Sea Life

The Enoshima Aquarium is pretty magical. I mean, look at this guy's face. The last aquarium I visited was in Boston and the whole place smelled like penguin guano. Let me assure you, despite their unparalleled adorability, penguin crap has a way of winding up your nostrils and poking your brain with a pitch fork. The penguins in Enoshima are in a closed-in exhibit. When we saw them, they were all neatly lined up for feeding time, patiently waiting by the door. It was kind of Japanese actually.

A large portion of the aquarium is devoted to the animals that live in Sagami Bay (which you may remember from my post on Odawara Castle), which is literally only feet away. It's interesting to see what's in the water outside. There is a gigantic talk that is really amazing, all the bay species swimming around together.

The other big exhibit is the jellyfish. At first, it was kind of creepy. It's this big room with huge tanks of blobby things floating around. I mean, they don't have any bones, they're more than 90% water and frankly, my most prominent jellyfish memories are of the dried up, deceased ones that wash up on Floridian beaches. They're not pretty and you do not want to step on them.

These jellyfish, though, were beautiful.

I know here they just look like a bunch of submerged shower caps, but trust me, in motion they are beautiful.

These jellyfish are colored by whatever they eat, sort of like if you put a daisy in water with food coloring. The aquarium made them all different shades. Floating aimlessly around in their tank, they reminded me of this game.

Here we have Blake's favorite part of the aquarium:

It's a walking fish, or a fish with legs. Would you expect anything less from a guy with a Darwin fish on the back of our car?

The most impressive thing to me? The crabs. Blake and I tried valiantly to get a picture of these crabs, but the lighting in the tank was weird so we couldn't get a good one.

I'd seen pictures on the internet of giant crabs. I thought surely, it must be photoshopped. Surely, there was no way crabs grew to that size. They do. It was like something out of Doctor Who (anyone, anyone?).

May I present the Japanese Spider Crab:

 

No, this is not my photo. It is a grab off the internet. These crabs really are this big and frankly, at this angle, the legs look much shorter than they actually are. If I held my arms straight out, and the crab did the same, the crab would be bigger. I do not want to think of running into one of those out in the ocean. Eugh. Creepy, yet fascinating.

The Enoshima Aquarium is clean and open, lots of windows looking out over the water. 

It's been about six months since Blake and I left Florida, where we'd been living near assorted beaches for three years. It was good to see sand, and to smell the ocean again.