[Ninong]

They now say it will be ready next fall.

Check it out here. Click on the Sneak Preview link for a 5 minute video tour of the building. They're claiming that the new coral reef tank in the new Steinhart Aquarium will be "one of the largest coral reef tanks ever built." Their current temporary coral reef tank is 20,000 gallons. I don't like the temporary reef tank at all, so I hope the new, larger one will be much better.

Anyway, check out the preview tour of the new building. It's in the same Golden Gate Park location as the old building, which was torn down.

If you're ever in San Francisco, this is a FANTASTIC place to take kids!

[Ninong]

The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice article on the new California Academy of Sciences building. They don't go into too much detail about the new coral reef exhibit except to say that it will be 25-ft deep at its deepest and that it will be viewable from above and from a bubble window at sand bed level. I think that's the one they will call the garden eel window. You have to crawl through a concrete tunnel to get to an acrylic bubble about 4-ft in diameter that will give you a view from sand bed level inside the tank. They don't say so in the article but I believe this tank will have a circular walkway surrounding it so that you can view it from the outside at all levels. I'm still not sure I'm all that excited about that concept. I guess I'll have to wait and see what it looks like in person.

The new Amazon river exhibit will be one of those walk-through acrylic tunnels where the fish are swimming on top of you and all around you. And the new rain forest exhibit will allow you to walk through it at all levels via one of those circular walkways again. They will have a lot of live birds and butterflies in this exhibit.

The swamp exhibit with the alligators will retain the same bronze railing from the old exhibit but the new one will allow you to view the tank from beneath the surface.

[wozza]

sounds cool.