People always wonder about the workings behind the glass - how the aquarium actually runs. We
asked Jason, one of our aquarists, to answer a few questions:
How do winter storms affect the Aquarium?
Obviously, the main difficulty is power outages, but there’s also sand blowing around, which gets sand on the windows and in the seal tank. It also gets pretty cold in the aquarium in the winter in general.
What happens when the power goes out?
There’s more than one way to aerate a tank. You can add oxygen, or you can constantly pump fresh seawater through the tank. Pumping water is the method we use at the Seaside Aquarium, so when the power goes out, we have a backup pump that we turn on to get the fresh sea water to all of the tanks. It’s a gasoline powered pump and someone needs to stay with it until the power comes back on. You can get about three hours on a tank of gas, so it makes for some long nights of not very much sleep when the power goes out for long stretches at a time.
Do the storms affect the seals?
They don’t really. They don’t get more wet. The noise of the backup pump can worry the seals, but they get used to it pretty quickly.
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Do they get cold? No. Not our seals. Are there any benefits to the winter storms? If it’s a really big storm, there’s a silver lining in that after the storm, large clumps of kelp wash up on the beach. Fresh kelp is something that sea urchins and shore crabs love to eat. I actually freeze the kelp to use all year. Also skate egg casings wash up, sometimes with live babies inside. It’s also just beautiful to look out over the ocean to see the big storms. The aquarium itself takes up very little space in that big building, and the roof is really large. During serious torrential winter downpours, especially if it’s hailing, you can hear the rain on the roof and it’s like being inside a drum. It’s pretty neat. |
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in back, submit it to and we might publish your question (and your name) in our next newsletter.
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Aquarium Word Search Find the following words across, down, diagonally, and/or backwards:
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