Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan

There is a huge aquarium in osaka... which we did on thursday instead of monday. Here are some pictures.

This is outside of the aquarium... its HUGE.

The aquarium! sort of a cool building, sitting right on the coast.

Another cool building right next to the aquarium. This one is a museum.

Most of the aquarium has tiled sides, and they have cool mosaics on them.

They had a large variety of mammals as well.. sort of odd for an aquarium but neat.

These little climbing crabs kept getting out of their home... and staff members in yellow coats where constantly running over to throw the newest escapees back into the enclosure.

More furry animals... this is a ringtailed coati.

What was so cool about all the furry animals was that they all had really cool fish in the water around them. The displays were these awesome land and water things. For instance, a tapir with some fish and a turtle.  The tapir habitat looked like it was from a nice zoo, and the fish habitat looked like an aquarium... it was just better done than i had seen before.

Emperor penguins being hand fed. This enclosure had lots or real snow... not something i've seen a lot of at zoos/aquariums.

Things like mooring lines, old bottles, and pieces of dock were a nice touch. Many of the displays had these pieces of human stuff which looked really cool.

The main tank has a huge school of fish. It parts for bigger fish gliding through... and swarms like this after.

A spotted eagle ray! lots of others as well, and a number of sharks. This was just a tank full of really big animals.

I tried to get some of the fish schooling...

An awesome octopus!

The awesome octopus being awesome

They had a huge manta ray. Its wingspan was easily taller than me.

Also schools of squid, with another ray.

more squid!

They had a special installation on egypt... so had a bunch of Egyptian fish and bugs.

Also an owl... which ive never seen at an aquarium. This owl is egyptian too!

There were lots of cool science facts like this... which i sadly could not read. so perhaps they were not science things at all, but i would have liked to have known either way.

To clean the big tank, these guys have a small trowel and a suction tube. They crawl back and forth, agitating the sand with the trowel, and sucking up the debris. It must take forever to get the whole thing. Hopefully you can see the faint lines in the gravel.. thats from these guys.

Sea turtles!

another special installation, this one on deep sea creatures.

also in the deep sea hallway.

So many crabs...

All these guys where just standing there.... sort of creepy. 

This was a really cool little display on the glass for the main tank.

Thats my hand... i knew this glass was think but this seems just crazy. Its so cool to me that its still so clear to look through.

Swarming fish!

At the bottom of the big tank where these cool little hiding places for little fish, with lots of little fish in them. It was neat that this was all in one tank.

They had a really cool jellyfish display.

sooo many jellyfish... but they are hard to take pictures of with no flash... so i've only posted a few. This was by far the largest jellyfish display i've seen.

The lights under the fish slowly faded in and out, and faded between colors as well.

jelly jelly jelly this one looks like an egg

On our way out we saw this. One Piece is really big here... it's  just about everywhere you look.  This is a whole store devoted to it.