The Tennessee Aquarium is a non-profit public aquarium located in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States. It opened in 1992 on the banks of the Tennessee River in downtown Chattanooga, with a major expansion added in 2005. The aquarium, which has been accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) since 1993, is home to more than 12,000 animals representing almost 800 species.
More than 20 million people have visited the facility, with the twenty-millionth visitor arriving in March 2013. It is consistently recognized as one of the country's top public aquariums.
Exhibits The Tennessee Aquarium's exhibits are housed in two structures, the original River Journey building which opened in 1992 and the neighboring Ocean Journey expansion, which opened in 2005.
River Journey
The River Journey facility is , having a floor area approximate to that of a twelve-story building. It contains a total of , and was the largest freshwater aquarium in the world when it opened. It is organized around the theme of the Story of the River, following the path of a raindrop from high in the Appalachian Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. Approximately two-thirds of the facility's display follows this theme, with the rest devoted to smaller aquatic exhibits hosting organisms from around the world.
Major exhibits in River Journey include: The Appalachian Cove Forest featuring River Otter Falls, which opened in 2014 and replaced a smaller exhibit of North American river otters. It also displays free-flying North American song birds, native fish species including shiners, daces, darters, redhorse, hog suckers and trout, and an artificial waterfall falling into a mountain sink.North American Native Fish Association:The Tennessee Aquarium: A Must-See for Native Fish Enthusiasts; retrieved March 21, 2014 Delta Country, which exhibits species from the Mississippi River delta. Its centerpiece is Alligator Bayou, which opened in 2015 and features a group of young American alligators and a pair of alligator snapping turtles. Rivers of the World, which includes several small to medium-large aquaria that represent the Amazon River, Congo (Zaire) River, Fly River and others. This gallery is also home to the aquarium's electric eel, Miguel Wattson, which "communicates" with the public through a Twitter account to which pre-programmed tweets are posted when it emits electricity. In December 2019 the eel's electricity was also used to power the lights on a Christmas tree. The Tennessee River gallery, which exhibits species found in the Tennessee River valley. Its centerpiece is the Nickajack Lake tank featuring species which live in the intensively managed Tennessee River itself, including the American paddlefish and channel catfish. River Giants, which contains giant freshwater fish from around the world, such as alligator gar, arapaima, giant pangasius, redtail catfish and freshwater whipray.Tennessee Aquarium: River Giants. Retrieved 21 March 2014
River Journey also displays turtles, seahorses, frogs and other aquatic and marine life.
Ocean Journey Ocean Journey, a 60,000 square foot structure equivalent in height to a ten-story building, opened in 2005 and contains a total of . It ostensibly follows the theme of the River Journey by following the river into the Gulf of Mexico. This facility includes hyacinth macaws, a touch tank of small sharks and rays, and a butterfly garden with free-flying South American species.
Major exhibits in Ocean Journey include:
The Secret Reef, the largest tank in Ocean Journey (and the Tennessee Aquarium), containing . It depicts the environment of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico and can be viewed from three levels including the Undersea Cavern, an underwater walk-through feature. The species exhibited in the Secret Reef include sand tiger sharks, bonnethead sharks and green sea turtles, one of which, Oscar, is a rescue animal missing much of its rear flippers due to injuries from a boat and a predator. The Boneless Beauties and Jellies: Living Art galleries, which exhibit invertebrates including corals, jellyfish, cuttlefish, giant Pacific octopuses, and Japanese spider crabs. Jellies: Living Art is a collaboration with the nearby Hunter Museum of American Art and includes rotating exhibits of art glass alongside the jellyfish. Penguins' Rock, which displays macaroni penguins and gentoo penguins onshore and swimming in a tank.
Offsite activities In addition to its exhibit halls, the Tennessee Aquarium includes two public offsite facilities. The River Gorge Explorer, a 65-foot catamaran tour boat, offers daily tours of the nearby Tennessee River Gorge and other sites along the Tennessee River, boarding from the public pier in Ross's Landing Park adjacent to the aquarium. The aquarium also operates an IMAX 3D theater.
History
Planning and development The Tennessee Aquarium was designed to serve as a cornerstone for redevelopment in downtown Chattanooga by reconnecting the city with the Tennessee River. At the beginning of the 1980s the Chattanooga-based Lyndhurst Foundation funded a series of initiatives to promote revitalization in the city, which was suffering from the impacts of deindustrialization and population decline. In 1981 the University of Tennessee's urban design program, with funding from Lyndhurst, established the Urban Design Studio in Chattanooga as an opportunity for its students to gain real-world experience in urban planning. This led to the first public mention of an aquarium project, in a 1982 student exhibit of what they described as an "urban design structure" for downtown Chattanooga and the adjacent riverfront. Another Lyndhurst-funded venture, the Moccasin Bend Task Force, was impaneled in 1982 by the City of Chattanooga and Hamilton County to study options for the Moccasin Bend archaeological site immediately north of the Tennessee River, but expanded its scope to cover the city's entire 22-mile riverfront. Its Tennessee Riverpark Master Plan, finalized in 1985, also included a recommendation for a riverfront aquarium. The aquarium plan was additionally endorsed by Vision 2000, a public visioning process carried out in 1984 under the auspices of the nonprofit Chattanooga Venture, as one of forty goals set out for the city to pursue.
Development of the aquarium and the adjoining Ross's Landing Park, part of the Tennessee Riverpark project, was funded by a combination of nonprofit, public, and private individual supporters. The site selected for the aquarium was a group of abandoned warehouses at the foot of Chattanooga's Broad Street, which was acquired for $4.5 million by the RiverCity Company, a nonprofit development agency created in 1986 to implement the Tennessee Riverpark Master Plan, and later deeded to the aquarium. The park received public funds, but the $45 million needed to construct the aquarium was raised privately. John T. Lupton, the chairman of the Lyndhurst Foundation, contributed $10 million from the foundation and $11 million of his personal funds to the project, as well as raising funds from other donors.
The aquarium building was designed by Cambridge Seven Associates, which had previously designed the National Aquarium in Baltimore and the New England Aquarium in Boston. The decision to focus on freshwater environments was made during the planning process, as participants reasoned that it would be difficult to raise money for an aquarium offering conventional salt-water exhibits and that most people would be unlikely to travel to Chattanooga in order to visit one. The resulting structure is organized vertically, following the theme of water traveling through the Tennessee River system from the mountains to the sea. The two living forests, representing terrestrial habitats in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, are located at the top of the building and lit by skylights, while underwater habitats are viewed or accessed from the building's dimly lit, multi-story central "canyon". The building's exterior reinforces the focus of the exhibits with a series of 53 bas-relief depictions of the history of the Tennessee River valley set into the walls. In the surrounding plaza of Ross's Landing Park, variegated bands of plantings and paving represent a chronology of Chattanooga, with a stream flowing through the park to guide visitors through its history from its beginnings as a Cherokee settlement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, facing towards the river, to the present, facing towards downtown Chattanooga.
Construction began in November 1988, and the aquarium opened to the public on May 1, 1992. Some observers were skeptical of the project, with local detractors describing it in terms like "Jack Lupton's fish tank" and some analysts questioning whether Chattanooga had fallen victim to a fad for public aquariums and overestimated the potential economic impact. However, it was successful from the beginning. The aquarium met its first-year goal of 650,000 visitors by the end of August 1992, and by the end of May 1993 more than 1.5 million people had visited.
Expansion During the aquarium's early years, planners considered ways in which it could be used as a foundation for additional public projects with aquatic themes. In 1988 it was suggested that it could become the anchor of a complex that would also include a sports fishing trade center, potentially making Chattanooga the sports fishing capital of America. In 1993 SITE, one of the firms which had designed Ross's Landing Park, was asked by regional development authorities to design a center for exploration of other aspects of aquatic science and activity; its proposal, the "Aquatorium", included a museum, a conference center, and a spa. Neither of these ideas was developed.
In 1995 the aquarium broke ground on a $14 million IMAX center on land adjacent to Ross's Landing Park, containing an educational facility and offices as well as the IMAX theater. This expansion opened in 1996. During its first decade the aquarium also focused on improving and refining its initial designs for the permanent exhibits, and presented two temporary exhibitions, "Jellies: Phantoms of the Deep" in 1998 and "VENOM: Striking Beauties" in 2000.
In 2002 Chattanooga undertook a new public planning process, the 21st Century Waterfront, to continue the reorientation towards the river that had begun with the Tennessee Riverpark Master Plan. An expansion for the aquarium was part of the resulting blueprint for $120 million in improvements to both sides of the downtown riverfront. Although the plan for Ocean Journey was announced a month after the developers of what would become the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, two hours away from Chattanooga, announced their choice of a building site, Tennessee Aquarium officials insisted that their own plans were not a response to this potential competition and that the addition of saltwater exhibits simply reflected visitor requests. However, by the early 2000s analysts were warning of an "aquarium glut" in the United States, after the number of accredited public aquariums in the country grew from 26 to 40 between 1993 and 2003 while the overall number of aquarium visitors rose by only 23% during a similar time frame.