On a quiet back street between the highway and the bay, it's a place that's a little bit lost in time. Old wooden buildings with casually landscaped wisteria and roses, house a collection of sea water tanks and aquariums. Water bubbles and flows in a swirl that sustains unique collections of the bizarre and the beautiful. Unlike most big public aquariums that emphasize porpoises and big fishes, we focus on seahorses and hermit crabs, emerald eyed spiny box fish, electric rays and red and white spotted calico crabs - all the endless living treasure of north Florida's still shining coast. Before eating a fresh seafood dinner at the coast, we thought people would enjoy meeting some of the other residents of the coast, have a good time and make a new connection with the planet while keeping their feet dry.
Seahorses hide in the seaweed, their black and bronze heads dusted with gold flecks.
Starfish glide effortlessly across the sand and sometimes an octopus will come out of its burrow. Red hermit crabs with bright blue eyes carry waving sea anemones on their shells. Together with animals that look like plants and plants unlike any on land, they challenge our concepts of what it means to be an animal, of what it means to be alive. The people looking at them are delighted to finally see a live seahorse or to find out what a shrimp actually is before it ends up on a dinner plate or better yet to learn what that funny looking blob on the beach that they have wondered about for years really is in our aquariums. Water tables and holding tanks range from 10,000 gallons, the largest, to 3,000 gallons and many touch tanks that are 500 gallons and under.