Texas State Aquarium

By Lynx, on May 20th, 2011

One of the star attractions in the Corpus Christi area is the Texas State Aqarium. Its quite impressive with a number of activities for kids, including many touch pools, dolphin and bird shows, and a water play park that was being worked on while we were there. You could easily spend the day here with the kids.

There are still plenty of interesting exhibits for adults and those interested in history its just a short walk to the USS Lexington museum.

They have some pretty neat touch pools for the kids and these where you can get right up close.

Ever got to pet a sting ray? They have a petting pool for those too with several different kinds of rays.

This ray in the shallow tide pool aquarium was massive! I’m not sure I would want to pet him. It’d also make me think twice about strolling through waist deep water on the beach again like we did yesterday.

Of course they have some pretty impressive reef fish and coral displays.

And again, lion fish the pests of the sea. As we learned at the Seattle Aquarium, these have been introduced into waters where they are not native and nothing eats them causing them to explode in numbers and cause havoc with the local ecosystems.

They have some cool jelly fish displays too that are quite difficult to get a picture of.

The most impressive tank in the aquarium was this one, which mimics the deep sea conditions around an oil rig. The pipes and legs from the rig create an artificial reef in deep water and attract a lot of fish. The times I have been deep sea fishing we often set up just off of an oil rig for some good fishing.