Name: Zoo Tours: Monterey Bay Aquarium | PART ONE
Uploaded: 2025-06-29T05:34:52.000Z
Duration: 11 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

For this video, I travel to the absolutely gorgeous Monterey, California to find out why so many people say it has the best aquarium in America.

The world famous Monterey Bay Aquarium has been revolutionizing marine husbandry, research and expanding conservation efforts since 1984, like campaigning to ban the shark fin trade in California, organizing a strong commitment to sustainable seafood, successfully caring for and releasing great white sharks, and so much more that you'll learn along the way.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

For our three-part tour, you'll see the best of their 770 plants and animals from the waters that are right outside the window, the open ocean, and a world unlike any other.

Before we get started, I would really appreciate it if you pressed those like and subscribe buttons to officially join our zoo crew.

If you haven't already, then I would like all of you to share one reason why everyone should visit your local aquarium.

I did not have the pleasure of staying in the city, but to get here, I drove two hours from San Francisco.

Like a lot of aquariums, they don't have their own parking, so I settled for the Cannery Row Public Parking Garage that's just a seven-minute walk away.

Aquariums are also known for being a bit on the pricey side, and Monterey is no exception.

But believe me, no matter what you spend, it is worth it.

We'll be taking a left into the ocean's edge and the coastal habitat of Monterey Bay.

The first main hallway starts you off kind of small.

It's made up of four different zones, Deep Reef, Sandy Floor, Shell Reef, and The Wharf, displaying mostly overlooked species that can be found just outside the aquarium.

Even though a lot of what you'll find is so small that some of them need to be magnified, This hallway makes up the largest collection in the entire aquarium with nearly 100 species.

The entire way, you're able to follow along a 90-foot-long, 312,000-gallon, hourglass-shaped tank.

This shape gives the sharks room to glide and turn, which helps them get rid of metabolic waste and muscle tissue.

You'll find striped sea bass, leopard sharks, white sturgeons, giant sea bass, a top predator that can weigh 550 pounds.

But what you want to look out for, though, is something found in very few aquariums.

The Broadnose Sevengill Shark, one of two sharks with seven gills on either side of their body.

Most have five, and they only have one dorsal fin, while most sharks have two.

Its upper teeth are jagged, its lower teeth are comb-shaped, perfect for tearing flesh off of an octopus, dead animals, and they've even been observed hunting seals in packs.

The very end of this gallery is where I learned how much this aquarium values education and conservation.

To further promote the importance of sustainable seafood, they installed the Real Cost Cafe, a fake but still interactive diner.

Just click on one of the fish listed on the menu, and three virtual chefs and your check will give reasons as to whether or not it's okay to order certain seafood because it may or may not be ethically farmed or caught.

But we'll learn more about this in part two.

The second gallery in Ocean's Edge is the Rocky Shore, opening up with hermit crabs, pipefish, and another virtual expert talking about the importance of wetlands.

But everyone flocks to this walkthrough aviary.

When you think birds in an aquarium, you might think penguins and puffins.

Monterey has those, but also gives Sanctuary to overlooked and underappreciated shore birds from the beaches and dunes, and you can get really close to them.

This corner blends life from the land and the sea, mixing oyster catchers with rays and sharks.

Also, if you don't feel like crouching down to see underwater, you can move and pinpoint this periscope.

In recent years, you'd find ten different kinds of shorebirds in the main exhibit.

Almost all of them came from other wildlife rescue stations across the country after being injured or abandoned before they even hatched, and some are rehabilitated and released into the wild.

To keep the birds busy, keepers hide insects in the sand so they can hunt just like they would in the wild, and some days the staff will open the windows so you can all feel the breeze.

And to look like an actual shoreline, it's supposed to blend with the bay in the background, but on the inside, the dune slopes into a saltwater shallow.

The birds on this side don't live with sharks, but they're still definitely not alone.

The rest of the rocky shore is the most hands-on part of the aquarium, a batray touch tank that looks like it connects to the oyster catchers, which by the way, are much easier to see outside of the aviary.

There's a touch pool filled with kelp and smaller creatures, a wheel feature where if you spin it, barnacles will come out to feed.

But you're going to want to get a good spot in this walkthrough tunnel, where timing is everything.

The Wave Crash Gallery drops 600 gallons of water every minute into an all-outdoor display.

Not only is this a thrilling feature, but it was made to teach visitors about high and low tides, which perfectly matches the theme of the Great Tide Pool.

The water that circulates from the bay that goes into the aquarium is then emptied into this partially man-made reservoir.

Not only is wildlife welcome to use it, but the aquarium has used it to rehabilitate pelicans, seals, and two fictional humpback whales in Star Trek IV.

But even you can swim in it if you sign up for the Underwater Explorer's Scuba Experience.

When you're out here, you can really get a better look and see how Pixar was inspired when they were designing the Marine Life Institute and Finding Dory.

Speaking of humpback whales, it may look like a whole bunch of nothing in the bay, but depending on the season, you might see glimpses of common and Rizzo's dolphins, several kinds of whales, and even orcas.

If you think you don't see anything, you might need the binoculars, but you should always be able to see pinnipeds and a large raft of sea otters.

The majority of them will stay way out there and float on the surface in a group, but a few stragglers might come even closer to the aquarium, like the one I spotted just outside the window when I was eating lunch.

The viewing deck also has a second outdoor tank, this time filled with loads and loads of trout, turtles, and living plants.

And if you were to follow it, it'll take you back inside and lead you to the aquarium's crown jewel.

This is the famous kelp forest, 343,000 gallons, 65 feet wide, 28 feet tall, making it one of the tallest aquarium exhibits in the world.

Kelp forests are very important to the California coast's ecosystem.

They're like tropical rainforests in terms of its biodiversity and how they provide shelter for hundreds of animals.

Before becoming an opening day attraction, no aquarium was able to maintain a living kelp forest in an artificial setting.

They allow the forest to grow in direct sunlight. 2,000 gallons of water from the bay is pumped into the tank every minute, and every six seconds, a surge machine replicates the currents of California's waters.

This process helps the kelp grow an average of four inches a day and gives this display its iconic look.

Including the kelp, about 20 species call this home, but the most popular creature that you find in this area doesn't live in the tank.

In fact, they don't even live underwater at all.

On select days around 1.30, the keepers will bring out Makana, a Laysan albatross.

Laysans are on the smaller side, but in general, albatrosses are the world's largest seabirds.

In the wild, they are known for traveling thousands and thousands of miles without even touching land.

It would only take them around two months to fly around the world.

Makana, though, is here because she sustained an injury to her wing, therefore wouldn't be able to survive in the wild.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium claims to be the only institution in North America that cares for an albatross, so this encounter might be your only opportunity of ever seeing one.

And based on the crowd, it was nice to see that people apparently got that message.

The kelp forest can be admired from three different stories, including one that's above deck.

The second story continues this kelp mania in the enchanted kelp forest.

There's kelp growing in a cylindrical tank, another kelp touch pool, seaweed gardens, and you've heard of shark tunnels, but you've probably never seen a tunnel filled with, you guessed it, more kelp.

The Splash Zone is essentially a children's zoo.

The Coral Kingdom draws in both adults and children with vibrant displays.

There's a playground and interactive water features, leaping blennies, but everyone knows extra fun is by and from the penguins.

Though they don't have an outdoor display, the aquarium says the cold currents of their native South Africa are similar to Monterey Bay's.

To stay warm, African penguins have a double layer of insulation with densely packed feathers.

They face the opposite problem on land and try to avoid overheating.

They'll resort to panting and pump blood to certain parts of the body that are less insulated.

I read this exhibit was meant to be temporary, and there are talks of either an expansion or plans to improve this habitat.

Next to that is an above-surface view of the Sevengill Shark Tank and close encounters with California morays, and we are off to the last gallery of the day.

Compared to other world-famous American aquariums, Monterey's collection lacks mammals.

Since none of the exhibits were designed to house larger mammals like whales and dolphins, they sort of use that kind of wildlife that you can find outside as a quote-unquote exhibit.

They do have one furry friend, and it's possibly the best marine mammal you can ask to see.

Ladies and gents, the Southern Sea Otter.

The first floor windows give an underwater view of their acrobatics in 55,000 gallons.

The second floor, you can watch them at the surface.

Just like every sea otter habitat we've come across so far, but all of those other ones are really bare and uninspiring.

The kelp might not be real, I think, but there's growth on the rockwork.

If I never saw this and you told me Garibaldi's were mixed with otters, I don't think I'd believe you.

On top of that, after looking around, I feel like I'm an expert on sea otters now.

Everything you need to learn about them is right here.

About their diet, why they don't need fresh water, why they're threatened in the wild, how a mom cares for her pup, how the aquarium cares for pups, and you can even compare and contrast the thickness and texture of their fur to a muskrat's and synthetic fur.

Since year 1 in 1984, Monterey has been rehabbing and releasing injured and orphaned sea otters.

I found one source that claims back then, staff would swim with rescued otter pups in the Great Tide Pool, teaching them to swim and hunt.

In 2001, they became the first place to use sea otter surrogates.

A few of those females that are deemed unreleasable will act as surrogate mothers to rescued pups so they can show them what it takes to survive in the wild.

From 2002 to 2016, 37 surrogate-reared pups graduated from this program and were released into the Monterey Bay.

And that is where we will leave off for now because I need a breather.

While most of the left side of the aquarium focuses a lot on conservation and really gets you to appreciate the wildlife in the bay, the right side that's coming up is conservation-focused too, but also compared to the left side, it will blow your mind.

So as always, please stay tuned, stay wild everyone, and thank you for watching my first presentation of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.