Recently Miss V's been under a bit of stress. As previously mentioned, there are many projects she wants to complete before she heads off to her summer job. For the last several days she hasn't left the house, because she's been buckling down on a specific time-sensitive project, and it's been taking its toll on her physically and mentally. Yesterday she decided she needed a chance to stop, breathe and maybe decompress a little.
So we went here. (King County Library System patrons: you can go too, for FREE!
Get wise to the joy of museum passes and start visiting sundry Seattle-Tacoma area museums -- including the Seattle Aquarium -- without breaking the bank. You can thank me later.)
The first thing you see (after the big Wall of Fish in the lobby) is the tidepool area.
Beautiful green anemones (or as Nemo put it, "an anemonemone") wave serenely in the artificial surf.
This area is the touchable tidepool, where visitors are allowed to reach out and touch someone. The invertebrates, specifically, like anemones, sea cucumbers, urchins and sea stars. (Don't poke the fish. They don't like it.)
(For that matter, don't poke the humans. Some of them
may like it, but you should always ask first. That's just polite.)
Having poked our fill of tidepool creatures, we wandered through the big donut fulla jellyfish (does this make it a jelly donut? hmm.) and into the next area, which turned out to contain...
...a Pacific giant octopus. (He was hard to photograph.) These guys are at least as smart as -- possibly smarter than -- dogs, and there are stories of them temporarily escaping their tanks in order to eat crabs and other delicacies from other tanks nearby.
We proceeded to the big tank full of reef fish: blue tangs, wrasses, unicornfish (really, that's what they're called) and one big pufferfish cruising along looking genial. V spent a lot of time in front of this tank, enjoying all the various creatures.
As you may have noticed already, I don't take the best pictures of creatures in tanks -- I tend not to keep track of shadows and reflections, and my camera doesn't capture the quick movements of fish very well -- but I got a few acceptable shots here and there.
While V remained mesmerized by the big tank, I took a few photos of corals and the fish that love them.
This one resembled nothing so much as a big pink head of cauliflower.
(insert additional obligatory Finding Nemo reference here)
We spent a lot of time watching the dwarf cuttlefish tank, for two reasons: 1) it's entertaining to watch them change color, which they do very quickly, and 2) we happened to be there around feeding time, and watching them zap out long feeding tentacles to catch little shrimp in the water (very similar to watching a frog catch flies with its tongue) was worth the visit all by itself.
Although we spent a lot of time watching the cuttles, I completely forgot to photograph one, so HOORAY FOR STOCK PHOTOS! Thanks to the Seattle Aquarium for making so many images available to the public.
This lovely creature is a longnose butterflyfish, or as it's called in Hawaiian, a lauwiliwilinukunukuoi’oi. Don't ask me to say it three times fast.
More jellies! I do like to watch them merrily glooping their way through the water. Always think of the Lewis Carroll word "galumphing" when I see them doing their thing.
Fish fry on the ceiling! No, not fried fish, that's down the street at
Ivar's. These are little fishies hatched here at the aquarium, who will some day grow up to be big salmon.
My favorite room in the Seattle Aquarium: the dome, where the people are on display under glass and the fish get to come stare at them. It only seems fair.
Well, let's move on to the mammals.
It was a nice warm spring day, so all three of the harbor seals were out of the water and basking in the sun. Some of them twitched and rolled a bit in their sleep, as though they were dreaming.
We happened to come around feeding time, so we watched the sea lions being fed buckets of various small silver fish, which they caught expertly.
Finally, it's really difficult to get pictures of these guys since they move so fast and they're always on the go, but here's the best photo I took of the river otters playing underwater. They were super cute.
We went to a few other places along the waterfront and finished up our outing at Pike Place Market near closing time.
No, we didn't go on the Great Wheel today. V is no longer a huge fan of Ferris wheels. Ever since she and Jenny had that Sun Wheel incident at Disneyland...
Thanks, Seattle, it's been fun. We'll be back soon to goof off some more.
And thanks to you for reading all the way to the end of this photo essay. Here, have a fish!
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