The age of aquariums

By Ginger Strand, from the February issue of The Believer. Strand is the author, most recently, of Flight, published in May by Simon & Schuster.

The ocean has long been a repository for our ideas of the monstrous and the unknowable. “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” God demands of Job. The sea’s creatures challenge our most basic ideas of creatureliness. Creatures have recognizable parts, but in the sea they can be diaphanous clouds of membrane, without eyes, face, stomach, spine, or brain. Creatures move, but oysters drift, and corals are rooted like plants. Creatures have physical integrity, but a starfish chopped in half will grow into two separate beings. Or consider the Portuguese man-of-war, which acts like an individual but is actually a huge colony of beings moving as one. There are fish that can freeze without dying and other sea creatures living at temperatures above boiling. As for reproduction, even the most ordinary fish can be deliriously perverse. They’re hermaphrodites. They switch genders. Males give birth. Some corals and bivalves reproduce by “broadcast spawning,” in which males cast off huge nets of sperm that drift capriciously to any available egg, while snails and leeches mate through what scientists call “traumatic insemination,” in which the male fires a detachable sperm-filled harpoon at the unsuspecting body of a female. As the naturalist Loren Eiseley once wrote, “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”

A visit to an aquarium does little to diminish this sublime terror. Even as it strives to inform, with wall copy and touchscreens and neat placards of exhibit-speak, the aquarium mesmerizes visitors, overflowing its own didactic intent. No touchscreen on earth can match the allure of a live reef shark, rippling your way with a sinister, toothy smile. We must love this. Aquariums are currently all the rage. Of the forty-one American aquariums accredited by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association in 2003, more than half opened since 1980, seventeen since 1990 alone. These are not traditional halls of fish tanks but huge, immersive environments with increasingly exotic fish in ever more realistic habitats, with live coral reefs, artificial currents, and living kelp forests. Massive public/private endeavors, the new breed of aquarium has flourished in an era of ambitious urban renewal aimed at reviving derelict inner-city waterfronts. Their prominent role in such schemes caused the Wall Street Journal to dub the last two decades “the age of aquariums.” We are in love with looking at fish.

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