The Aquarium

Why animals in captivity is not a business.

I went to the National Aquarium in Baltimore for their Sharks! Behind the Scenes immersion tour last June. I haven’t been to the aquarium in over fifteen years and I haven’t been to a zoo in over five years. I don’t believe they are doing what is best for the animals. I believe they are using them to make money. They claim to be doing what is best for the animals but the wild is best for the animals. I understand sometimes animals get hurt and need help. I’m not saying the aquariums around the world shouldn't be responding to animal emergencies. I also know that sometimes an animal cannot be returned to the wild due to injuries it may have received or due to needing special care. Sometimes it’s inevitable and I’m okay with an aquarium keeping an animal that actually needs their care. They can even let people come see the animals that they have to keep, that way they can continue to have people donate money to them so that they can keep helping animals that need their help.

I went only to get photos and ask questions. I ended up not having to ask any questions because the tour guide was answering all of the ones I had as he was telling us about the sharks. I had one question that I meant to ask but forgot to. Here is what I learned…

Most aquariums use the water that’s located near them. The Inner Harbor’s water is not usable by the aquarium due to it’s very low salt content. For water to be considered salt water it has to have a salinity of 35ppt (parts per thousand), the Inner Harbor’s salinity is only 4ppt due to high levels of chromium. The aquarium needs salt water for it’s exhibits so they have to make it. It costs them $.31 a gallon to make the salt water. They require 2.5 million gallons of water for their exhibits. That’s a staggering $775,000 to fill their tanks.

The aquarium officially stopped their Dolphin shows on May 4th 2012. Now they have an exhibit called Dolphin Discovery which has trainers interacting with Dolphins and showing how they are trained and a few of their tricks. They attribute the stopping of the shows to ecology, vet care, and animal interaction. Our guide didn't explain it past that. I’m guessing animals were getting hurt doing tricks repeatedly throughout the day every day of the year. Their oldest dolphin Nani is still forced to perform and do tricks even though she is forty-one years old.

They were getting ready to take the Wings in the Water exhibit off-exhibit starting Labor Day to begin building a new exhibit to be an Australian shark reef. Wings in the Water is due to come back once the new exhibit is completed. The exhibit is estimated to be open May 30th, 2013. It will feature 50 Blacktip Sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus) from Australia. The National Aquarium has an exclusive deal with Australia. Basically they are ripping 50 Blacktip Sharks from their natural habitat and shipping them to Baltimore to live in a tank surrounded by concrete, rebar, and 2-1/2 inch glass for the rest of their lives. Sharks are shipped inside wooden crates and can be transported for up to seventeen hours without stopping.

Their eight Dolphins eat a total of three hundred pounds of fish a day. It is restaurant quality and flash frozen. Their Sharks are fed fresh fish because they don’t like the flash frozen fish that the Dolphins get. They eat an average of one to two percent of their body weight a week, around one hundred pounds, except for the Sand Tiger Sharks who eat between two and two and a half percent of their body weight. The aquarium spends between $20,000 and $100,000 a week on food for their eighteen thousand individuals comprised of eight hundred sixty species.

They currently have five species of Shark Bonnethead, Horn, Nurse, Sand Tiger, and Zebra. Each shark is capable of going through roughly thirty thousand teeth in their lifetime, you can even see teeth laying on the bottom of the exhibit tanks. Soon they will have six species when they add the 50 Blacktip Sharks from Australia next spring.

Behind the scenes they have a large pool for putting sharks into the exhibit. It was being occupied by a large Grouper, commonly called a Potato Cod, while we were there. There was also a Puffer Fish in a quarantine tank in the same room. He was new and they had to make sure he didn't have any kind of disease. Apparently the reason Puffer Fish puff is due to a last resort to deter predators, it’s not good for them. The aquarium also features a huge Fin Whale skeleton from an animal killed in 1882 off of Cape Cod. It was a chilling reminder of a more ruthless time when America was a whaling nation.

The aquarium has a veterinary staff consisting of three veterinarians and seven vet assistants on the payroll. Including the veterinary staff the aquarium has two hundred fifteen paid staff and seven hundred twenty five volunteer staff. Of the nine hundred forty combined staff members between one hundred eighty and two hundred are divers for feeding the animals. Animals are microchipped so that if a certain animal needs to come in for a checkup or is being treated with medicine they can make sure they have the correct one before they go to the veterinary office. The aquarium’s Marine Animal Rescue Program (MARP) is responsible for any marine mammal or sea turtle that gets stranded along the coast of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Most of which is almost 7,000 miles of Maryland coast.

While our tour guide was very knowledgeable about the Sharks and other animals, how could you not be when you've been working there since the aquarium opened, there were a few things not mentioned on the tour. He mentioned nothing about human-shark interactions in the wild. Not even about the chance of being attacked by a shark (1/107,543,424 (based on statistics from 2009)). He briefly mentioned Shark fins being used in Shark fin soup, and Shark liver oils being used in capsules for a vast variety of medical conditions, none of which have been medically validated.

He didn't explain the cruel practice of shark finning or how many Sharks are killed by it each year. In fact the only number he did give was that every hour 1,200 sharks are killed around the world. A number that unfortunately was greatly understated. Using his number of 1,200 to calculate the number of sharks killed each year you end up with a total of 10,512,000 Sharks killed. The real number is estimated at 100,000,000 (nearly 10 times his total) Sharks killed each year with an estimated 73,000,000 killed by the cruel act of Shark finning where the Sharks are pulled onto a boat, their fins are sliced off, and they are thrown back into the water still alive where they either drown because they can’t swim and sink to the bottom or are killed by other predators because they can’t get away. The remaining twenty seven million are killed by a combination of bycatch from commercial fisherman using longlines for species like Swordfish and by “sport” fisherman who want to “catch a man-eater”.

The aquarium makes $220,000,000 a year according to their FAQ section on their website. It also says that they pay $6,800,000 in state and local taxes each year. Using the high number of $100,000 a week for food for the animals,$100,000 a year for each of the veterinarians, $56,000 a year for the veterinary assistants, $775,000 for water and an average of $40,000 a year for each of the other aquarium’s paid staff I came up with a total cost of 21,607,000 to operate the aquarium not including consumables such as electricity, cleaning supplies, etc. Add in an additional $50,000,000 to cover other expenses such as maintenance, electric, medicine, supplies, etc. and that’s $71,607,000 a year. That leaves them with $148,393,000 at the end of the year. Even if it costs them a little more than what I figured they still have a lot of money left over at the end of the year. Where does it all go? I’m sure they have a pretty hefty marketing budget considering all of the tv ads and billboards you see. People could be taking that $220,000,000 every year and using it to actually save the oceans instead of using it to condone the imprisonment of 18,000 animals behind concrete and glass enclosures.

That’s just from one aquarium. Think of how much money could be used to help protect the oceans and marine wildlife if every aquarium was closed. Instead of putting animals on display for money they could take donations to help wounded and stranded animals. There could be a few aquariums around the country for animals that were too injured to return to the wild after being treated. Less than twenty aquariums strategically located around the United States coasts could care for injured animals. Just put one aquarium in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland or Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico or Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska, and put two in Florida, Texas, and California since they have so much coast line. A quick search online returned seventy eight aquariums in the United States. Aquariums are helping to teach future generations that keeping wild animals captive is an acceptable everyday occurrence and that you can even get paid to do it. Don’t get me wrong I applaud the aquariums for trying to teach people about marine wildlife, the oceans, and conservation. But the way they are doing it is morally wrong.

There is no reason to be shipping in animals from other countries to earn money. The aquarium states on it’s website:

“We are opposed to the inhumane slaughter of dolphins and applaud the creators of “The Cove” for raising public awareness of this terrible practice.”

Aside from killing Dolphins the killers in Taiji are motivated to catch Dolphins by aquariums in Asia wanting Dolphins for exhibits and paying a substantial amount of money for said dolphins. But it’s doing the same thing by importing 50 Blacktip Sharks from Australia. Looking online at all of the aquariums in Australia (according to Australia’s Zoo & Aquarium Association) only two aquariums in Australia have Blacktip Sharks. I doubt between the two of them they have fifty that they’re going to give to the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

There are ways to protect our oceans and aquariums are not one of them. Try donating to conservation groups dedicated to saving our oceans.

Author Notes

Anyone looking for organizations to support and donate to that are helping protect our oceans here is a list of a few of my favorites. More can be found by a simple Google Search.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
The Blackfish
Save Japan Dolphins
The Whale & Dolphin Conservation Society