In the upcoming November issue of Diver Magazine longtime underwater journalist Stephen Weir takes readers on a visit to and into the New Jersey Aquarium. In preparing that article Stephen spent a day with the curators of the underwater gallery, looking at displays, talking fish and diving in the huge shark filled $55 million aquarium.The story that we ran was edited because of space reasons. What follows is the story behind the story -- items that Stephen Weir collected while preparing his feature article -- and the original version of our magazine piece before it was trimmed! The pictures that accompany this Website article were supplied by the Aquarium.
BRING ON THE COLOUR
Last year the New Jersey State Aquarium, located in Camden, NJ (a free ferry boat ride away from its cross-river neighbor, Philadelphia) opened Ocean Base Atlantic, a $4 million adventure at the aquarium.
Ocean Base Atlantic was, in essence, a facelift for the State Aquarium. When originally opened in 1992, the aquarium featured the fish that one finds in the waters around the state. Local divers took to the aquarium big time. See a Sand Tiger while diving off Atlantic City? This is the place to come and study the friendly beast close up. In the first 3 years 2.5 million people came through the doors of this river front establishment.
After the initial rush, the people behind the non-profit aquarium found our that solely featuring northern water fish does have its drawbacks. Although big and fascinating, this eco-system tends to have a rather bland colour scheme! The new look to the aquarium has meant the addition of a coral reef, teaming with bright tropical fish!
In addition to the triggerfish and the groupers, currently running is a new show entitled Dangers of the Deep. A must see for divers, this exhibit takes a look at those creatures that can inflict pain (and sometimes death) when touched. Stinging jelly fish, poisonous stone fish and snakes get to swim in the spotlight at the aquarium.
The New Jersey State Aquarium at Camden is a nonprofit corporation located at 1 Riverside Drive, Camden J.J./ For information call (609) 365-3300. Ticket prices for the aquarium, in American funds are: Adults $9.95, children - $6.95 and students/seniors $8.45. Divers will often see their phone number (800) 616-JAWS but this is a ticket line phone number and it is often difficult to get specific dive related information.
While interviewing the curatorial staff at the aquarium I was given a number of interesting bits of underwater trivia. What follows, in no particular order, are those items that I jotted down in my reporter's notebook.
The Aquarium has over two dozen sand tiger sharks, brown sharks and the New Jersey dogfish. Aquariums in America's southern regions don't exhibit these northern water behemoths, so, as a result most of the gallery research is handled in New Jersey. Their findings include:
How far away can a shark smell you? The aquarium figures about a mile - the distance between the Aquarium in New Jersey and the famed Liberty Bell in Philadelphia Pennsylvania.
The Open Ocean Tank holds 760,000 gallons of water - enough to take a bath every night for 65 years! It's 120 feet across at one point - about the distance from home plate to second base on a baseball diamond. At the Edge of the Abyss, its deepest point, it is 24 feet deep.
Into all that water goes 160,000 pounds of table salt and about 100,000 pounds of other chemicals to arrive at just the right balance. The Aquarium makes its own saltwater mix under the name "Conservation Crystals" which you can buy for fish tanks 150 gallons in size and larger.
The water in the Ocean Tank circulates through filters, turning over completely every 90 minutes.
About 80 percent of visitors to the Aquarium are local residents: 20 percent come from more than 100 miles away. The Aquarium doesn't know how many of the visitors are divers -- "lots" is the closest they came to estimating.
Interested in seeing an aquarium. There is a dirth of aquariums in Canada, however in the US the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, counts 18 Aquariums, four combination Zoos and Aquariums, four Sea World Marine Mammal Parks and 134 Zoos as members.
The New Jersey Aquarium has a team of dedicated volunteer divers who feed the turtles and fish, put on underwater demonstrations for school kids, clean rocks and tank windows and even administer vitamins to the sharks (You sneak up on them and place pills inside the gills!). Joining a team on a day of diving is not an easy thing to do, not even for a magazine writer.
As a staff journalist with Diver I have been writing about aquariums for years. For me and many other Canadians, after the lakes have frozen over, aside from blasting off to Caribbean, the best way to get an underwater fix is to visit an aquarium. Stories I have written about fish tanks include: an underwater tour of the Disney Epcot Centre aquarium, a visit to the Baltimore Aquarium, a story on exhibits at a California aquarium, a look at the Toronto Zoo's modest aquarium, and a half dozen or so stories on Toronto's attempts to get a World Class Aquarium. Getting into the New Jersey Aquarium was the hardest aquarium assignment I've had!
Everyone at the Aquarium is very nice, extremely knowledgeable and dedicated to the welfare of the fish. As a result of their concern for their underwater habitat Diver Magazine's request was turned down several times. However, with a lot of help from the New Jersey Tourism department and Melaine Communications in Toronto, we did win the right to get in (Bet you haven't read about the Aquarium in Skin Diver!).
Before I did get in the water I did have to prove myself. In addition to getting an hour long safety briefing I was required to:
A day at the New Jersey Aquarium isn't everyone's cup-of-tea -- wreck divers will be happy to know that there are some great sites in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey that are worthy of a visit or two.
This month I received a mailing from the Sea Dwellers of New Jersey, a scuba diving outfit company located at 132-A Broadway Avenue in Hillsdale New Jersey. I can't vouch for their credentials, however, in the package I received they were advertising day-long wreck diving trips on board the Deep Adventure at the rate of about one every three weeks. Some of the sites include the Gulf Trader, the Stolt, the Pinta and the Oregon. Some of these wrecks are way out there -- the boat leaves as early as 3:00 am for some of the dives. Prices range from $65.00 to $175.00. The last scheduled dive for 1996 takes place on December 15th. There number is 201-358 0009.
The Original Version
Swimmin' with the Sharks in the New Jersey Aquarium
By Stephen Weir
The water was cold, the light was bright and there were man-sized sharks directly below and above me. I was the neoprene pelagic cookie and there were 150 New Jersey school children looking on wondering if the whole would suddenly become a sum of its parts!
Welcome to the New Jersey State Aquarium in Camden, New Jersey. Dubbed Ocean Base Atlantic, this new $55 million aquarium is a showcase for both northern Atlantic and Tropical sea life and is attracting the year-round interest of Canadian tourists and volunteer scuba divers!
Built beside the Delaware River directly across from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Ocean Base Atlantic is one of the few places in the world where the fish and sea animals of the north Atlantic (New Jersey to Nova Scotia) are on display. There are 600 fish including over two dozen well fed Brown and Sand Tiger Shark inside the 760,000 gallon salt water habitat.
For the visitors the aquarium, built in 1992 and dramatically retooled this year, is a total underwater experience. Working with a team of Disney advisors, the Aquarium has been designed to make visitors feel that they are explorers, immersed in a new world. There are interactive exhibits, opportunities to handhold live sea creatures (from sharks to horseshoe crabs) and of course, the salt water habitat!
The centerpiece of the harbourfront building is the Deep Atlantic tank. It isn't the biggest in the world (that honour goes to Disney's Epcot) but it is the newest and as a result the sight lines are unmatched. Want to look under, over and sideways at more than 400 kinds of fish?The New Jersey Aquarium has been designed to keep two species happy -- fish and tourists! It is a constant underwater parade as fish swim by banks of glass, port holes and bubble windows. Aside from the pilings of a shipwreck there are no blind spots in the huge tank where the inmates are out of the public eye.
Of course, spotting a fish and naming it are two different tasks. In the Deep Atlantic, visitors can get in-water ident support from volunteer divers who are in the tank every day to assist in the business of promoting the underwater environment.
"We recruit once a year and we do that in the summer" said Fran Ansbro. The Marine biologist turned Aquarium dive master works with 73 scuba volunteers. She has rallied them to the Aquariums's cause by appealing to local New Jersey scuba clubs and dive shops. Most of her unpaid help comes from the Camden/Philadelphia area, however, there are some dieharders who drive up to 3 hours each way to spend a day inside the apartment building sized cold water tank. There are sharks to be fed, shows to be staged and, when it gets slow, sunken rocks to clean!
It takes a special sort of person to volunteer. Scuba skills are important (minimum 25 open water dives), so is a tolerance to large sharks, pesky turtles and schooling blue herring (who are known to nip). However, the real talent that Ms. Ansbro is looking for the ability to show up and dive on schedule throughout the year.
"Why pay thousands of dollars to go to the Caribbean and hardly ever see a shark when you can swim with the really big ones right here!" explained volunteer diver Rick Ivy. He and his wife Pat spend one day every two weeks at the aquarium giving underwater lectures about sharks, the aquarium and the science of scuba. The round 760,000 gallon Open Ocean Tank is about 17 feet deep except in a section that is called the Abyss. Here the bottom has been deepened (24 ft) and the steel wall has been replaced by the world's largest single pane of glass. On the wet side of this window divers use Scuba Phones to communicate to visitors who sit high and dry in a 150 seat auditorium.
This is cold water diving, the exhibit is meant to simulate New Jersey conditions found in the nearby Atlantic Ocean. The sharks on display were captured in the mouth of the Delaware River four years ago when the facility was being opened and have adjusted quite well to the 68¼F temperatures and the institutionalized food.
On the Tuesday morning that Diver Magazine dove in the Abyss the Ivys were in full suits demonstrating how to make a lift bag work while fielding questions from a bus load of Philadelphia school children. "What are the bends?"asked one grade eight student. "Why don't sharks get the bends?" another asked Rick Ivy after hearing his accurate impromptu talk on the dangers of decompression sickness.
Ivy's shark diving bravado aside, the couple, like 70 other diving volunteers, give a lot of themselves just to get in the water. Rick Ivy is a close-to-retirement senior officer with the US Navy and Pat is a dental hygienist. Twice monthly both step away from good paying full time professions to help at the State Aquarium. When they aren't giving 4 daily briefings to visiting students they are administering to fish -- the sharks get a vitamin boost (pills are slipped behind the gills), the health of the pesky oversized sea turtles are monitored -- and if there is nothing else to do, scrubbing by hand each metal beam in the ersatz shipwreck that is the centerpiece of the tank.
The volunteer divers have to follow a code of standards set down by Ms. Ansbro. She has divided her helpers into 14 teams of 5 -- each group is assigned two days each month (the facility is open seven days a week) to work the pool. Each team wears matching wet suits supplied by Henderson and use the latest gear from US Divers.
The Aquarium estimates that it spends about $1,000 US every two days to feed each one of their shark. The Sand Tigers look rather plump as they serenely glide past me, looking down I see that the bottom hugging 6ft Browns need to diet. Content with their meals they touch neither the volunteers or the smaller fish. "If a herring is sick or injured, the sharks will move in, but, other than that life is pretty quiet," explained Fran Ansbro, a university trained marine biologist and chief diving officer at the aquarium. "They (sharks) obviously like it here. In fact, one of the Sand Tigers may be pregnant -- the first time that has happened in captivity!'
"We don't allow the public to dive here, our divers have a good reason to be here," she continued. "We do this for the sake of the fish. We want our divers to have as little impact as possible on the sharks. It is true that they they are used to divers, however if you startle one it can bolt and bang into the window ... it is easy for a shark to damage the cartilage in its nose."
"Not everyone is as enamored with New Jersey fish as our volunteer divers," said Michael Krajsa, the New Jersey State Aquarium's director of marketing and public relations. " People are interested in our indigenous fish, but, they also love tropical. That is why we opened Ocean Base Atlantic last summer and since then our attendance has increased by 12%."
Ocean Base Atlantic is a section of the building where there are 1,500 new tropical fish swimming in full sight. Again, with a tip of the hat to the diving community, many of the angelfish, butterfly fish and royal gammas are inside a salt water tank that has been built inside a replica of the Wreck of the Rhone (the British Virgin Island shipwreck that was featured in the movie The Deep).
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