Open Ocean

A 350,000-gallon ring of blue water built for animals that never stop swimming — yellowfin tuna, sea turtles, and hammerhead sharks in one continuous current.

Overview

Inside the exhibit.

The Open Ocean gallery is built around a single idea: some animals physically cannot stop moving. Yellowfin tuna are ram ventilators — they have to keep swimming forward to force oxygen-rich water across their gills, so our 350,000-gallon tank is shaped as a continuous ring with a gentle current, letting them swim in the same unbroken, high-speed loop they would in open water. Green sea turtles drift through the same water column at a completely different pace, and scalloped hammerhead sharks patrol the mid-water using their distinctively shaped heads to scan a wider field for prey.

Watching this tank is the closest most visitors will ever get to the true open ocean — or the pelagic zone, as biologists call the water column beyond the reef and the coast, where there’s no bottom to rest on and nothing to hide behind, just distance, current, and whatever swims fast enough to survive it.