Aquarium of the Smokies

At first blush, the mountains are a strange place for an underwater world teeming with thousands of the ocean’s most bizarre and exotic creatures.

Yet Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies in Gatlinburg ranks as the fifth most visited aquarium in the world, bringing 1.5 million visitors every year face-to-face with an otherwise elusive ecosystem. 

“A lot of people don’t have the opportunity to go to the Indo-Pacific and dive a coral reef, so we brought it to them,” said Courtney Thompson, the education director at the aquarium. “Where else in the world can you hike the Smoky Mountains in the morning and in the afternoon spend it at a coral reef?”

Thompson also likes to point out that Tennessee was once covered by an ocean — a long, long time ago. Visitors to the aquarium are quickly immersed, their senses transformed from the hustle and bustle of Gatlinburg’s streets to a place where time and space are suspended. The aquarium’s prize feature — an underwater tunnel stretching for more than 100 yards — envelops visitors in the profound world of the sea.

“When you go through Shark Lagoon tunnel, you see a 12-foot sawfish sitting right above your head. That is an experience most people would never have,” Thompson said.

It’s hard not to be awe-struck at every turn, whether it’s witnessing Sally, the endangered sea turtle, effortlessly propel her massive shell through the water, or studying the perfect spiral of a sea horse’s tail. The most creative minds on the planet would be hard-pressed to imagine a fish more alien than those nature has already come up with.

The cuttlefish has a pulsating radiance below its skin that intensifies when you press your hand to the glass of their tank. A giant spider crab with lanky, multi-jointed legs measuring 14 feet across, looks like it crawled off a Star Wars set.

With so much life teeming below the water’s surface, clever species have honed peculiar adaptations in staking out their niche in the food chain. The banded archer fish shoots insects out of the air with a well-aimed stream of water, while the angler fish uses a built-in fishing pole on its head to lure prey toward its mouth. The poisonous cone snail is even equipped with a harpoon that it shoots at prey and reels in at will.

Visitors should be forewarned: the aquarium can be addictive, with one visit simply whetting the appetite for more. Over half the guests every year are repeats, some visiting monthly. One most loyal visitor, a quadriplegic, visits every week, citing the therapeutic qualities of watching the tranquil world playing out behind the glass.

Of course, not every tank is tranquil. There are piranhas for starters. It was a hard-fought species for the aquarium, which had to assuage the government’s fears over the possibility of one escaping and taking up residence in a local river. There’s also the barracuda, a cannibalistic fish.

The aquarium has an entire exhibit dedicated to the vicious creatures of the ocean, called Lethal Weapons. One toxic frog on permanent exhibit, the poison dart frog, packs enough poison to kill 10 humans.

Replicating an underwater marine environment is difficult. But Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies has done it well, judging by the animals themselves, which interact and reproduce just like they would in the wild.

“That’s what we pride ourselves on, their habitat,” Thompson said. “If they aren’t reproducing or eating, then we’ve gotten it wrong.”

The aquarium was one of the first places in the world to breed the rare spotted eagle stingray in captivity last year. Some animals even reproduce a little too well. Another species of stingray called the Southern stingray was proliferating so much they had to take the males out of the exhibit. The aquarium’s octopus made itself at home surprisingly well, developing a particularly bad habit shortly after its arrival.

“She was getting out of her tank at night, going in another tank, eating some fish and getting back in her tank,” Thomas said. The aquarium thwarted her escapes by lining the top of the tank with Astroturf.

With some fish constantly eating each other and others giving birth, the aquarium is never quite sure exactly how many they have. The biggest challenge is posed by Shark Lagoon, the Mack-Daddy exhibit with roughly 2,000 fish co-mingled in a 740,000 gallon tank. Staff undertake a quarterly census to keep tabs on what’s living there.

“We set up five people in the tunnel with radios and they say ‘OK, for the next minute everybody count a particular species in their section of the tank.’ We repeat that several times and we get a fairly accurate guess,” said Frank Bulman, the director of husbandry.

Monitoring the health of the aquarium’s 10,000 fish is paramount. If a fish got sick and it was contagious, it would pose serious concerns in large tanks like Shark Lagoon and Coral Reef.

“This is such a delicate environment,” said Karl Thomas, marketing consultant at the aquarium.

Divers and marine specialists work in tandem to spot and isolate a sick fish as early as possible. The first red flag is its appetite.

“If a fish isn’t eating, you know something is wrong with it,” Bulman said. “There are a lot of other behavioral clues.”

To the novice, discerning abnormal behavior in one fish out of 10,000 seems impossible. But the staff are so tuned in to what’s normal. “If a fish is acting strange, you see it right away,” Bulman said.

A sick fish is very rare, however. The fish in the aquarium live longer than their wild counterparts, partly because they don’t have to work as hard to find food and they don’t face the same threats from predators.

“Most of the animals have been with us since opening nine years ago,” Bulman said. The four-foot-long jack fish in Shark Lagoon were just one inch when Bulman first put them in the tank prior to opening in 2000.

In the rare case of a fish dying from old age, it gets a necropsy to determine the cause. Fish are occasionally pulled for routine check-ups or for ultrasounds to determine if they are pregnant. In the case of a shark, a sawfish or the giant spotted eagle stingrays that can weigh up to 500 pounds, it becomes quite the operation.

To extract a shark from the giant Shark Lagoon, four divers suit up and descend into the tank with a large net stretched between PVC pipes. With two on guard to keep sharks at bay, the other two divers sidle up to the sick animal and maneuver the net under it. The four divers then grab a corner and swim to the surface, lifting the animal up as they go. 

As a precaution, every new fish that comes into the aquarium spends time in quarantine, particularly those caught in the wild, where they get various medicines taken orally or infused into the water and absorbed through the gills. Lacing the water with copper is effective at getting rid of parasites, for example, a standard treatment for all new fish.

“It is rare to have infectious disease problems in the exhibit because we have done a good job in quarantine,” Bulman said. The minimum is 40 days, with some much longer than that.

A traveling marine veterinarian visits the aquarium two days a month to assess fish in quarantine and in the tanks.

Each fish obviously has a dollar value attached to it. The aquarium’s largest exhibit, the 740,000-gallon Shark Lagoon housing some 2,000 fish, ranks in the millions, Bulman said.

Some fish may be irreplaceable. One of the aquarium’s most exotic fish, the Sea Dragon, looks like it climbed out of the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. They herald from Australia and are a protected species by the government. Only a handful of collectors are licensed to capture Sea Dragons, following rigorous protocol. Collectors can only catch males, which carry eggs on their tail after being deposited there by the females. When the eggs hatch, the collectors must return the adult to the wild. With a finite supply of Sea Dragons on the market, they cost thousands of dollars per fish.

When possible, the aquarium acquires specimens bred in captivity.

“I think it is just the responsible thing to do,” Bulman said. “Even if it costs more we would go that route.”

Occasionally the aquarium launches its own sea expeditions, including an annual shark fishing trip. Sometimes the trip is purely centered around an on-going joint research project to track the movements of tiger sharks and record data on the water they pass through. But sometimes they bring one home. To transport it over land, Bulman loads the animals into a 900-gallon traveling tank outfitted with its own filtration system, oxygen canisters and temperature controls pulled behind a pick-up truck. Probes run from the tank through the window to meters in the cab that allow Bulman to keep an eye on the water conditions as he’s driving. He also stops every couple of hours to peek in on them. The large aquarium logo on the side of the truck — and a small window on the side of the traveling tank — turns his rest breaks into a side-show.

“We get a lot of people who are curious when we stop for gas or lunch and want to see in,” Bulman said.

Bulman is engaged in a constant juggling act between his myriad holding tanks behind the scenes, continually shuffling species around to make room for new ones or accommodate those in quarantine. The aquarium raises many of its own fish — some of which are born in-house and others that are acquired too young to put in an exhibit right away. As they outgrow one holding tank, they must be upgraded to a larger one.

Take the six giant grouper Bulman bought this spring. They reach eight feet long and grow to hundreds of pounds. While just a few inches long when he got them, they won’t be released into the exhibit are until they are a foot and a half, and will occupy ever increasing tank space for the couple of years it takes them to grow that big.

One holding tank is dedicated to baby cownose stingrays, which prove quite the space hogs. Stingrays give live birth to a single pup that’s already quite large: at just a week old they are already a foot-and-a-half across.

“Proportionally the size of the pup compared to the size of the female would be like a human mother giving birth to a three- or four-year-old,” Bulman said. “It’s amazing. They are rolled up like a taco when they come out.”

Luckily, not all the sea life Bulman propagates take so much room. Dozens of baby seahorses the size of a match head occupy a tank no bigger than those found in your average living room, while infant jellyfish the size of tiny down feathers are perfectly content in a row of beakers on a shelf.

Bulman’s space crunch is apparent by tanks of baby sea creatures stashed in every nook and cranny — including an out-of-the-way corner of a filtration room reached only by climbing over a maze of pipes.

“There is never enough back space,” said Bulman.

The aquarium posts its extra fish on a surplus list with the American Zoo and Aquarium Association and gives them away gratis.

“Later if they have something we want, they remember us,” Bulman said of the quid pro quo between aquariums.

Not every species gets along well with others, further complicating the juggling act. Sometimes Bulman knows what not to pair in a tank together, thanks to constant trading of data between aquariums through conferences and the American Zoo and Aquarium Association.

“But a lot of it is trial and error,” he said.

Making sure all 10,000 fish at the aquarium are well-fed is yet another behind-the-scenes challenge. It’s particularly important for the predators. A hungry shark would be bad news for the hundreds of fish that occupy the same waters.

“Everyone asks, ‘Why don’t the sharks eat the small fish?’” Bulman explained. “The short answer is they do. The long answer is we try to minimize that.”

Shark feeding is an all-hands-on-deck affair. Four staffers arm themselves with a bucket of fish and a long pole outfitted with tongs at the end and stagger themselves around the perimeter of Shark Lagoon. The sharks congregate at the surface of the giant, open-topped tank, crowding around the feet of the feeders. Some feisty sawfish — sharks with a long chainsaw snout — try to grab the tongs, forcing the feeder to jump backwards to avoid being grazed. Each shark is marked, ensuring it gets the requisite intake. The feeders call out who got what — “Number 7, mackerel!” — while a fifth staffer overseeing the feeding marks it down on a clipboard.

Their daily menu sounds like an upscale seafood restaurant.

“We’ve got salmon, mackerel, silversides, mahi-mahi, squid, clam,” Bulman said as he surveyed the shelves of their massive, walk-in freezer. The aquarium knows the mineral and caloric content of every ounce. Sometimes they send pieces off for nutritional analysis, as it can fluctuate depending on the season.

Getting food to the lower reaches of Shark Lagoon, where schools of colorful fish make their home among the coral reefs, required some clever engineering.

“We don’t want the small fish to come up to the surface for their food where they are more vulnerable, so we send the food right down to their habitat where they are hiding,” Bulman said.

A series of large PVC pipes run behind the walls of the aquarium and empty into the bottom of the tank. Food is stacked into the tubes, and with a twirl of a few valves, flushes through the pipes and into the water.

The tubes are fired in rapid succession. The more aggressive fish swarm around the first to fire, allowing the more timid fish to nibble at the outlets of subsequent food bursts. The firing of feeding tubes at the bottom of the lagoon happens while the sharks are being fed at the surface, keeping the big predators and little guys segregated.

“That’s when the fish are most vulnerable,” Bulman said. “Everybody gets worked up, and if there is a predation, that’s likely when it is going to happen.”

There’s yet another piece of the feeding puzzle: figuring out a way to segregate Sally, the endangered sea turtle. Sally has a strictly controlled diet, plus the aquarium doesn’t want her to risk a brush with a shark during a feeding frenzy. Sally, on permanent loan from the federal government, was trained to swim into a holding pen off the main tank on cue. Feeders rap three times on the side of the holding pen to call Sally up from the depths of the tank before shark feeding begins. Sometimes, however, the pen is occupied by an animal receiving special care or being acclimated. So the feeders had to have a back up plan. They trained Sally to touch her nose to the center of a large bull’s-eye target to receive her food. If she has to stay in the main tank during a feeding, they can call her off the side and keep her preoccupied with the target until the frenzy is over, Bulman said.

When feeding of the large exhibits is over, staff undertake the equally labor intensive but less-stressful chore of hand-feeding the myriad smaller tanks throughout the aquarium.

Some fish are picky and only eat live food, which the aquarium raises from scratch behind the scenes. A series of household-sized tanks is dedicated to a live food operation. The first step is cultivating algae, which is fed to minuscule organisms, which are fed to progressively larger critters up the food chain. The last tanks in the process are teaming with brine shrimp and grass shrimp to be savored by the aquarium’s picky eaters, as well as newly arrived specimens being acclimated.

“There is going to be something wrong with a fish if he turns down a live grass shrimp. That’s like putting a big steak in front of me,” Bulman said.

As visitors probe the windowed world of sea creatures at Ripley’s Aquarium, they’ll stumble upon one exhibit that seemingly has nothing to do with fish: a manned command post with the aquarium’s “life support” at the finger tips of a controller. The giant wall — flanked by computer monitors, lighted gauges and operating panels — keeps the aquarium’s constant cycle of water filtration humming. It’s no small feat. The aquarium holds 1.4 million gallons of water that is turned over every hour. Do the math, and every second some 400 gallons of water are rushing through a massive network of pipes en route to the filtration tanks and then back into the exhibits.

The powerful filtration equipment for the main tanks is housed in a three-story warehouse that looks, feels and sounds like the engine room of a tanker ship. There are two basic steps in filtration. Water free falls through huge towers called “fractionators,” where it is infused with oxygen and purged of bad bacteria. Meanwhile, water is pushed through giant sand-filled cylinders to strain out debris. The sand quickly becomes clogged with fish waste, however, requiring frequent back-wash. With the twirl of a few dials, the flow of water is reversed, surging backwards to tumble the sand around and release the debris. The back-wash is diverted into huge, dirty water basins before it is cleaned and returned to the filtration system.

“Every large exhibit has two underground vaults associated with it just for back washing,” Bulman said.

The aquarium also has large underground vats for mixing batches of salt water. The concoction has a dozen different compounds — some added by the bucketful and others by the teaspoon.

The aquarium has one mixing vat and one storage vat, so it always has plenty of reserves to call on. Each holds 35,000 gallons, yet when mixing a batch, that teaspoon of rubidium is just as important as the 8,050 pounds of basic sodium chloride.

“We try and match the constituents of natural sea water with our recipe as closely as we can,” Bulman said.

Water in tanks is not replaced carte blanche but merely topped off as a gallon here and there is lost due to evaporation. For all that water swirling around, the aquarium uses surprisingly little H20, instead recirculating and filtering the same water over and over.

Water samples are taken from every tank daily. They are tested for ammonia content, nitrate, salinity, pH, oxygen, bacteria load — you name it, they test it. Fine adjustments are made in filtration and feeding to keep the water just right. Different fish require different temperatures, so as water flows through filtration, it is also routed past heaters or chillers, depending on the preference for that tank. The same system is actually used to run the climate control for visitors, making the cool aquarium a luscious afternoon respite from a hot summer day.

Bulman and his “life support” crew get text messages to their cell phones every 15 minutes from the central command station with oxygen readings, temperature and other pertinent updates. Life support is so critical, the aquarium houses a back-up generator the size of a tractor trailer truck to guard against a power failure. A second generator is on stand-by in case the main one malfunctions.

“We have to have two of everything; in case one goes down, life support can still go on,” said Karl Thomas, marketing consultant,  pointing to their segregated tank. “I’ve heard that building an aquarium is as complicated as building a nuclear power plant.”

Nature’s most lethal weapons

Every year, the Aquarium of the Smokies unveils a special exhibit. Almost as soon as one goes up, brainstorming starts for the next one, with everyone tossing ideas in the hat. Some prove harder than others to pull off.

Take this year’s exhibit, called Lethal Weapons. A few featured animals are so dangerous, it was hard to find a collector willing to gather them, like the extremely poisonous blue-ringed octopus and cone snails. The venom of both slows your metabolism, heart and respiration to the point of paralysis, although your mind remains aware of what’s happening. The blue-ringed octopus is the most toxic creature on the planet. With enough poison to kill 26 adult humans within minutes, it was difficult to land one.

Staff take precautions when handling the dangerous animals in-house, like using long tongs to move them between tanks. While some are poisonous, the unusual mantis shrimp has claws that unfold so rapidly and forcefully they pack the punch of a .22-caliber bullet.

“They have been known to smash and break the glass walls of aquariums,” said Frank Bulman, director of husbandry.

As for the electric eel, which can create heart-stopping currents of 600 volts, staff working in the exhibit use a net with a wooden handle and wear shoulder-length, heavy rubber gloves.

For the odd trunk fish, Bulman’s biggest concern was protecting it from itself. It secretes a toxin akin to chemical warfare that kills everything around it, and when trapped in close quarters, will kill itself.

When collecting the animal from the ocean, Bulman cuts the bottom out of a five-gallon-bucket with a net stretched over the bottom and dangles it over the side of a boat to flush it constantly with sea water.

Once on land, getting the fish from the Florida coast to the Tennessee aquarium posed another challenge. So Bulman aggravated the fish to release the toxin, essentially emptying itself before being loaded into a confined tank for transport.

Lethal Weapons will be on display through 2009. As for next year’s exhibit? Stay tuned!

Diving in

Greg Cole is likely the fastest draw in the mountains when it comes to pulling on a clammy wetsuit and strapping on scuba gear — he’s got it down to just under five minutes.

“I get a lot of practice,” says Cole, who descends into the world of sharks and stingrays several times a day at Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies.

Cole says he never tires of the dives but relishes every chance he gets to slip into the tranquil underwater world. He can’t get too complacent, though.

“There are some venomous fish in there and some with sharp spines on the side of their tail,” said Cole, who’s 23.

While in the tank, Cole doles out food from a zipper pouch to the stingrays. He keeps tabs on how much each one gets, and makes a note if one doesn’t seem to be eating enough or acts lethargic. In this sense, Cole acts as the eyes of the marine caretakers tasked with keeping the aquarium’s specimens happy and healthy.

For visitors, simply seeing a diver interact with the fish holds entertainment value. Cole puts on a little show of his own while in the tank, upstaging even the most bizarre and exotic fish. Cole is prone to perform headstands or do a Spiderman crawl across the inside of the glass. One of his favorite antics is to strike a meditation pose, sitting Indian style with his palms turned up as if levitating — albeit in scuba gear.

“The guests crack up,” Cole said.

Crab daddy

Jerry Zimmerman may have discovered his mission in life on the late side, but he’s doing his best to make up for lost time.

Every day, hundreds of children funnel past his shallow troughs filled with horseshoe crabs, and it’s Zimmerman’s job to coax and cajole each and every one into touching their hard, smooth shells.

“I have picked up the dubious title of crab daddy,” said Zimmerman.

While it’s bound to happen — children deciding they are finally ready to touch the crab once they are already in the car on the way home — Zimmerman goes out of his way to spare parents the unfortunate timing. He has picked up an important trick of the trade, which goes something like this: “See this guy? This is Fred. Fred is my friend. He has been my buddy a long time,” Zimmerman will say while caressing the crab’s large smooth shell. “If you hang a name on the animal, [it] is a little less frightening.”

When a child finally gets up the gumption, Zimmerman makes sure to celebrate with them.

They usually say, ‘Yeah I did it!’ It’s a big thing for them and we try to make it as big as it seems to them,’” Zimmerman said.

While Zimmerman patiently works with shy children, he has to protect crabs from an inadvertent pile, one by the more rambunctious children.

“We do get into being a crab cop,” Zimmerman said.

At 72, he could retire, but someone would have to pry him away from his horseshoe crabs first. That’s unlikely, especially since Zimmerman regularly brings in break room cookies for the wildlife biologists and divers who work behind-the-scenes.

Zimmerman can only think of one down side.

“My hands are usually looking like pink prunes by early morning and stay that way the rest of the day,” he said.

www.ripleysaquariumofthesmokies.com or 865.430.8808.