My Super Bowl Weekend in Atlanta, Georgia
I look forward to Super Bowl weekend every year!
Every February, I try to attend the Big Game with my good friends, Jane Heller and her husband, Steve Gerard. I love the excitement of the crowds and the action on the field, from the battling NFL teams to the halftime entertainment. It’s also lots of fun touring the year’s chosen city - this time, Atlanta, Georgia. Among our stops over the weekend was a visit to the Georgia Aquarium, which houses more than a hundred thousand animals and represents several thousand species, all of which reside in 10-million gallons of marine and salt water.
Here are some photos - enjoy.
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- I always try to include as much as I can during my trips, so they are productive, informative and fun. Here we are at the Georgia Aquarium, where they welcomed all the visiting Super Bowl fans.
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- One of the first tanks we saw included fishes native to the Amazon basin in South America – the largest river basin in the world with one of the most diverse ecosystems. In fact, the Amazon River alone is home to thousands of freshwater fishes like Cardinal tetras, Marbled hatchetfish, and various catfish.
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- This is a yellow bellied slider, a land and water turtle belonging to the family Emydidae. This subspecies of pond slider is native to the southeastern United States, specifically from Florida to southeastern Virginia, including Georgia, and is the most common turtle species in its range.
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- Here we saw longnose gar, alligator gar, and spotted gar. The spotted gar is a freshwater fish native to North America that has an abundance of dark spots on its head, fins, and dart-like body. The longnose gar is a primitive ray-finned fish of the gar family. It is also known as the needlenose gar. The alligator gar is the largest species in the gar family, and among the largest freshwater fishes in North America. The largest alligator gar ever recorded caught was more than eight-feet long.
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- In this tank are various fishes native to New Guinea, such as the Threadfin Rainbowfish, Neon Dwarf Rainbowfish and the spotted blue-eye. These colorful fishes are typically found in freshwater habitats and feed on insect larvae, worms and vegetation near the bottom of swift rivers and streams of Papua.
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- In this aquarium – Southeast Asian fish species, including the Red Scissortail Rasbora and the Pearl Gourami. These fishes can be found in the freshwater areas of Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
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- Look closely and you can see the tail and shell of this alligator snapping turtle. It is the largest freshwater turtle in North America, reaching lengths of up to three-feet. Its diet includes fish, reptiles and even small birds.
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- This fish is a Red Piranha. It can be found in the Amazon River basin and Northeast South America. Its powerful jaws contain razor sharp triangular teeth and naturally regrows any teeth that are lost or worn.
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- These bright, pretty fish are called Blue discus, native to the Amazon River basin in South America. Due to their distinctive shape and bright colors, discus are popular as freshwater aquarium fish.
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- This is a California Sheephead with its bright orange midsection. The California Sheephead is a species of wrasse native to the eastern Pacific Ocean. Its range is from Monterey Bay, California, to the Gulf of California and Mexico. This species can live for up to 20-years in favorable conditions and can reach a size of up to three-feet long.
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- The big-bellied sea horse is one of the largest seahorse species in the world with a length of up to 14-inches – it is the largest seahorse in Australia. The big-belly seahorse is found among algae, seagrasses, and rocky reefs in shallow water, and attached to sponges and colonial hydroids in deeper areas. They also attach to jetty piles and other manmade objects, and can be found in estuaries.
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- Here is another seahorse. Seahorses can camouflage to mimic their surroundings and appear invisible to predators. In the wild they spend most of their time hunting for tiny crustaceans to consume while using their signature slow movements.
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- These are African penguins. The African penguin, also known as the jackass penguin and black-footed penguin, is a species of penguin confined to southern African waters. It is widely known as the “jackass” penguin for its loud, donkey-like bray.
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- Like all extant penguins it is flightless, with a streamlined body, and wings stiffened and flattened into flippers for a marine habitat. The African penguin is a pursuit diver and feeds primarily on fish and squid. Once extremely numerous, the African penguin is declining rapidly and is now classified as endangered.
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- This is the invasive lionfish. Lionfish have distinctive brown or maroon, and white stripes or bands covering the head and body. They have fleshy tentacles above their eyes and below the mouth; fan-like pectoral fins; and long, separated dorsal spines – on average, around 18 venomous spines along the top of their body. Their ability to consume more than 100 species of fish, competing for food against native species such as grouper and snapper, make them one of the top predators of Atlantic reefs.
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- We stopped to watch these graceful Japanese sea nettles for several minutes. These creatures live in the subtropical ocean waters at temperatures of 54 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
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- The color of their rounded dome-shaped bell ranges from gold to red with a distinctive darker sunburst pattern of stripes from the top to almost the rim of the bell.
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- Like other sea nettles, the Japanese sea nettle is a voracious carnivore. Its preferred prey is comb jellies. It also eats small fishes, copepods, larvae, anchovy eggs, and other zooplankton. Trailing tentacles sting and transport food up the central tentacle to the jelly’s gastrovascular cavity where it is digested. Nettles can and do feed constantly because their many tentacles can function independently of each other.
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- The bell diameter can reach 12-inches and its tentacles can extend up to 10-feet.
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- We also saw some beautiful coral. This is Orange cup coral. Orange cup coral belongs to a group of corals known as large-polyp stony corals. This non-reef building coral shows translucent tentacles at night and grows in complete darkness as long as it can capture enough food.
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- Sea anemones are a group of marine, predatory animals of the order Actiniaria. They are named after the anemone, a terrestrial flowering plant, because of their colorful appearance. Sea anemones are related to corals, jellyfish, tube-dwelling anemones, and Hydra.
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- Clownfish, or anemonefish, can be seen swimming around the sea anemone and work together. Anemonefish feed on small invertebrates that otherwise have potential to harm the sea anemone, and the fecal matter from the anemonefish provides nutrients to the sea anemone. The anemonefish is also protected from predators by the anemone’s stinging cells, to which the anemonefish is immune.
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- The Royal blue tang fish has a royal blue body, yellow tail, and black “palette” design. It grows up to a foot long and adults typically weigh around 21-ounces. This fish is rather flat, with a circular body shape, a pointed snout-like nose, and small scales. It can be found throughout the Indo-Pacific, in the reefs of the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, New Caledonia, Samoa, East Africa, and Sri Lanka.
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- And this is the beautiful green moray eel, which is actually brown. The yellow tint of the mucus that covers its body, in combination with the drab background color, gives the fish its namesake green color. Like other true eels, the moray’s dorsal fin begins just behind its head, extends along the length of its body and is fused with the tail fins. With its long, scaleless body, green moray eels are often feared and mistaken for sea serpents. Rather than hunting for food, they wait until food comes to them. The green moray feeds mostly at night on fishes, crabs, shrimp, octopuses, and squid. I hope you take time to visit the Georgia Aquarium the next time you’re in the area. Tomorrow, I will share my photos from the Big Game and some of the foods we tried.
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