Sydney Aquarium
“Where the hell is Australia anyway?”
— Often attributed to Britney Spears
“I get to go to lots of overseas places, like Canada.”
— Often attributed to Britney Spears
I was lucky enough to see many of Australia’s creatures in the wild, but there was one elusive little guy I had missed: the duck-billed platypus. So while I was in Sydney, I headed to the Sydney Aquarium to finally see one.
The platypus has to be one of Australia’s strangest animals. It’s an egg-laying mammal, and the males have venomous spurs on their hind legs. My digital camera wasn’t exactly ideal for photographing a small, fast-moving animal in a dark aquarium, but as you can see from the gallery, I didn’t do too badly.
One Australian creature I was perfectly happy not to encounter in the wild was the box jellyfish. Some species of box jellyfish possess extraordinarily potent venom and can be extremely dangerous to humans. One of the photographs in this gallery shows a preserved specimen — dead and safely behind glass, exactly where I preferred it.
The aquarium had a fantastic underwater tunnel design where the tanks surrounded you as you walked through. Sharks circled overhead and you could get almost eye-to-eye with them. Awesome.
The coral and aquatic displays were impressive, but after everything I had experienced during the previous few months, even a world-class aquarium had some serious competition. Nothing inside could quite compare with seeing Australia’s marine life in its natural environment on the Great Barrier Reef.
