Osaka Aquarium

The Osaka aquarium is a huge with around 5500 cubic meters of water, 16 tanks and it uses so much acrylic glass that it has 1.5 times the annual production of acrylic glass used just at this aquarium. The windows used are huge and the largest one measures six meters by five meters and is 30cm thick! The aquarium's tanks represent the ring of fire and ring of death areas of the Pacific Ocean and all the animals are from that area.

You begin at the top of the building around 6 stories up where you are 'above ground' and get to see a few otters and a sloth in the tree above. You then walk down slowly seeing the top of the various tanks they have. One with dolphins, another with seals and another with sea otters. These are otters but a hell of alot bigger, they are about the size of a seal. I didn't even know they existed this big.

You then progress down and down seeing below the water and into the tanks and what lies below. The main large tank had the usual sharks, fish and stingrays all ranging from small to freakn massive and the one which stood out the most was the massive Whale Shark present.

Other tanks included the great barrier reef which was jam packed with tropical fish. Another tank had 5 or so dolphins in there, this tank was quite small and for an active mammal like that you'd expect them to have a much larger tank.

Once you got to the bottom of the ocean you are left with the ugly jellyfish and huge crabs. *shudder*.

The weirdest fish there was the Sunfish, it was round, around 1m in radius and sorta thin. It had the ugliest face and mouth and it was in a tank of its own. Inside that tank though it was inside a net and you could see why. It would swim around and then just head straight for the glass and try to smack into it, luckily for the fish the netting was there to stop it :)

It was a pretty good aquarium and one of the largest ive been too.

Click here for some pics.