aquarium staff member lining inside of empty fish tank with sealant

This Old Holding Room

September 10, 2013

It is hard for me, as director of operations, to believe that we have been open for 13 years.
It seems like just yesterday we were moving fish from our temporary holding area to the Aquarium. As with anything that has been running nonstop for thirteen years, some maintenance and updating needs to be done. One of the updates that we are working on is redoing our holding area. Actually, we were originally going to just replace the stands the quarantine tanks sat on but, decided that is was time for a complete makeover.
Holding is a room that has three main purposes:

Quarantine. Any time we bring an animal into the aquarium it has to be in quarantine for at least 30 days. This way we can ensure that it is disease-free as well as acclimated to our diets.
Hospital. When animals are sick, the holding rooms and tanks make it easier for us to administer treatments, make more up close observations, and lower the risk of the disease spreading to other animals.
(As the name suggests) Holding. This gives us a place that we can house animals while an exhibit is being constructed or updated.

I’ll be tracking our progress over the next few weeks as we continue to work on a new holding area. Please keep checking in to see how we are doing. We hope to have this project finished before October so we can start bringing in animals for a NEW exhibit coming summer of 2014.

First step was to drain the tanks and take apart the the filtration.