Monterey - part 1

For our 1 year anniversary, David and I drove down to Monterey and went to the Aquarium. We also stayed the night at a hotel.

I have a lot of pictures, so am splitting the trip into two posts. The first post is about our visit to Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the second post about the rest of our trip.

Ever since I learned about the new exhibit there--the secret lives of seahorses--I was dying to go. It was my first time going the the aquarium. The drive down took about 90 minutes.

Penguins!

The diver is feeding the fish. Look at the giant sheephead fish on the right--the orange one. It was huge! This enclosure was the "kelp forest".

Otters!

The jelly fish were so cool.

We went to this game show called "you otter know". All the answers were really obvious, but the best part was the pre-show where someone had designed a repetitive screensaver-like presentation with the heads of otters you see below. There was the same sound clip on repeat for at least 15 minutes, with the heads dancing around the screen. You had to be there to truely appreciate how silly it was.

Lots of fish! I think these are sardines. These are in the "outer bay" exhibit, along with some sharks and tunas. The best part of the whole trip (for me) was watching them be fed. It was amazing. It's too bad none of our pictures turned out.

An Albatross! David loved this one:) He's kind of obsessed with birds.

At every presentation we went to, the staff always managed to bring up the "seafood watch" research the aquarium has done. There are a lot of fish that are fished in ways harmful to the habitat, or fish that are endangered. They made lists of fish that are best to buy and fish to stay away from (due to bad practices of some kind). The lists are found here. You can also just search their database and look up specific fish.

On to the next post!