Aquatic Life — a world within our own
A few months ago I had been on a short trip to Belgium with two of my colleagues. It was a weekend joined by a bad weather. There was an unpredictable rain all over the two cities we were visiting, Brussels and Antwerp. And to make things worse, it seemed to rain whenever we stepped out to go anywhere. After a long and dull downpour I was disheartened from seeing anymore of the city, and wanted to go back to my place. I just wanted to escape this rain and spend the remainder of the Sunday comfortably in my room. But the train wasn’t scheduled till the evening and we needed to kill some time, a few hours, in the least. We looked for some sort of indoor tourist attraction, someplace that would relieve us of the outside weather. After a short pursuit around the Antwerp railway station, we came across exactly such a place, called Aquatopia, and decided to get in.
Aquatopia was primarily a marine life conservatory with plethora of aquariums featuring various recreations of underwater creatures. It also hosted various bio-life habitats such as rain forests, coral reefs and etc. As we walked along this lively museum, I quickly felt immersed in the surroundings filled with myriad varieties of lifeforms that I’ve never seen before.
And it slowly began to impact me from within.
The first creatures that stole my attention were frogs; the little yellow and black ones. They’re called Poison Dart Frogs.
Looking at them, I remembered the cover page of a book that I started reading long back: The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert. It had a similar looking frog on its cover page, the Panama Golden Frog — which is a critically endangered species in the Amphibian family. And for an instance, I thought I was looking at it. But the frog present here was a Yellow Banded Poison Dart, which also belongs to the same family type as the endangered Panama Golden Frog. The frogs were jumping from one twig to another inside that large glass containment, like kids at a children’s park.
I felt a strange sense of joy looking these golden little creatures. They were so fragile and fascinating, and their wild appearance captivated me strangely. I never felt like this before towards frogs or towards any other life form. These little beings appeared so alive, as alive as myself.
We moved ahead towards other exhibits : marine animals. There were many large glass tanks around us, showcasing marine creatures of different species. There were star fish, porcupine fish, jelly fish, yellow tang, sea horse, shrimp, eel, octopus, sting-rays, sharks and many, many more forms of aquatic life that I didn’t know existed.
As I walked along further, I spotted the two types of fish that appeared in the animated film Finding Nemo: clown fish (Nemo and Marlin) and blue tang fish (Dory). For an instant I felt like a child filled with excitement and worked my camera at them.
Looking at them, I wondered how artistically has nature adorned these tiny water beings in such magnificent colours. And the marine plantation around the fish reflected a beautiful coral reef, adding more beauty and liveliness to the life that was swimming swiftly in the controlled blue vastness that stood in front of me.
I felt an acute sense of realization that all this life I was looking at in this aquatic park was just a glimpse of a much larger, and a much vaster marine life that is out there in the seas and oceans of this planet. But a majority of that marine life is now being massively impacted by us, by our uncontrolled exploitation of the planet and its ecological habitat.
The marine life is undergoing grave dangers due to human activity. The rise in global temperatures is resulting in the bleaching of coral reefs, which would cause their eventual death and decay. Alongside this, the pollutants we release into our seas and oceans are causing an irrevocable damage to the deep blue beings all around the world.
Numerous species are going extinct because of what we’re doing to this planet, and we don’t seem to mind it at all. We rarely think of it, we rarely think of life outside of our own kind. We believe ourselves to be the world’s most significant species, ignoring many other forms of magnificent life around us. This very perception of our species is what has led our planet into the peril that it now finds itself in. The inevitable changing of our earth’s climate, and the global threat that is rising from this whole crisis is our very own doing.
I ask myself how different would our behaviour be towards the world if we realized the fact that it’s not created solely for our own use. I wonder if we would behave any different.
Note: I feel sad to say that the tourist attraction mentioned above, Aquatopia, located in Antwerp, Belgium, was closed down permanently on 8th January, 2017 due to a steep decline in the number of visitors over the past few years.
