Metro Pulse/Cover/Aquaria

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Thinking Expansively
The Tennessee Aquarium will gain weight soon

A companion aquarium structure on the site of the Tennessee Aquarium is set to begin construction this year, with groundbreaking due in May and its opening scheduled in the spring of 2005.

Charlie Arant, the former IBM marketing executive who has been board chairman and president of the Tennessee since 1995, says the $30 million new building is being funded half through private donations, half through admission fees and local hotel/motel tax monies. Private donations also paid the lion's share of the aquarium's initial cost.

The sister addition's 60,000 square feet will house a 650,000-gallon Gulf of Mexico exhibit and will provide gallery space for further expansion of displays, both permanent and changeable. The sea floor of the gulf exhibit will mimic the underwater Flower Garden of the National Marine Sanctuary, whose coral reef is a dream destination for gulf divers.

Arant says the existing aquarium building's space has been gradually filled with exhibits over the years, pushing offices out to other buildings.

The new building is incorporated in Chattanooga's 21st Century Waterfront Plan, a public/private project that is expected to cost around $120 million. Arant, a member of the steering committee behind it, calls it "a very aggressive plan" that includes a riverfront parkway, a park, and a boat-docking area along the urban waterfront. The parkway runs between the river and the aquarium and will open new access to the Hunter Museum, Chattanooga's fine-arts museum.

Arant says the Hunter is spending nearly $20 million on its own expansion, and the Children's Discovery Center, just a couple of blocks from the aquarium, is embarking on its own $3 million improvement program.

That plan, along with prospects for a national park just downstream at Moccasin Bend, are intended to create a magnet for tourism its promoters have dubbed the "Chattanooga Experience." If it all works out as envisioned, it will leave its neighbor Knoxville greener than ever, with envy, not foliage.

Chattanooga officials are hoping that all that investment will increase the number of people who visit their city. But while the Tennessee Aquarium is undertaking a major expansion, another regional aquarium is on the horizon about 100 miles south, in Atlanta. Although still being conceptualized, the Georgia Aquarium is expected to contain about five million gallons of fresh water and saltwater within a structure funded largely through a pledge of up to $200 million made by Home Depot chairman Bernard Marcus. A 2005 target date for its opening looms large in terms of both competition and, as the Tennessee and Ripley's folks like to say, "aquarium awareness."

—B.H.

Watery attractions in Chattanooga and Gatlinburg go nose to snout

by Barry Henderson

Knoxville may be in an almost singular position. Nearby are two massive, climate-controlled marine microcosms where people can gaze upon fish, sea creatures, and reptiles from such close range that our forebears would hardly have believed it. Both are world-class attractions; both were designed to be ecologically sensitive and entertaining at the same time. In many ways, both have succeeded.

Chattanooga's Tennessee Aquarium has been around long enough to gain national attention to its unique presentation. It displays fish, animal, and plant life indigenous to the watershed of the Tennessee River, from its mountain-stream origins, through its manmade reservoirs, to the water's ultimate destination in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies in Gatlinburg is a relative newcomer on the regional scene. Going along with its image as a presenter of the unusual, Ripley's is primarily a salt-water aquarium that emphasizes mesmerizing, sometimes scary things. Ripley's oceanic emphasis makes much of the fact that all of Tennessee and the United States was a primordial seabed millions of years ago.

The first is a non-profit institution supported by local philanthropy as well as municipal largesse and paid admissions. The second is a business venture that has relied on considerable city assistance for land acquisition and for access and parking improvements.

The first anchors a downtown waterfront and boasts that it's the largest freshwater aquarium in the world. The latter inhabits a tourist mecca, relies heavily on its location near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and bills itself as America's most-visited aquarium.

The elder just passed its first decade mark and is about to break ground on a new $30 million building to house a major salt water exhibition. The younger is two years old, the second in a corporate series, with no land to grow on. Its company is looking elsewhere for a third location with an established tourism base.

Principals of both organizations emphasize the idea that the two aquariums, little more than 100 miles apart, enhance each other's appeal by raising public awareness of aquariums in general and by offering different approaches to their exhibits. Their marketing people concede, though, that competition exists between the two and that the rivalry is a factor in the quest for new exhibits to gain repeat visits and provide the basis for advertising that brings people in from far away.

Both aquariums list Knoxville near the top of their market tables, in terms of numbers of people who have visited. Officials of each cite Knoxville's mature and accredited zoo as a stimulus for interest in the aquatic life they exhibit. What each of these regional aquariums has to offer, and how each views itself and its future, is of more than passing interest to Knoxvillians. With that in mind, Metro Pulse visited each aquarium to take a casual tourist's walkthrough and to talk with members of the staffs.

Refreshing Freshwater

At the foot of Broad Street in the heart of Chattanooga, the Tennessee Aquarium is an imposing structure, all sharp angles and clad in stripes of terra cotta. More than 10 stories high, its glass peaks house an atrium that towers above its 130,000 square feet of floor space.

Huge murals depicting rippling Smoky Mountain streams grace its entryway, and the first hall off the lobby leads into a saltwater display of seahorses, 32 varieties in all, from shallow coastal waters across the globe. The colorful seahorse family, including sea dragons and pipefish, are tethered, so to speak, in tanks containing plants collected from their native surroundings—reefs in the Galapagos Islands and the Philippines, a kelp bed off Tasmania, and coastal U.S. waters from Chesapeake Bay to the Florida Keys. There is also ample information about threats to seahorse populations, including manmade pollution and overharvesting (seahorses are used frequently in traditional Chinese medicine). The seahorse exhibit is temporary; other recent ones have included poisonous fishes and jellyfish.

"It's part of our strategy to offer something new and fresh," said Charlie Arant, the Tennessee Aquarium's president and board chairman, "to give the 45 percent who are repeat visitors a new experience each time they come."

Once through the hall of the exotic, visitors are directed up a long escalator to the building's topmost area and into a limestone passage with displays of native reptiles. The passage opens out into the atrium, where birds—sparrows, finches, doves, cardinals, titmice, and bobwhite quail—dart freely among trees and shrubs representative of the flora of the Smokies' slopes. It's an indoor ecosystem, climate-controlled to simulate the seasons, with descriptive material to read, hear, or see at every turn. A whitewater stream is the playground of a group of river otters, who can be viewed from above the surface or below it, through acrylic windows.

Such windows look above and beneath the surface of a river system that descends from a mountain stream to a Tennessee reservoir, with trout, chubs, shiners, minnows, sunfish, and big catfish and carp displayed, along with the more dramatic, prehistoric-looking natives, such as lake sturgeon and paddlefish.

Volunteer docents are stationed along the way to help expand on the descriptions on wall plaques and in repeating videos.

Circling around the building, you come to an elaborate Delta Country exhibit, with alligators, turtles, frogs, and salamanders inhabiting a cypress swamp.

"That gator there got the mother wood duck a couple of weeks ago," said docent Sara Hartley, with a hint of sadness in her tone. "She had only one good eye, and she must have gotten too close to him on the side with the blind eye."

Looking at the gator's sleepy eyelids and sharp teeth protruding from along the sides of its closed jaws, one could almost hear the chomp and see a few stray feathers floating around him. The animals are all well fed on regular schedules, but it must have been a good while since the gator had a shot at a whole duck.

Around the next corner, the Gulf of Mexico tank takes up a whole acrylic wall, through which an assortment of tropical fish, eel, rays, and small bonnethead sharks swim in and out of view, seemingly at home in their reproduced world of living coral and other aquatic life from the gulf.

Next comes a series of displays of rivers of the world, with freshwater systems from North and South America, Asia, and Africa. The Amazon Basin is especially well depicted, as is the Zaire River, also known as the Congo. Then there are smaller tanks containing an array of turtles from all over the world.

Lastly, one curls past the Tennessee River bottom, with its lumbering catfish and carp, as defined by the environs of Nickajack Lake, the reservoir that backs up to Chattanooga. An adjoining display depicts Reelfoot Lake, the West Tennessee body of water created in the dislocation of the Mississippi River by the New Madrid Fault earthquakes of 1811-12.

Then it's out through the gift-shop exit. The shop is impressive in that it offers lots and lots of books along with the obligatory toys, models, apparel, jewelry, and trinketry.

All in all, the Tennessee Aquarium is an engaging experience, educational in the nicest and least boring sense of the word. It makes the very best uses of its 400,000 gallons of water, its five levels of winding walkways, and its towering atrium. If you don't learn a lot while there, you either knew too much already or didn't pay much attention.

Believe It

Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies sits unprepossessingly between two sprawling hotels along River Road. Its exterior, a mélange of metal, glass, stucco, stone, and wood, looks more like a great big Gatlinburg restaurant than a state-of-the-art aquarium. But inside, it's the real deal.

In its lobby, behind a large tubular tank of the flashiest imaginable tropical fish, hangs a casting of a huge archelon sea turtle skeleton from 70 million-plus years ago that was found in South Dakota. Nearby hangs the 55-foot skeleton of a 40-ton humpback whale taken from Cape Cod waters.

From the lobby, visitors enter the Tropical Rainforest, with its initial display of 50-plus piranha glittering like fool's gold and schooling menacingly in a big wall tank. Overhead and all around are plastic plants and ferns, a little in need of dusting but lending somewhat to the forest feel.

Next comes a tank of small tetras of the home-aquarium variety and another displaying a pair of green iguanas. Then there's a tank of amphibious mud skippers, fish with gills that absorb oxygen from either water or air, who swim in the water or scoot atop the mud in swamps along the Indian and Pacific Oceans. That begins a corridor devoted to unusual species with odd habits—such as dart frogs, whose bright, primary-colored skins excrete poisons—that leads into what's called the Ocean Realm. It starts with a very colorful assortment of Caribbean fish cruising around a manmade reef of coral reproductions.

In the midst of the ocean displays, the glass-enclosed control center heaves into view. Looking almost as sophisticated and complex as a nuclear power plant's control room, the aquarium's nerve center continuously monitors, filters, replenishes, and maintains the water in each exhibit. The process is explained by video as it takes place; the existence of the display is a reminder that in an aquarium, the building is a wonder in itself.

As the route continues, the Shark Lagoon can be seen from above the surface of its gigantic, 750,000-gallon tank. Its content constitutes about half the water in the entire aquarium, but the most popular and dramatic view of it is yet to come. First, the visitor passes by an assortment of South American fish from the Amazon, Orinoco, and La Plata River basins, among which swims, incongruously, one African cichlid.

The next steps are breathtaking. They lead onto a 370-foot moving walkway that carries the viewer into an clear acrylic tunnel, with sharks, stingrays, a couple of rare sawfish, and other fishes swimming on both sides and above the slow-moving pathway. The ability to see the sea creatures, and particularly the sharks that range up to 11 feet in length, from all angles and so closely, has made the tunnel the aquarium's most popular feature, according to its general manager, Steve File.

File, who came to Gatlinburg from Ripley's slightly smaller aquarium in Myrtle Beach, said, "The product is entertainment. It's fun to do, and it makes it good for all ages. Theatrical effects, lighting, and color all contribute."

It's true. But despite the hokum that's evident in the phony shipwrecks and the eerie, dirgelike electronic music that haunts the tunnel, the total effect is both fun and fascinatingly educational. And it's easily the aquarium's most impressive element. Beyond the tunnel, which includes separate tanks of giant barracuda, huge jewfish and grouper, and some moray eels, the rest of the visit is relatively tame.

At the end of the tour is the Ripley's changing exhibit, a multi-faceted representation of the 1912 sinking of the "unsinkable" superliner, the Titanic. It includes models, photos, charts, artifacts, a movie, and even a tank where one can dip one's fingers into 29-degree water to experience the feel of the icy North Atlantic to the hundreds of passengers who died in the tragedy. File said the exhibit, opened last May, will stay through 2003 because of its popularity.

The Titanic fairly well concludes the tour, although it is possible to eat in the restaurant or the snackbar, almost embarrassingly called the "Feeding Frenzy," which featured a fish-sandwich special on the day of the MP visit.

How They Stack Up

The two aquariums have lots to offer, both to the casual visitor and the serious student of marine life and ecology. They both have outreach programs and summer "camp" experiences for schoolkids, and Ripley's holds frequent "Sleep with the Sharks," overnight group events that include evening and morning activities, a pizza dinner, and a sort of slumber party in the tunnel.

The Ripley's aquarium has the more exotic, dazzling appeal in some respects. Kids might like it better for its melodramatics. The Tennessee Aquarium has a more ordered, seemingly better planned layout that is easier to follow and includes more species of animal, plant, and aquatic life, including many with which most Tennesseans may not be familiar, though these life forms exist literally right under our noses.

Jackson Andrews, the director of husbandry and operations at the Tennessee, said, "We like to think we make the ordinary extraordinary." They do that, to a considerable extent.

The fun factor for each is high, perhaps an eight on a scale of 10 for Ripley's compared to a seven for the Tennessee. In educational terms, the Tennessee rates about an eight against the Ripley's seven. The workers at each institution are friendly and helpful, though the Tennessee's volunteers seem more knowledgable than the Ripley's employees.

Both aquariums are accredited by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, and the Ripley's vice president for animal husbandry, Joe Choromanski, said he's especially gratified by the compliments the Gatlinburg aquarium has received from AZA members who have visited there. He said there was a challenge in getting people past the perception of Ripley's as a shock and schlock organization, based on what he called an "older image" of the company's "Believe It Or Not" origins.

Costs of construction were comparable. The Tennessee cost $45 million 10 years ago, and the Ripley's cost about $50 million. The state of Tennessee paid for some infrastructure improvements in each case. The city of Chattanooga also kicked in for the Tennessee's infrastructure needs, and the city of Gatlinburg, largely thanks to its special sales tax arrangement with the state Legislature, spent at least $17 million on improvements for the Ripley's Aquarium. That money paid for land acquisition and construction of two parking garages.

Attendance is also roughly comparable, though Ripley's ability to capitalize on the tourist trade that heads straight to the Smokies as a destination is evident in the numbers.

Ripley got more than two million visits the first year and 1.8 million the second year, leading to its "America's most visited" claim. Its annual draw surpasses those of California's Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, and the National Aquarium in Baltimore, by at least a few thousand, the Ripley team contends.

The Tennessee also approached two million visits in its first year and has since averaged about a million a year. Its visitation reached about 1.5 million with its jellyfish exhibit of the late '90s, and that number has fallen just below a million the past couple of years. It counted 930,000 visits last year.

Chairman Arant at the Tennessee said the aim, besides satisfying members and other local people in Chattanooga, is to attract visitors from a region that comprises roughly a four-hour drive from around the city. "We want ours to be more of a getaway, a family experience involving all of Chattanooga," he said.

Admission to the Tennessee is $14 for adults, $7.50 for kids 3-12, and free for those under three. The Ripley's rates are $15.95 for adults, $7.95 for kids 6-11, $3.95 for those 2-5, and free for those under two. The Ripley's guide pamphlet is $1. It's more colorful and detailed than the freebie at the Tennessee, but the latter is adequate. Both offer special rates to school groups.

There is one highly appealing feature of the Chattanooga site in terms of better access, in that driving through Pigeon Forge to reach Gatlinburg can be a time-consuming nightmare. And there is one other thing. Leaving the Ripley's property, the first thing you come to is a candy factory. Departing the Tennessee, nearly the first business in front of you is a brewpub. Advantage Chattanooga? Case rested.