The Hugest Bestest Aquarium in the World.

Hey! What's that little swirly green thing to the left? Is it a piece of kelp? Is it an alien? No it's a SEA HORSE! Click on the picture to see up close. I know I say my favorite animal is the giraffe, but these little guys may be a close second. Sea horses have their own big room in the Monterey Bay Aquarium and no wonder, they are so fascinating. These "Leafy Sea Dragons" were the star of the show. With their tank in the very back, like a centerpiece for the exhibit, you really had to push a little to get space to see them. People would stand there forever watching. Did you know it's the boy sea horses who get pregnant? They had some pregnant males there. It made me really happy in a mean sort of way.
Here's feeding time in the kelp forest tank. The diver under water had a microphone inside his "helmet" to talk to the docent standing outside the tank, and a bone conduction listening device to hear the docent talk back. I'd heard of these bone conduction things before when we were fitting Ari with her hearing aids. Here's a link to the hearing aids, and I'd guess they'd work similarly to what he was using.
These are the same jellies we saw outside in the bay. The ones that hunted Jeff down.


Barnacles. They really do look like that with their little feelers poking out. We had a guy in college (I studied Marine biology) that could do a great barnacle imitation. Remind me to show you what it looked like sometime.

I had to include at least one blurry picture of this guy. He was bigger than Jeff. Bigger than I. Bigger than Jeff and I together. He also seemed to want to make friends since he kept coming over to the side of the tank to say Hi. That, or maybe he was hungry.

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