Vancouver Aquarium

sea anemones, urchins, starfish, glorious sea baubles.

It was a typical Vancouver day on our first adventure together, wet, windy and gray. Apart from being soggy we were very excited to be setting off. So far our method for handling wet weather was to sloosh around in one pair of shoes and wear our others while they dried out that day!
North we went (this time), when we left the built up area the wind cut through like a cutting thing. We zigzagged through Stanley Park, spotted squirrels (cool!), vainly trying to capture them on camera, and took shots of one glorious tree still in Autumnal bloom. I continuously learnt more about my camera and experimented (I can't Wait! till go on another camera expedition).

top- beluga whales, calf and mummy. left- kiddies framing giant octopus, they only live a couple years and have a diameter of several meters.

When we got inside we shed our layers in relief only to find out the big exhibitions were outside. So we made our way to the door pulling clothes back on but because we'd worked up a sweat on the walk the wind found its way through us and chilled our skin; which was very bad for sick mum.

top- cool frog in a big tank with heaps of tadpoles and frogs, all these pictures are from the same display. left- Devfrog. right- busy tadpoles.

We saw the otter show, which was very cool, learnt all sorts of interesting things like they have no fat at all but live in freezing temperatures so they keep warm with the most luxurious fur in the world. Its soft, long and dense causing them to be brought to the edge of extinction by us of course. In fact their fur was what opened the trade to the Asian market, it was bought at a high price and coveted by the nobility.

left- tree frog. right- salamander

We saw very curious dolphins, 1 swam on his back round and round, the other kept popping out of the water to give me the eye. The Beluga whales were worth seeing, you could see them on the surface and also go underground to a big viewing window. I captured 1 on film singing for a few minutes :). When we got to the underground tunnel which was heated and mum curled up on a seat immovably. No questioning or suggestioning swayed her so I acquiesced to her will and led the kids off to the next exhibit.

top- sea snake, they were perfectly still waiting for dinner to swim by (you can see the perfect reflection of my camera lens ;)). left- sand eels (I think?) pretending to be drifting, floating sea anemones. right- party hat crab.

We soon found the giant octopus which was held in much anticipation! No amount of photographing could capture it though, in its dark highly reflective habitat :(, but we were blessed that the extremely shy creature was in fact in full view!

this was the opening display to the jellyfish exhibit, those colours are pretty close to as is.

We saw all sorts of fish, my favourite were these truly gorgeous ones, their eyes practically glowed, stingrays, starfish, urchins, turtles, seahorses, sea spiders (ick), sea snakes, sharks etc! And Jellyfish! Oh sublime, what is it about jellyfish.. they're graceful, cute, delicate, glowing, squishy! they're my favourite sea creature.


i'm not sure they need any description :) maybe if i knew anything about them i could ;p. there were tiny speedy ones, medium pulsing ones, glorious gliding daddy ones. click for a bigger picture, truly the delicate details of these creatures are perfect.

There were 4 eyed fish, they had 2 bubble eyes that cruised around, checking out the surface and on the side of those they had eyes that were immediately below those eyes, just under the water surface, wacky! We saw small alligators and snakes and tarantulas (it seems Canadians have a tarantula fetish - every where we went it seemed they had their token one), cockroaches (ick ick) and an anaconda - super cool! We saw the snake show and Blythe told them all about our snakes to which the snake show girls gasped and ewwed (which I thought was pretty funny, 'hallo, snake show?!').

top left- emerald tree boa, beautiful colour. top right- marmosets. bottom left- lone snoozey sloth Blythe spotted way up in a corner very hard to see. bottom right- those noisy amazonian birds and Blythe!

It got hotter and hotter as we entered the bowels of the place and got to the rain forest section. Here there were all sorts of bright birds; 2 very noisy birds who Blythe imitated, who they imitated, who Blythe imitated (you get the picture). I angled for a good shot of some red birds and got shat on! Fortunately it was easy to clean off but the first thing I thought of was 'cool some action to write in my blog' lol. There were fast marmosets who kindly posed.

left- contrast outline of lionfish and coral. right- a rare mumfish. bottom- my favourite glowy eyed fish :)

We worked our way back out and ran into mum, we'd been a good 1-2 hrs, it was perfect timing as she'd been panicking because she'd moved and thought we may have not been able to find her. She'd warmed up and felt a lot better so we excitedly took her back through everything all over again :), like the important shat point :p and then all went to see the frog section. I was in frog photo heaven but it was getting late and no food and kids don't mix well.

left- poison dart frog who kept hiding, was kinda cute :). top- toadlookalike frog, might have been a burrowing one. bottom- sneaky hiding frog :), he was taken at the extreme end of my zoom and them cropped and zoomed on the computer.

So foot sore and soggy we plodded back, stumbled across squirrel feeding time, counted 20 squirrels scampering for their lives with Devlin chasing and screaming blue curry; had sushi for dinner.

The LandSea Tour called us and said the ferries had been cancelled due to high winds - we were going to go to Vancouver Island the next day. So we prayed about it and the ferries were running again in the morning but the tour still didn't run lol. Fortunately we weren't on a fine time line and it was just as well because mum got to rest up again.

The kids and I returned to our rambles, walked, got rained on, ate something ;), went home (truth is my journal was back written and I don't remember, naughty me!).

Next blog: Vancouver Island!