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By Pam Willard Lamb
The Oklahoma Aquarium brings aquatic life from around the world to the Midwest
The Oklahoma Aquarium is in Jenks, Oklahoma just southwest of Tulsa. Built it 2002, it is the largest aquarium attraction in a four-state area. The aquarium features the world’s largest exhibit of bull sharks visible through a unique walk through tunnel. The aquarium is home to more than 500 aquatic species and 10,000 animals.
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the people, places and traditions that make the ozarks home
“It’s a very good aquarium. It was cool to see native aquatic life. The Shark exhibit and the coral reef made me miss California even more. A must go,” visitor Frank G. said. “A wonderful aquarium with beautiful in-tank displays. Very informative plaques along with the various displays. And of course, the shark tunnel was amazing.,” visitor Nancy S. said. The Aquatic Oklahoma exhibit features ecosystems located in Oklahoma’s more than 160,000 miles of waterways and 1,401 square miles of water bodies serving as habitats for many amphibians, reptiles, fish and mammals. Visitors can learn about noodling, feed smaller turtles, and visit an alligator snapping turtle that
is older than Oklahoma. The Amazing Invertebrates exhibit address animals with no backbone. These species range in size from smaller than grain of sand to half the length of a football field. Invertebrates comprise 97 percent of all species on earth. Some of the earliest invertebrate fossils are from 543 million years ago when the entire state of Oklahoma was submerged by a sea known as the Western Interior Seaway. You can see and even touch some of these amazing creatures in the exhibit. With many animals visitors can touch or feed, the EcoZone Exhibit, displays different types of ocean nurseries which provide safe, shallow waters with plenty
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of hiding places. These nurseries include the rocky coast from Northern California to Alaska, ocean caves, coastal marshes, Africa’s freshwater Lake Malawi, mangrove forests and coral reefs. The EcoZone exhibit features many interactive areas where visitors can touch sea stars, abalone, shark eggs, grown sharks, juvenile stingrays or feed shrimp to the stingrays in the Mangrove Forest. The 3,800-gallon freshwater tank in the Extreme Amazon gallery highlights the ways Amazonian fish have adapted to life in the world’s largest river. The Amazon River Basin is the largest rainforest globally and produces about a quarter of all Earth’s oxygen. The Amazon River is JULY 11, 2022
