The Shedd Aquarium lifts the curtain on one of the world’s most elaborate fishbowls this week, an exhibit displaying such theatrical flourishes as manmade fog, optical illusions and a movie soundtrack.
The Asian River exhibit recreates a lush, tropical rain forest as it appeared 1,000 years ago along the Chao Phraya River in Thailand, before proliferating humans destroyed it to make way for farmland.
Paul Bluestone, the aquarium’s exhibits curator, described the 20-foot-high, 30-foot-long, 420-square-foot space as “a greenhouse with a river running through it.”
Shedd officials said its opening Tuesday is a sort of sneak preview of a five-year plan to re-do virtually every exhibit in the six galleries of the 63-year-old aquarium building.
When Bluestone talks about planning and building the new exhibit, he sounds like a Hollywood producer pulling together a script, set design and cast to tell a story.
“We worked with a Field Museum ethnobotanist, O.M. Stefancich, to come up with an exhibit story line that would tell how the plants and animals co-exist,” said Bluestone. “Visitors will look in and see several different levels-the fish under the water, the water surface, the mud banks, the forest and the forest canopy above.
“We’re trying to tell the story of disappearing rain forests and the threat that imposes on all of us. It’s the direction we want to take all of our exhibits in, telling the story of habitats and the interdependence of plant and animal life.”
The fish in the new exhibit, including carp-like gouramies, catfish, gobies, barbs and bonytongue, aren’t all that rare, many being larger versions of what hobbyists keep in tanks at home.
Mostly gray, they aren’t even all that colorful as they swim around roots of a giant, artificial fig tree in 18- and 32-inch-deep pools recreating the muddy bottom of the Chao Phraya.
The exhibit’s real dazzle comes from the tropical rain forest that looms above the artificial river.
Except for some fallen logs and a massive tree at the center of the exhibit, 95 percent of the plant life is real, 50 varieties in all.
There are nine different kinds of living trees, including bamboo, ficus, licuala and palms. There are ferns, vines, ivies, taro and jasmine. There are hosts of orchids, including vanda, dendrodiums, moth, aerides, dorites, jewel and tropical lady slippers.
After the exhibit’s plant life is established, curators hope to add live birds, geckos, turtles and snakes native to Thai rain forests.
Bluestone said he and the Shedd’s design chief, Dean Rivas, relied a good deal on stagecraft skills to merge the artificial with the real rocks, plants and animals to create a believable environment.
“The exhibit is only 15 feet deep, and we needed the illusion of looking deeply into an immense forest,” Bluestone said. “We did some tricks by hiring a muralist from Tucson who painted backgrounds into the ceiling and skylight windows.”
The artist started with very crisp, close foreground images of plants gradually blurring to less distinct mid-background images, ending in very indistinct, nebulous images of distant plants. It succeeds in making the viewer believe he or she is almost staring into infinity.
It is bathed in natural sunlight, since the exhibit cuts through the ceiling of the vaulted gallery, taking advantage of the skylights that illuminate the building’s maintenance areas.
The designers extended the river water into off-viewing areas of the 30-foot-long exhibit so that it disappears on either end. They installed several out-of-view fog-making machines that spread 2 1/2 gallons of mist a minute through the exhibit’s forest.
“It suggests a steamy, dense tropical forest while it also disguises the limits of the space of the exhibit. The corners have a soft fog that rises and sits, obscuring the architecture of the building,” said Bluestone.
The final touch, he said, is a high-tech speaker system installed over the four 14-foot-long windows into the exhibit.
Shedd curators discovered a company in California that earlier this year recorded the sounds of an untouched rain forest along another Thai river. The recording was made for a still unreleased movie filmed in Thailand this year by director Oliver Stone, tentatively entitled “Heaven and Earth.”
The Shedd had the forest sounds of birds, insects, wind, gurgling river, rain and rumbling distant thunder tailored specifically to the exhibit. For instance, they had to reduce the roar of a 20-foot-wide waterfall in the movie soundtrack to match the splash of the exhibit’s 14-inch-wide, 12-foot-tall waterfall.
To build the exhibit, contractors had to rip out five conventional exhibit tanks and build a cinderblock enclosure to seal the forest off from the rest of the building. It has its own, sweltering tropical climate, with temperatures ranging from 75 to 105 degrees Farenheit, and humidity ranging between 80 and 90 percent.
“I’m pretty excited because this is the first exhibit that focuses on live plants as well as fish,” said Bryce Bandstra, Shedd horticulturist.
Most of the fish in the former tanks, African freshwater species, simply traded tanks with the Asian River species in the new exhibit.
The most notable individual displaced by the construction, however, was the aquarium’s Australian lungfish, which has been at the Shedd since 1933 and is its longest-standing resident fish. It is currently out of view, awaiting a new exhibit.
Fish curators looked over a list of several dozen freshwater fish species indigenous to the Chao Phraya to come up with the dozen species in the exhibit.
“You don’t want to put something in there that’s going to eat the rest of the exhibit,” said assistant fish curator Jim Anderson.
For instance, he said curators want to put a 30-inch fish called snakeheads in the exhibit but can’t, for the time being.
“Snakeheads are aggressive, territorial and predatory,” he said. “It’s difficult to get them not to eat their tank mates. But we’ll be raising some juvenile snakeheads on prepared foods, conditioning them to that way of eating so that we eventually can introduce them to the exhibit without danger to the other species in the tank.”
The rain forest took a year and $400,000, but Bluestone said it’s just the start of bigger projects in the aquarium.
The marine mammal exhibits in the Oceanarium have nearly doubled Shedd attendance since it opened three years ago. Now, Bluestone said, the staff wants to make major changes in the old aquarium building, which opened in 1930. Though it is considered one of the most beautiful museum buildings in the world, its tanks and exhibit materials are woefully dated.
“We can’t start from scratch, because we’re limited by the architecture of the building,” Bluestone said, “which is pretty rigid and repetitive. And, whatever we do, we want to maintain a reverence for the building’s original architecture.”
The staff wants to eliminate the rows upon rows of exhibit windows, all the same size, positioned at the same height and illuminated with the same lighting.
Bluestone said he’d like to see more natural light coming into the “unwelcoming,” darkened galleries by cutting through barrel vaulted ceilings in the manner of the Asian River exhibit. New exhibits will depict whole environments rather than just the fish.
The next project will be to tear out the existing shark exhibit this fall and build a new one for a 1995 opening that will triple the shark’s habitat, extending it 12 feet out into the gallery floor. In 1995, the Coral Reef exhibit will be closed so that it can be rebuilt.
“Five years from now, this will look like a different place,” Bluestone said.
