Last weekend I visited the Aquarium but having already been to Wildlife Sydney and Madame Tussaud’s, I only had an hour left to spend. So I went through pretty quickly. Here are some brief impressions. There is plenty of construction going on. Right at the entrance, in fact. You walk into a small cul-de-sac to look at some fishes, then take an exit through to another area, follow the path down and end up doubling back. The platypus is off-display, as is all the surrounding tanks. The top of the Dugong pool is still closed, and the bottom in two halves separated by an ugly wire fence. The main shark pool is completely closed. Although I saw no signage calling it that, Bay of Rays is actually rather popular with the public. The curved Perspex walls, however, greatly distorted the size of some of the rays, depending on what angle you looked at them from. There was a lot of empty space around the circular display, which is in stark contrast to the rest of the aquarium where the narrow corridors are blocked by groups of people looking into one exhibt. The part of the aquarium that has the Little Penguins has been decked out like the below decks of a an old sailing ship (this might not be new, but noticed it this time around). Pineapple fish were on display here, which was new, but viewing all the small tanks with lots of people around was a nightmare, particularly the people with strollers. The Claws exhibit was still there, with its tacky 1950’s B-grade horror movie theming. In the coral reef tank – the long curved tank – I saw that they had bred the Banggai Cardinalfish, more than once. There were some small juveniles about two-thirds the size of the adults, and there were some tiny little fry that most people missed, sitting on the sand near an anemone. The massive Great Barrier Reef tank, and the two tanks you walk past to get to it, all seemed to have much more fish than I remember, and I suspect that many of the fish from the shark tank have been moved into these displays. It will be interesting to see the Aquarium again once all the renovations have been completed. Hix
