Monday, December 17, 2007

Sea World

Well, it was my birthday last week, and I decided that was as good an excuse as any to take a week off and go down to the Gold Coast for a couple of days. I booked a room at the Holiday Inn right at Surfer's Paradise, which was convenient to the beach if not right on it.

I did some swimming on Sunday. The surf on the Gold Coast is somewhat difficult to deal with, and "swimming" largely consists of fighting to stay upright with one's head above the water. I'll certainly say I prefer Noosa for swimming. There is surf if you want to use it (I have taken a liking to some body-surfing) but you can actually get out past where the waves start breaking and still reach the sand with your feet. I've also been told I should check out a couple of places on Moreton Bay, which should be both closer and have very little surf.

Monday, I paid a visit to Sea World. I was a little disappointed that they don't have an Orca, as I've never been to any of the Sea World parks in the US (as many times as I've been to Florida, mind you) and was hoping to see one.

The first exhibit I came across was the dugong exhibit. Dugongs are related to manatees, though they are smaller and have a fluked tail like dolphins and whales rather than the rounded paddle-shaped tail the mantees have.



The main attraction of Sea World are the dolphins. Mostly they have the familiar bottlenose dolphins. The first ones I ran across were in the nursery area, where the mothers and calves stay until the calf is ready to be with the rest of the adult dolphins.


They are all quite inquisitive, and seem to be watching the crowd almost as much as the crowd watches them. They come right up to the edges of the pool and look at you.



The young ones are especially fun to just sit and watch, because they will play games with ANYTHING. A leaf, a stick both become toys for throwing and swimming to retrieve. Sadly, I didn't have any photos left to take while I was watching them at the end of the day.

They also had an Indo-Pacific Humpack Dolphin which I'd never seen before (indeed the only kinds of dolphin I've seen are the bottlenose ones). They have an elongated beak, and have pink markings along with the grey. They also have just a hump on their back instead of a dorsal fin.





They also have a dolphin show, which I caught near the last of my day.






Another interesting attraction they have is called "Shark Bay." Here they have touch pools with starfish, urchins, sea cucumbers and such of various varieties, and even some rays and fish.







I love that last ray. It just looks like a star field on a dark night.

Obviously, they also have sharks in Shark Bay. They have 2 separate enclosures. One is a reef environment and has a lot of fish and reef-dwelling shark species. They had a couple of very large zebra sharks (called zebra due to the stripes they have when young).




The second tank is more like the coastal shelf type of environment. There were a few quite large sharks here. They had a big bull shark as well as a couple of dusky sharks (in order below).



There is also a polar bear exhibit here. Their crazy polar bear was continually doing back flips by launching himself off of the viewing room glass.





That's all for now. Hopefully it won't be so long before my next post.