Utah Adventure Week – Loveland Living Planet Aquarium

This week Julia announces that she’s added an event calendar to her website for The Pleiadian Altar.  Take a few minutes and find out where she’ll be hocking her wares!  Black Rabbit Studios sends us our promised gifts.  We’re going to spread the love by putting some on our travelling suitcase and sharing the wealth between the four of us.

This week we are starting a new monthly spotlight.  After some on-episode discussion, it will be called the Utah Weekly Adventure.  We start off our tourn at the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium

You know where it is, just on the west side of I15 at 120the South. Do you know why you know?  Because instead of allowing U2 to scrap their stage from their 360 Tour, they are now using it as part of the Aquarium’s educational area.

The Loveland Living Planet Aquarium was started in 1997 by Brent Anderson, a marine biologist and Utah native.  He started with a mobile educational marine exhibit in 199 and opened the 10,000 square foot location at the Gateway Mall in 2004.  This enabled Anderson to raise funds and to garner interest in the endeavor.  They had over 300,000 visitors in the first two years and quickly outgrew their space.  In June of 2006, the moved to their space in Sandy, which was over 43,000 square feet and soon had over 460,000 visitors each year.  Finally in 2010, they purchased 17 acres of land and raised $27 million to build the Aquarium in its permeant home, Draper.  Currently the Aquarium is 136,000 square feet and was opened in March of 2014 and saw over one million visitors in the first year.

There are five areas to visit at the Aquarium so I’m going to give a little overview of the order we saw each of them:

1. Journey to South America.  Our first impression was of the climate control.  It was humid and warm inside to mimic weather for the animals and plants living inside.  We saw the electric eel, a sloth, porcupine, toucan, poisonous frogs, and empty butterfly exhibit.  It was really cool to see the indigenous plants that were included with identification signs.  Julia confessed that she used to be afraid of the river monster fish and was terrified that she might fall into the tank.

• Penguin Research Station.  When we arrived, they were feeding the penguins and talking about how they take care of them.  Each penguin is labeled so they can monitor their food intake and the lights and temperature in the enclosure are controlled to imitate their natural environment (Sub-Antarctic islands).  The lights go up and down according to what would be happening in the wild.  Many of the penguins at the Aquarium were actually born there and you can read a little bit about each of them. 

• Expedition: Asia. There are two clouded leopards in this exhibit; however, we were only able to see one for a short time.  What a treat that was though!  There were a lot of giant and colorful fish!

• Discover Utah.  We have determined that Utah has boring fish, but you can see the brine shrimp in this exhibit.  This is also where we saw the otters come out to have a little food stimulated learning and an active beehive.  Utah is a beautiful place and watching the otters play was one of the highlights of our day.

• Ocean Explorer:  This exhibit has a place where you can touch sea urchins, star fish, sea cucumbers, and anemones. They also have a stingray pond where you can reach out and pet them!  This is where we saw the seahorses and dragons, the giant octopus, giant clam, and the giant lobster, along with bioluminescent fish. There is a really cool shark tank with a tunnel you can walk through so you are surrounded by the beautiful creatures.  Just outside the tunnel is a show area where you can see the same tank from the side.

You can buy a membership, eat there and when it opens again, they have a 4D theater.  They offer shark yoga, nature storytime and youth camps.  You can rent the Aquarium for private events like weddings, proposals, and family parties.  Both indoor and outdoor spaces are available and there are times when you can rent out the entire Aquarium.  Additionally, the Aquarium is in the process of adding on hands on learning as well as science labs.  (Chris may have a recording of this information)

We loved this episode and our first adventure.  Join us next month as we continue to explore Utah for ourselves!

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