Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year — and to mark the occasion, the facility will open a new gallery featuring native wildlife this July.
The Southern California Gallery will give aquarium visitors an opportunity to get up close and personal with more than three dozen local species including the California two-spot octopus, leopard and horn sharks, Catalina goby and the Garibaldi — alongside vital plant life including bull kelp and purple sea urchins.
“We’ve come a long way, and in that journey, I think the aquarium has really established its identity,” said AOTP CEO and President Peter Kareiva in a Wednesday, May 24 press conference. “It delivers a real community service to Southern California, (around) education and conservation — and the theme that we are really trying to emphasize this year, and going forward, is the whole idea of connection to nature.”
Though the Southern California Gallery is still under construction ahead of its planned July 1 opening, it will house more than 10 exhibits, two of which will display underwater habitats off the coast of Catalina Island. The first will include a replica of the subterranean environment, including kelp forests and deep-sea hydrocorals, at Farnsworth Bank — a large offshore seamount and popular diving spot.
The other will be based on the Eureka oil rig — which sits in federal water about eight miles from Long Beach’s coast and is the deepest rig in Southern California currently accessible to divers — to exhibit how the now-abandoned well has come to serve as an artificial reef for many wildlife species in the Pacific Ocean.
“Our goal is to basically connect the public to these marine environments, so we picked that one intentionally,” said Brooke Hernandez, a member of the aquarium’s husbandry team, on Wednesday. “We’re gonna light it as though you were a diver in the exhibit.”
The near 5,000-gallon tank will house a…
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