In celebration of World Oceans Day, aquarium visitors will get a whole new experience when they walk through the door beginning on June 8, when the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk’s new seal exhibition opens.
Due to the construction of the Walk Bridge in Norwalk, the aquarium closed the IMAX theater and built their new seal exhibit. The IMAX theater has been replaced with the aquarium’s new 4D movie theater, and now the seals are happily living in a significantly larger tank.
“This is a beautiful, enormous new space that guests will love maybe even more than the seals will,” said aquarium spokesman Dave Sigworth. “The exhibit represents an exciting new opportunity for us to tell the story of the seals that populate our local waters, for us to further enhance the care that we provide to our seals, and for our seals to just - well - be seals in a much larger, deeper environment.”
The seal’s original exhibit could be viewed from inside and outside the aquarium but only offered a few small windows to observe their underwater activity. The new 160,000-gallon exhibit, called Pinniped Cove, is 22 feet deep and considerably larger than the 19,000-gallon exhibit the seals previously resided in. The aquarium’s five female harbor seals moved to their new home over the Memorial Day weekend and Barrett Christie, the aquarium’s director of animal husbandry said they have adapted well to their new home.
“They’ve been taking to it extremely well, making use of the space, navigating very well. We didn’t know how they were going to respond to the trainers [in the new exhibit], but mostly they’re cooperating. They’re eating very well,” Christie said. “We’re not seeing any abnormal behaviors, so by all accounts they seem to be really enjoying themselves.”
The resident seals are all between the ages of 30 and 35, which is much older than the 28 years a seal would have living in the wild. Christie attributed the seal’s age to the care and nutrition they receive at the aquarium.
“One of our veterinarians put it best when we moved them in: ‘it’s like your grandparents won the lottery and moved into a palace,’ which is kind of true for them,” he said.
The new exhibition can be viewed from the first and second floors of the aquarium. From the first floor, visitors can watch the seals swim and recline underwater, and from the second, they can observe the seals as they surface or interact with aquarium staff and volunteers during their feedings.
Watching one of the seals leisurely float along the water, Christie joked that his goal in life is to be as relaxed as a harbor seal. Christie explained that when the seals poke their heads above the water and linger there, it is called bottling and that the bouncy crawling movements they make on land are called galumphing.
“This is one of the best and largest displays devoted to harbor seals in the U.S.,” Christie said. “Fabricated rock work on the bottom and along the edges simulate their native natural environs of New England. And guests have the opportunity again to watch as our staff feeds the seals and works with them on animal husbandry techniques.”
He also noted that the ashes of two of the aquarium’s seals who had previously died due to old age were incorporated into the rocky outcroppings in the exhibit so “they will forever be a part of this exhibit.”
With the new and larger tank Christie said the exhibit could house eight or more seals.
“We could probably go up in numbers, but we don’t want to push it. Part of the reason we did this whole project was to build a nice enclosed space for these animals who are pretty old,” he said. “We will probably be adding more in the future as they come available, but we don’t want to crowd them in.”
Christie explained that the aquarium’s resident seals are those that were previously rescued or are the offspring of rescued seals.
In addition to having a much larger exhibit space for the seals, the aquarium added an impressive state-of-the-art water quality system that creates salt water and maintains the seal’s habitat. There’s also a clinic to provide the flippered critters with optimal care on site. Due to their advanced age, many of the seals have cataracts and other vision issues that the aquarium closely monitors in addition to maintaining the seals’ overall health.
“We’re really planning a century in advance to make sure we’re thinking about the long term health of the animals in captivity, beyond these animals but the next generation and the generation beyond that,” Christie said.
Christie said he’s looking forward to seeing how the public reacts to the new exhibit, noting that whenever the aquarium opens a new exhibition he likes to come in early and observe how guests respond to it.
“The reactions from people —especially kids —when they come in and see it for the first time it makes all the work worth it, all the very long days and weeks leading up to this. I’m excited for people just to see it and I’m really excited for these seals to have their palace in retirement and all this space to swim around like they’ve never had before.”
The exhibition’s opening is part of the aquarium’s World Oceans Day celebrations on June 8. The seal exhibit will be opened to the public at 1 p.m. In addition to seeing the seals’ new home, visitors can also attend a lecture and documentary screening. Author and ecologist Carl Safina, a professor at Stony Brook University and founding president of the Safina Center, will give a talk about conservation at 3:30 p.m. The screening of “Mission Blue,” a documentary about marine biologist Sylvia Earle’s campaign to create a global network of marine sanctuaries will be at 4:30 p.m. For more information, visit maritimeaquarium.org.
tinamarie.craven@hearstmediact.com
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June 04, 2021 at 05:08PM
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Maritime Aquarium to reveal their palace-like new seal exhibition on World Oceans Day - Westport News
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