On Wednesday, Dec.22,Howard and I drove about 15 miles up the coast from San Diego to La Jolla, to visit the Birch Aquarium. After getting Howard a latte at Starbucks and driving through the town and down to the beach to see the unusually high waves, we headed north a bit to the aquarium, just across from UCSD (University of California at San Diego)--which is at an incredibly beautiful location.
You can find out more about the Aquarium at http://aquarium.ucsd.edu/
The Hall of Fishes displays an amazing variety of Pacific marine life. The main part (or first part) of the aquarium has about 30 windows showing sea life from the Pacific Northwest down through the Pacific coast in Mexico. One of the most stunning parts of this section was the four displays showing jelly fish. I've never seen so many in my life.. One case must have had over 3 dozen. The picture here is a water color, but it looks very much like the jellyfish did.
We also saw at least a half dozen jellyfish that lie on their backs. They too were incredible.
We saw another tank showing how jellyfish reproduce. The fertilized egg eventually develops into polyps, grown, and then little teeny tiny jellyfish break off from the polyps. Unfortunately, could not find a good picture on the web.
One of the most amazing fish that I saw there was the mandarin fish, less than 2" long with vibrant blue and green colors. The one pictured on this blog has more reds in it than the one we saw.
Another section of the museum had a number of exhibits showing how sea life camouflages itself. In some of the places, we had a very hard time finding the sea life as it was so well camouflaged.
I love sea horses and one variety camouflages itself very well. It is called a leafy sea dragon, and you can see a bunch of them at: http://www.divegallery.com/Leafy_Sea_Dragon.htm The one we saw looked greener than the one in this blog.
Another fascinating fish was called a pencil fish. It was about 3 inches long, maybe 1/8th inch in diameter and saw almost vertically...just on a slight angle.Unfortunately, I could not find a picture of it on the web.
Howard thought the most unusual fish that we saw were the very thin look down fish. It was about 6" long but when it faced us, you could see how very thin it was.
We also saw lots of anenomes, star fish, smaller sharks, etc. We spent about 90 minutes at the aquarium and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!
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