London Zoo 2001 - The Aquarium at the Mappin Terraces

Scanned photo from my visit in September 2001.

The Aquarium at the Mappin Terraces.

Any chance we can get this photo rotated so we can properly appreciate it?

Done, my friend!

i noticed they was working on some tanks in the 1st hall today, they looked freshly glazed and ready to start fixing up!

Thanks Baldur!

I'm currently reading "Life in a Fishbowl: Confessions of an Aquarium Director" (1994) by Murray A. Newman, who was the original director of the Vancouver Aquarium. He ended up spending 37 years as the leader of that institution, and in his autobiography he mentions visting London Zoo in late 1960.

He wrote that "the aquarium itself was fairly minor, since exhibition was less of a priority at the time than research", but what interested Newman was the sight of a South American manatee that had as its staple food copious amounts of cabbage. Are there photos anywhere of a manatee at the aquarium? I am surprised to learn that there would have been a tank big enough for such a large creature in that era.

I have fond memories of a manatee that lived for a number of years in a tank at the old Steinhart Aquarium that couldn't have been any larger than 20 feet by 10 feet and 7 feet "deep." It seemed perfectly fine at the time (late 60s)......It too ate mostly cabbage.

Manatees can get by in remarkably small space; those at Amsterdam's Artis didn't have too much of it at least when I saw them there in 1999 (can't remember if they were still there on my second visit in 2002) and I'm pretty sure they lived long lifes in that pool.

The manatee was still there at the time of my visit (also 2002): http://www.zoochat.com/160/west-indian-manatee-artis-2002-a-34120/

The exhibit was tiny - just about big enough for the animal to swim a tight figure-of-8 but no bigger.

The last manatee in Artis was a male named Bertus and I too saw him in 2002. In 2003 he left for the (currently) second-best manatee exhibit in Europe in Randers Tropical Zoo, Denmark, where he still lives today.