A Sign of the Season
Have some more fruitcake and eggnog!
Denver aquarium
Quest Blessing
The Denver Aquarium seemed like a good place to find audiences interested in hearing my Stirring Sea Secrets presentations, and it is, but when I contacted the education manager there I found I’d stumbled on a motherlode. Colleen Shipley’s standards for volunteer enrichment programs are stringent. Every driblet of information in my hour-long talk had to be cited to respectable sources. My terminology needed updating too. Starfish and jellyfish are now sea stars and sea jellies because they aren’t fish–the very sort of nitpicking I needed to bolster my confidence and credibility. Colleen’s passion for education keeps her running hard, but […]
Want a Hug?
Believe it or not most visitors to the touch pool at the Denver Aquarium take me up on the offer and get a thrill out of their hug. Why do these sea urchins gently squeeze our finger between their spines when we give them a chance? I’d tell you, but I’m afraid that if I look it up I’ll find out that the “hug” is an unfriendly reflex of some kind, and that would spoil everything.
Death Squirt
A beetle picked his way along a branch above a mangrove swamp. Wham! A geyser of water smacked him right in the kisser, dropping him into the water where he was snatched down a hungry gullet. On the other side of the globe, in Denver’s Downtown Aquarium, an innocent child climbs a ladder to stretch his arm over an exhibit and offer the fish a cricket. Wham! A powerful spurt smacks his palm dead-center, jolting the little guy with backsplash. The exhibit and swamp are each populated by hand-sized archer fish which specialize in precision squirts ranging to six feet. I’d been captivated by an article about archers sometime back and am thrilled to find that the Denver aquarium not only has archer fish, it […]