Swimming with the fishes

When we went to the aquarium the other day we passed by an exhibit about microscopes. There was a girl behind a table showing passersby how this super-duper microscope works. She would point it at one of the tiny pieces of coral or whatever she had on the table and a huge hi-def live image would show up on the connected TV screen. When we walked up she was talking about some squiggly thing writhing across the screen, some sort of predatory plant.

When she finished, she held up a very small beaker in between her thumb and forefinger, no bigger than a shot glass, filled with what appeared to be water. "Now," she said. "Who is going to stick their finger in this beaker and have a taste?" She looked me dead in the eye.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I'll tell you afterwards." 

Never one to turn down a snack, I stuck my finger in the beaker. Room temperature water. I slurped down the mystery drink. Salty water. Boo-ooring.

"So?" she asked. "Not so bad, right?"

"Saltwater?" I hoped.

She stuck the beaker under the microscope. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny fish were swimming furiously in all directions.

"Zooplankton!"

I considered all the teeny tiny bones and teeny tiny shells and teeny tiny bodies I had just ingested without any physical effort.

I felt like a zooplankton the following day as I sat on the floor of the predator tank, watching a shark swim toward me.

I've watched plenty of documentaries on sharks and I've seen them in aquariums but it wasn't until they were within arm's length, with no glass between us, that I realized why they are so menacing, perhaps more than many other predators. If you've ever seen a cat you know what sort of mood a lion is in. Same thing with dogs and hyenas. When elephants stick their ears out and make noise you know they're upset. Horses stomp around. Birds puff up their feathers. And so on.

Sharks are not so obliging. They look angry all the time. They don't growl (at least not in a way that humans can hear). Their teeth are always visible. They stare at you with unblinking, soul-penetrating eyes. They barely even move when they swim, so you can't even fool yourself into thinking they're having a good time swimming around, the way you can with some other fish. They just glide and stare, glide and stare.

Unless you accidentally kick one with your fin.

Four of us went down on the dive into the tank. The other three were a guy from Johannesburg and two random kids. Before we went down, the divemaster told us that if we were lucky we might stumble upon a shark tooth, which we were welcome to take with us as a souvenir. This lead to my three dive mates spending nearly their entire time in the tank with their heads down to the floor, looking for teeth. Guys -- there plenty of shark teeth right above you...still in the sharks' mouths!

Anyway, I was kneeling on the floor looking up at two passing sharks. The guy from Johannesburg came swimming towards me with his head down, looking for teeth. He glanced up at me and I thought he'd like to know he was getting awfully close to a deadly predator, so I waved my hand in a downward motion. It was not a standard motion you use in diving communication, so he ignored me. He stuck his head down a bit further which meant his fins went up.

I could see he was going to kick the shark right in the side. There was nothing I could do. Grabbing him (the guy, not the shark) would have just startled him and possibly made the whole thing worse, and I couldn't exactly yell at him. My best option was to try to look like a piece of coral and see what happened.

So he kicked the shark.

What happened next took what felt like a tenth of a second. The shark whipped around to see what happened and whacked the shark next to it, which took off like a bullet and slammed into the side of the tank. The sound that made was incredible. I've never heard anything so loud under water. I've never seen anything move so quickly, either. I don't understand how they can propel themselves so quickly.

The guy from Johannesburg looked up, confused, having no idea what happened. When we surfaced I told him. "Oh," he said. "That could have been bad!"

I also swam with a couple turtles, several rays, and some very large, very ugly fish, among others.

There's something a little artificial about seeing all these fish in an aquarium tank, sure. It's a middle ground between being on the outside of the tank and being in the ocean. You're close enough to the wildlife to interact with them but it's more controlled than being truly out in the wild. It's sort of like being on safari in a national park like Kruger, which is a middle ground between a zoo and walking in the jungle.

Sort of like how Cape Town is a middle ground between Europe and what I've described in this blog as my perception of "real" Africa.

If you're a diver and have the opportunity to dive in an aquarium tank, I say it's worth it. I know one can dive at the Baltimore Aquarium...