Kagoshima aquarium

my FAVORITE aquarium so far!!!!!!! (warning! this will take a long time to read because i added a LOT of videos!!!!)

    Jul 11, 2024 

    We started our day with excitement as we headed to the Kagoshima aquarium. 🐠 There, we ate lunch. 🍴 They had a lot of fun animals in the aquarium. 🐟 When we got in, we first went to see the whale shark, the most popular animal in the aquarium.🐋  Even though the whale shark was young, it was still quite big.

Then, when we came out, we saw a large, flat, oval-shaped tank with very few fish. But when we looked closely, we found out that the tank wasn’t actually about the fish, but about the shrimp! 🦐 The little shrimp were everywhere in the tank, either eating on the rocks or digging for food on the ground. The shrimp were adorable and had what looked like 6 little hands to search for food. I loved the little shrimp. 💕

After we finished looking at the shrimp, we moved on to the fish. 🐠 In the first tank, there was a cute, little brown pufferfish hiding in a corner. 🐡 I really liked the pufferfish, and I spent what felt like 15 minutes with it. ⏳ I loved being with it! Afterwards, we saw more fish, as well as about five eels bunched up in a tank about half the size of the pufferfish’s tank, which was about a meter tall and half as wide. 

    Next, we went to the garden eel tank.  It was in a half-dome shape, while the other side looked square. It was very fun and surprisingly satisfying, putting my hand on the glass and watching them go back in their little holes. 

    Soon after, we went to see a dolphin show, and it was much better than I expected. 🐬🐬🐬🐬 The dolphins could glide across the rim of the pool, touch the red ball about 3-4 meters from the surface of the water, 🔴 glide to a super shallow area, and even jump at exactly the same time! here are a bunch of pictures and videos (took me a long time to load them):

    When we got back, we decided to see the coral growing lab. 🪸 When we went inside, we expected to see more different types of coral and a video about coral (in Japanese, of course).  But no! Instead, we found lots, and lots of NUDIBRANCHS!!!!!!!!!!!!  There were white spotted red ones with blue edges, light purple ones with orange gills, and many, many more! Some were small and colorful, while others were big and dull. Some were in big, square tanks, with several different species, and a lot of plants and things to hide under, making them hard to find, and others were in small, honeycomb-shaped boxes with either just them, or them and a few others of the same species and basically nothing else.  Some of the honeycomb-box nudibranchs had eggs, or egg noodles, as we like to call them, since they look so much like noodles.

some nudibranchs

In one of the big tanks, instead of nudibranchs, there were sea hares, which, like nudibranchs, were sea slugs, but were a muddy brown and about the size of a small rabbit. 

can you find the sea hare in the video?

When we finished looking at the nudibranchs, we went and saw the dolphin show again. 🐬🐬🐬🐬

    After that, we went to the highest floor in the aquarium. There was a very nice view of Sakurajima that we liked a lot ⛰️🌋 (well, Mama bear and Papa bear did, I’m not much into views), and a polar bear brand ice cream vending machine.🐻‍❄ 🍨 Papa bear bought a chocolate bar-shaped, waffle-like, hollow thing filled with vanilla ice cream and different types of fruit jams from it with a 500 yen coin 🪙 that I had in my pouch. 👝 Mama bear also used the change 🪙 that came out of the ice cream machine to buy a banana latte out of another vending machine, and we shared the snacks while looking at the view. 🍌☕

On the way down, we visited the jellyfish, and it was lucky we did, because we were just in time for feeding!

Finally, we drove home, filled with wonderful memories from our day at the aquarium. 🚗✨