewing area is in the form of large and wide tiers. At the time I thought there needed to be seating there (as for example at the manatee aquarium at River Safari) because everyone was just sitting on the floor, but Zooish tells me the area is also used for functions and the space is required for that. Apart for the main window at the front, the tank is also viewable from inside the restaurant next to it, and at the opposite end from the “Ocean Dome”, a separate room with windows in the walls and “the world's largest underwater acrylic dome” in the ceiling (nine metres across). This latter area seems to be where the three manta rays spend most of their time. From the main viewing window I only saw one manta (the biggest one) making loops of the tank. There are also dolphinfish (mahimahi) in the tank, giant groupers, zebra sharks, etc. Ocean sunfish would be a nice addition.

From the Open Ocean tank one then heads down the other half of the aquarium's rectangle towards the exit. The first half of the aquarium was really diverse – jellyfish, octopus, nautilus, crabs, mangroves, etc – but the second half has a lot of different coral reef tanks and although each has different species displayed within they all got a bit “the same” after passing a few. There was a clever Rocky Shore display, and also a really random Rift Valley area with two tanks (one for tigerfish, the other for lake cichlids) which really didn't seem well-placed within the aquarium. Although the theme is southeast Asia the scope includes the whole Indian Ocean, so the Rift Valley sort of fits but at the same time seems like a needless addition, especially because these were the only freshwater tanks in the whole place. Other more interesting displays along this stretch were pinecone fish and a nice moray tank.

It had taken me so long to get through the first half of the aquarium to the Open Ocean tank (about an hour and a half) that it was a bit of a shock to realise I was suddenly at the end of the aquarium after only half an hour more. I was halfway through the tunnel in the shark tank (the last tank in the aquarium) before I realised that this underwhelming tank was actually the famous Shark Seas itself! There were a lot of sharks in there but they were all fairly small – lots of white-tips – and the spectacle wasn't really there. I saw a few scalloped (?) hammerheads though which was cool. The viewing into the shark tank is actually best from the end of the tank where there is a big flat window showing the true depth and size of the tank, not from inside the tunnel with the distorted perspective.

Because the second half of the aquarium had been so unintentionally quick, I hopped over the rope separating the entrance from the exit and made a return trip through, skipping over the less interesting tanks and stopping at the best ones, and spending longer in the second half.

There were some additional parts to the aquarium (or rather the Marine Life Park as a whole) which I did not see because they incur extra charges. The main dolphin pools for one. There is a viewing area into one pool from within the aquarium which is nice, but the majority of the dolphin area is separate. There is also a Ray Bay where you can wade with rays (that looks pretty cool actually!). At the Adventure Cove Waterpark there is the Rainbow Reef where you can snorkel with, apparently, “20,000 colourful fish”!

 

I didn't miss the freshwater aquariums, I think it worked a lot better with just marine. Perhaps it was deliberate with regards to River Safari. I would be interested in how this new aquarium will affect the pre-existing Underwater World though (which of course is also located on Sentosa Island).

No turtles, no sea snakes. (Although I stand to be corrected!). Both are actually rather obvious inclusions to make.

 

oh, interesting point! When devilfish went to Underwater World (last year?) he wrote in his thread that it was busy and he didn't think the opening of S.E.A. was a big problem competition-wise. However I wonder if many people make that same mistake as you? Given that both aquariums are on Sentosa potentially it would be easy to do.

 

yeah I don't think it can survive in the long run. Devilfish made the point that Underwater World has sealions and otters and some other things like that to set it apart, but basically in my opinion it comes down to "huge aquarium with dolphins", or "small aquarium with dolphins" -- which are most people going to choose?

S.E.A. is very close to the entrance. I walked across from the "mainland" (the island is so close you could jump across if you had a running start .... and rockets on your shoes ) and it was only a few minutes walk further on. But it's easy to get around Sentosa on the (still free?) buses so I'm not sure that really matters.

 

oh, on that last note, I should mention that I discovered the presence of a third aquarium in Singapore while there! Just near the wetland reserve of Sungei Buloh in the Kranji industrial district there's a place called the Hausmann Marketing Aquarium which I saw on Google Maps. I did a search and found it mentioned on "what to do with kids in Singapore" type websites. Apparently it is a commercial ornamental fish farm (i.e. they breed pond and aquarium fish for export) which is open to the public with pond and aquarium displays. Not quite in the same league as the two real aquariums but interesting to note nonetheless.

 

to stay with the theme of people confusing the two: I assume that when you went over to Sentosa your aim was to visit the new aquarium yes? So how did you end up at Underwater World? Did you follow a map or ask a bus driver to drop you at the aquarium?

 

I've uploaded some photos from my visit to the gallery: Marine Life Park Gallery

 

yes

From the initial post (the review):
"There was a clever Rocky Shore display, and also a really random Rift Valley area with two tanks (one for tigerfish, the other for lake cichlids) which really didn't seem well-placed within the aquarium. Although the theme is southeast Asia the scope includes the whole Indian Ocean, so the Rift Valley sort of fits but at the same time seems like a needless addition, especially because these were the only freshwater tanks in the whole place."