Oklahoma Aquarium

[TWallace]

I was in Tulsa last weekend for a family reunion. I didn't even know Tulsa had an aquarium, but my dad mentioned it. Well, to my surprise it's actually quite a nice aquarium.

My camera isn't very good and I didn't have a lot of memory left, so unfortunately the pics I've got are brief.

The first exhibit I went to was the Carribean fish exhibit. It was feeding time when we arrived, which is why we went straight to this exhibit first, skipping many others. This is their biggest tank, other than the shark tank with 2 or 3 bull sharks (no pics, it was too dark).

The highlight of this tank for me was the huge porcupine puffer, nearly two feet long. He was very friendly with the diver, maybe a little too friendly. During feeding the diver had to keep shoving the puffer away so other fish could eat.

This was a really cool looking trigger. It stayed in the dark part of the tank, so I couldn't get a better picture. It's black with a dark red dorsal and anal fin, each with a horizontal white stripe at the base. It was about 8 inches long. There was also a large queen trigger in the tank, but it was moving too fast for me to get a pic.

Also they had a very large French angel in this tank, probably 15 to 18 inches long.

Finally there was a large pink orange and blue parrotfish, around two feet long.

 

[TWallace]

In a nearby (much smaller) tank there were some corals and fish from the Pacific/Indian Ocean. These clowns were using a toadstool leather as a host.

Here's a fairly large clam. In the front left, the blur is a spotted mandarin.

Here's a better pic of the mandarin. He was so fat, it was amazing. They had some other mandarins in other tanks (both spotted and green) and all looked very large and very fat.

Here are some zoanthids and xenia in the same tank.

This Desjardini tang (same tank) was gorgeous, but was a fast mover, so this blurry shot is the best I got.

 

[TWallace]

Another highlight of the aquarium was a large open top tank featuring many stingrays and tangs. I saw Nasos, Orange Shoulders, Powder Blues, Atlantic Blues, and at least one Sohal and Vlamingi in this tank. In addition to the open top which you could view through, there were also a few porthole windows in the sides for a clearer view.

Nearby was another open top tank featuring stingrays (de-barbed) which you could pet and feed. They were very domesticated, often sticking their mouths out of the water begging for food.

They also had a large fish dedicated to lionfish (I think they were all volitans lions). They were massive. More than one was over a foot long. Unfortunately since it's a bowfront tank, it was difficult to get a good picture from a distance. In this one you can see my dad checking out the lionfish.

This looks rather like a sunpolyp coral, but I'm pretty sure this was in a cold water tank.

As I mentioned, my camera was low on memory, so I did not get pictures of their many jellyfish (several tanks dedicated to them). They had a section of the aquarium dedicated to fish of Oklahoma. I'm not into freshwater stuff, but the alligator gars were very impressive.

They had a few much larger (more than 6 feet long!), but I did not get a good picture of those.

If you'd like to know more, here's their website: http://www.okaquarium.org/.

 

[thor32766]

wow nice pics thanks for sharing