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Looks stunning..but i think they should take out the whale shark though...
Heres a link..http://www.plecofanatics.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8191

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I know human beings and fish can co-exist peacefully.

The Okinawa Aquarium is old news. That tank is frickin' enormous. ENORMOUS.

I won't comment on the Whale Shark, though...

Last edited by Shinigami at 12-Apr-2005 14:07

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.

I won't comment on the Whale Shark, though...

Me neither, I just wont start

going by the size of the fish in comparison to that shark, i doubt they would keep it if it got larger. When it does, i would suspect that they would release it, but the size ratios seem to show that it would be a juvenile at best.

as for commenting on it, i won't rant - enough people would do that

Hmm. I'll leave aside the ethical can of worms opened by that revelation too for the moment.

However, as a technical achievement, that aquarium is something else. And that window into the huge volume of water is astonishing. A 60 centimetre thick slab of acrylic. Yeep. That piece of acrylic is thicker than the entire length of many people's home aquaria. Puts things into perspective.

Let's see, the glass on the Panda Fun Palace™ is 3mm thick. So to scale it up to 60cm thick, you'd have to multiply all of the linear dimensions by 200. Which would give me an aquarium whose dimensions were 122 metres by 62 metres by 62 metres. Total volume would be 4,697,368 cubic metres. There's around 220 gallons in a cubic metre of water (UK gallons that is), so this would give me 1,033,524,312 gallons to play with. Wow. That is a LOT of water. Put it in a container of more reasonable dimensions (i.e., shallower depth) and I'd have a Panda Cory farm big enough to hold a billion Pandas. Heh, why don't I just buy Lake Windermere and heat it?



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

i find that heartbreaking.

My initial though was Wow - fancy getting a whale shark into an Aquarium! However it is heart breaking seeing such a magnificent creature caged up like that ... just like seeing caged animals in a zoo.

However (bare with me, I'm playing devil’s advocate here) we've all been to zoos and aquariums and marvelled at the animals there. And as keepers of fish, we all keep fish in environments smaller than their natural habitat, often subjecting them to alien situations, freaking them out with big faces in their window, banging about, giant hands in the tank, putting the poor things through agony with various chemical reactions that don't happen in the wild … even death. We're all guilty! That's humans for you.

<-- breaks her promise

Good point fishymama and I can agree with you but I still have problems with keeping such a large (the largest fish in the sea) magestic and protected creature in a tank of any description
I just hope that they have plans to release the poor thing as it gets larger

From what I have been able to gather, the tank is just under 2 million US gallons...not as big as I would have suspected.

That's humans for you.

yikes im a really creul person

I am just wondering if the picture is for real? I have never seen what looks like Eagle Rays schooling nor have I seen a sting ray swimming higher than a whale shark. But of course this is a fish tank we are talking about, not the open ocean...

Yes, that's a real pic. Stingrays don't always take to bottom living, although that is what they do most of the time. Also, those are probably Cownose Rays, very common small rays that are supposedly quite friendly.

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.

While on a sailboat in a bay in Florida, I saw HUNDREDS of sting rays top the water enough to have the tips of their "wings" actually flip out of the water. There were enough doing it that at any given moment, you could see at least two doing it. The water in that bay was also rather deep, so they were definitely nowhere near the bottom...

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