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Hi guys. Can someone find me or show the largest aquarium in the us.

I need some pics please/ or a link to the website

Do you mean largest container for fish or largest aquatic zoo? Cause the Georgia aquarium has 8 million gallons of water and over 500 species and is reportedly the largest aquarium in the world. It also has a 6 million gallon tank which is 263 feet long by 126 feet wide by 33 feet deep and features whale sharks. This is probably the largest tank in the world, besting the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Motobucho who had the world's largest tank for many years, holding 7 500 tons of water, or roughly 1.7 million gallons.

I'm trying to visualise how much space six million gallons occupies ...

According to the FP tank volume calculator, a tank 200 feet by 100 feet by 50 feet contains 6.2 million UK gallons.

That isn't an aquarium - it's a hardened nuclear shelter for a B-52 bomber ... You could fit my entire house inside that a hundred and thirty three times over ...

Just constructing the aquarium alone is a feat of mega-engineering ... have you any idea how thick the glass panes would have to be to hold in a 50 foot depth of water?

So, what was my first thought upon contemplating what to do with a six million gallon aquarium?

FIFTY MILLION PANDA CORYS!

You could start off letting 2,000 of them breed like rabbits (I'm sure my bunch would enjoy that much space!), then just raise fry on an industrial scale until you had enough Panda Corys to repopulate Peru ...

Imagine the Amazon biotope you could create with that volume of water ... your bogwood decorations would be whole trees ... no problem with having lots of different species in that volume, you could forty different species of Tetra - in shoals of 10,000 each. You could then add 20 different Cory species - again, 10,000 individuals each. You could put in 2,000 each of EVERY Apsitogramma Dwarf Cichlid known to science. You could have 20,000 Otocinclus ... 10,000 Panaque maccus Plecs. And then, because that biotope would be shallow (say no deeper than 8 feet) it would cover more than a hectare of land. This would be an aquarium you could sail a boat on! It would be a tropical boating lake ... and you could go snorkelling among the fishes ...

Mind you, the logistics of that setup would be horrendous to contemplate. Imagine a gravel vac on that ... no, on second thoughts, don't even try.

Keeping that volume of water at an even 78 degrees F would result in gigantic fuel bills. Not to mention the filtration system for it ... just the capital costs of construction would run into tens of millions of US dollars, and then once it was stocked, running it would involve bills of something like $100,000 per month. The only way you could possibly operate such a vast aquarium would be to make it a zoo and take paying customers, and if you charged, say, $5 a head to see it, you'd need 20,000 customers a month to break even.

But imagine how utterly stunning it would look when finished ... and imagine how much fun you could have snorkelling in what would be a real life piece of the Amazon, because you could stock it with 400 or more species of fish ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002