The highlight of our visit to the nearby aquarium was our experience with the Animal Encounters event. It involved snorkeling in a large outdoor tank filled with all kinds of fish, including a huge stingray named "Scratchy", which we got to pet as it swam by:
Then, our guide Alexandria took us to the shark tank filled with nurse sharks and lemon sharks. The tank was separated from us by a plexiglass wall, but it had small tubes in it to feed the sharks. Our guide gave us fish to hold in front of the tubes:
Then, we would slap the tube with the fish to alert the sharks (like Jillian is doing here):
... and the shark would "suction" the fish through the tube right out of our hand in the blink of an eye! It was shocking, and kind of scary! This is what we saw on the other side of the wall:
That was followed by feeding the small fish that were constantly hovering around us during the shark feeding ... we held a tiny (dead) fish underwater, and those peaky small fish went bananas, attacking us in a feeding frenzy! It was another shocker!
After that, we went to the sea turtle tank to see the giant named "Greenie", and again got to pet the stingray. We finished with about 10 minutes of free time to snorkel around:
There were some seriously big fish swimming with us, named Tarpons.
