Aquarium Des Lagons Aquarium des Lagons

Today's Aquarium des Lagons (the Noumea Aquarium) had its beginnings way back in the 1930s when French colonial Rene Catala was a farmer and amateur lepidopterist on the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. He first became interested in marine life in 1934, and just a few years later opened a simple aquarium there. However contraction of malaria meant he had to abandon Madagascar and retire to France to convalesce where he was recommended by his doctor to move to New Caledonia (doctors obviously gave better advice in those days!). It wasn't until 1945 that Rene made the move, along with his new Swiss wife Irene. He still harboured a dream of building a marine laboratory and aquarium, and as luck would have it he arrived in Noumea at the time that the American troops were pulling out (this being the end of World War 2 of course), leaving behind masses of equipment and property. Rene not only salvaged considerable amounts of this abandoned gear but also managed to convince the remaining American authorities to let him have a huge complex of 70 buildings and all the equipment within them that had served as an army hospital and staff quarters. These buildings became the Institut Francais d'Oceanie, composed of not just a marine laboratory but also a mining institute [New Caledonia's main income today is through nickel mining], an agricultural school, and a botanical studies institute. Once the institute was up and running, the French government basically thanked Rene for his work, closed down the marine laboratory part, and sent him on his way. With great bitterness Rene set off in 1952 to do a grand tour of European public aquariums before returning to New Caledonia the next year, where he used his own finances to buy land in the south of Noumea and set up an independant marine laboratory. He had pipelines laid running out 300ft offshore to pump seawater in through his tanks, and employed divers to collect specimens from the surrounding lagoon and reefs. Rene remained in ownership of the Aquarium until ill-health forced his retirement in 1975, when he unwillingly handed it over to the city. It immediately came under the jurisdiction of ORSTROM, the very scientific institute that Rene had originally founded after the war and whom the government had forced him out of.

For anyone who had visited the Noumea Aquarium in the past, you wouldn't recognise it today -- because its an entirely different building! The site of the old aquarium is now the carpark, and the new one sits beside it. People who judge Aquariums purely by their size probably wouldn't be very impressed because it isn't terribly big, but that's only to be expected given that the Noumean population isn't very large and there's only a limited number of tourists. It is situated very conveniently for the bulk of those tourists however, being directly between the two main beaches so I suspect the majority of tourists do pay it a visit. It is certainly on the schedule for most of the cruise ship passengers that pass through the town. Everything displayed in the tanks is local, which for me makes it more interesting than just a general sort of Aquarium (although being a tropical Pacific country, many of the marine species displayed actually are those typical reef fish that you see in every Aquarium around the world!).

The first part of the Aquarium is the freshwater section. This look really nice. Rather than just having tanks set in the walls with a few plaques of information beside them, the freshwater area is a spacious-looking and fairly brightly-lit room with planted beds in the floor and around the walls, which are themselves partly covered in rockwork. The fish here are species that can be commonly found in the streams and lower reaches of New Caledonian waterways, including several species of flagtails (Kuhlia), gobies and mullets, as well as speckled longfin eel (Anguilla reinhardtii) and long-spined glassfish (Ambassis interrupta)

Connecting the freshwater and marine parts of the Aquarium is, appropriately enough, the brackish area which in this case literally is a bridge between the two. From the freshwater area there is a short wooden "bridge" (but on the floor, not raised) with a small mangrove exhibit on either side. At first I thought that's all it was, but upon looking closer I discovered that on one side there were fiddler crabs scuttling amongst the mangrove seedlings while on the other side were mudskippers. There are just two brackish tanks after the bridge, a large one for various fish that can be found amongst the mangroves at high tide (mullets, scats, monos, rabbitfish, etc) and a smaller one for juvenile fish and a huge mud crab. The crab was not in a position that enabled me to photograph it successfully so I just took a photo of the tank with a blob in the corner that is the crab.

The tropical marine sections of the Aquarium are divided amongst several rooms, although there doesn't seem to be any sort of theme to most of them apart for that they are all tropical marine. The obligatory "touch tank" is nicely-constructed although as is so often the case many of the inhabitants can't really be touched (various corals, damselfish, small puffers, etc). [I'll just add in here I'm not at all a fan of touch tanks with their poor abused little residents]. The sea-grass tank and sand-flat reef tank are very nice, the former with an odd little fish that I think was a sabre-tooth blenny of some kind (Petroscirtes) and the latter with a crocodile-fish (a flathead, of the family Platycephalidae) but neither were on the labelling so I'm not sure of their specific identities. The fairly sizeable reef tank here had a nice selection of soft and hard corals and standard reef fish (including a very cute baby trumpetfish Aulostomus). There was also a very unusually-designed tank for baby leopard sharks (Stegastoma fasciatum) which reminded me of a glass-topped school desk coming out of the wall; the baby leopard sharks are totally unlike the adults, being black and white striped (hence an alternative name of "zebra shark").

After this first room is a completely-darkened one for corals. It was back in 1958 that Rene Catala and his wife, the founders of the Noumea Aquarium, first discovered that the living parts of corals (i.e. not the "skeleton") glow under ultra-violet light. This is now a well-known fact but I've never actually seen it shown in an Aquarium before, although I'm sure it must be widely done because it is very effective. Some tourists I talked to later in the week had been to the Aquarium and they said they didn't like this coral room because the flourescence seemed unnatural (i.e. not the way you'd see corals if you were just diving off the reef) but I thought it was very interesting. Also in here was a tank for flashlight fish, again something I've never personally seen in an Aquarium. The species displayed here are of the genera Anomalops and Photoblepharon. They carry bioluminescent bacteria in pockets under each eye, which can be flashed on and off by opening and closing the pocket. Being a completely black tank set in a black wall in a black room, I didn't even see them on my first circuit of the Aquarium (or rather, I did, but I thought the flashes of light were reflections from other items). Once I spotted them on my second run I was fascinated; all you could see were green strobes going on and off as the fish signalled one another. Very cool.

The next part of the Aquarium has a collection of small tanks for dangerous fish such as stonefish and lionfish, as well as small spiny lobsters, crown-of-thorn starfish (the scourge of the reefs), shrimpfish etc, followed by a large reef tank and a tank for sea snakes. Two species of sea snakes are displayed here, the banded sea snake (Laticauda laticaudata) which is boldly marked in white and black stripes, and the endemic Laticauda saintgironsi (split from L. colubrina in 2006) which is very attractive with its salmon and black banding. Some very small tanks in this area had small corals etc, as well as a monstrously-large mantis shrimp which I took a photo of with my hand next to the glass for scale.

After the main marine tank (the largest in the Aquarium but still not overly large) there is another darkened room for deep-sea creatures. The main exhibit here is the nautilus tank. Compared to the nautilus tanks I've seen in other Aquariums this one was really big, a cylinder tank about six foot or more high and several feet across, and the nautilus were the largest specimens I've seen anywhere. What I found most interesting here was that unlike other Aquariums where the nautilus are kept in well-lit tanks and they always just seem to lie on the bottom, here each individual was using their mass of tentacles as a holdfast to suck onto the rockwork or the sides of the tank, which I could imagine must be what they do in the wild as well. The Noumea Aquarium pioneered the keeping of nautilus. The first live one was obtained in 1958 (although at that time the facility was a private marine laboratory and not open to the public) and they've been keeping them ever since then. In 1960 they had 40 Nautilus in their tanks at one time! There had only been one Nautilus kept in captivity prior to Noumea's 1958 one, and that was at the aquarium in Sydney, where it survived for just a week. They laid eggs often at the Aquarium but these all proved infertile, and it wasn't until 1985 that the first young were hatched in captivity - at the Waikiki Aquarium in Hawaii - after it was discovered that although adult Nautilus survive just fine at constant temperatures (so long as they are cool temperatures) they cannot be bred successfully unless they are given the daily temperature fluctutations that they experience in nature during their vertical migrations to the surface each night to feed.

The other couple of tanks here were for deep-sea crabs but the fronts of their tanks were covered in condensation (a common problem with chilled tanks) and the signage wasn't well enough lit to read.

As mentioned, I did a second lap of the Aquarium to make sure I hadn't missed anything (like the flashlight fish!). The giftshop by the exit/entrance was closed so I couldn't browse what was on offer. Although a fairly small Aquarium I spent about two hours there, and I enjoyed it very much.


[NOTE: the information on Rene Catala, the Aquarium's history, and the keeping of nautilus there are all obtained from Peter Douglas-Ward's 1988 book "In Search Of Nautilus"]


Photos will be uploaded when there is a Gallery for them (so it may be a little while)

 

there is now a gallery for the Aquarium des Lagons and the photos have been uploaded
http://www.zoochat.com/gallery/aquarium-des-lagons/

 

the only sharks I saw were zebra sharks (Stegastoma fasciatum) and black-tipped reef sharks (Carcharhinus melanopterus). I have a couple of photos of the black-tips but they weren't very good so I didn't upload any (but now I have: http://www.zoochat.com/1487/black-tipped-reef-sharks-carcharhinus-melanopterus-223650/)