After hearing about the new Ripley’s Aquarium, opening in 2013 at the base of the CN Tower, it would be easy to make jokes about our esteemed mayor preferring sharks to, say, libraries, books or Margaret Atwood (alright, alright, that was his brother, but still). Yes, it would be easy, but we aren’t going to do it, because let’s be honest: we like sharks too.
Another thing we like, as Canadians, is building things that are just really, really big. It’s good clean fun, and it probably has nothing to do with inferiority complexes or any of that psycho-gibberish. Dubai may have us beat on the CN Tower, but how will our new aquarium compare to other similarly gargantuan aquaria? Let’s find out.
1. Tank size. At 1.5 million gallons (5.7 million litres), the Ripley’s Aquarium will be big, but not the biggest by any means. In Canadian terms, it’s smaller overall than the Vancouver Aquarium (2.5 million gallons between its combined tanks). Both of these get clobbered by the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Georgia, which has the world’s largest single tank at a titanic 6.3 million gallons.
Which raises the real question in terms of where we’ll rank on the world stage: how much of the 1.5 million gallons will be accounted for by a single tank? According to this Touropia guide, the cutoff for being in the top 10 largest tanks in the world is the Aquarium of Western Australia in Perth, at 793,000 gallons.
Facts like this can get pretty murky on the Internet, so we gave Tim O’Brien, Ripley’s VP of Communications, a call to set the record straight. “It’ll be multiple tanks,” he explains. “The main attraction is a 750,000 gallon shark lagoon, under which there’ll be a 100 meter gliding walkway offering spectacular views. There will also be a number of smaller tanks,” including a psychedelic jellyfish display (tentatively called Planet Jelly), which will bathe onlookers in blue luminescence and classical music.
So, there you have it — we just missed the top 10, even though our main tank is almost 10 times the size of Vancouver’s. (We’re assuming that siphoning 43,000 gallons from the Perth aquarium with mouth suction and a garden hose isn’t a viable solution.)
2. Number of animals. About 13,500 fish, sharks and other water-dwellers from oceans and streams across the world will call Ripley’s home (that number refers to individual animals, not species). That’s a tiny fraction of the Vancouver Aquarium’s 70,000 individual animals, and Georgia’s whopping 120,000. Personally, we think that we should just buy more fish. Couldn’t we just grab some from PetSmart and bring them over in a plastic bag filled with water? No? Eco-what? Okay, jeez, sorry.
3. Number of species. In terms of different kinds of fish, the Toronto aquarium (450) will be roughly equal to both Western Australia (400) and the Georgia Aquarium (500). So, in terms of sheer variety, Toronto’s right up there with the big boys.
And that’s where we stand. Happy shark-peeping!