The story of the Amazon River’s annual cycle of flooding and drying out is such a sprawling saga that the Shedd Aquarium had to break down venerable, 70-year-old walls to fit it all in.
The Shedd’s new $17 million Amazon exhibit, which opens a week from Saturday, takes the aquarium deep into realms it had explored only hesitantly before, throwing out old-fashioned fish tanks in favor of elaborate habitats that represent an entire ecosystem.
Wending its way through two of the six vaulted-ceiling galleries in the original aquarium building, “Amazon Rising: Seasons of the River” houses many living land animals more likely to be found in zoos than in aquariums, including birds, monkeys, sloths, spiders and a colony of extremely dangerous inch-long bullet ants.
They will live in spaces shared with aquatic creatures of the Amazon, many new to the Shedd, including caiman, freshwater stingrays, poison dart frogs and a giant anaconda expected to grow more than 20 feet long. All of them live amid lush rainforest plants, thriving since workers opened the ceiling to bring real sunshine into the once-darkened gallery spaces.
“You can no longer get away with having a string of lighted tanks in a gallery,” said Paul Bluestone, the aquarium’s vice president for planning and design. “We’re bursting out and blurring the lines between aquariums, zoos and natural history museums.”
The new exhibit inhabits the old Galleries 1 and 2, which housed Pacific and Indian Ocean fish. Workers tore out the rear walls of the two rectangular spaces and connected them, creating one huge, U-shaped exhibit area.
Though all elements within the permanent exhibit are entirely new, including behind-the-scenes life-support systems, the galleries that house it have been preserved. The vaulted ceilings are now finished with a soundproofing material that more closely resembles the original plaster finish, restored from various alterations in recent decades.
Along with the Amazon exhibit, the Shedd also is opening a new $2.5 million entrance just south of the main steps. It will accommodate group tours and is handicapped accessible.
Those two projects constitute the second phase of a $65 million makeover of the original building. First came last year’s restoration of the central rotunda, including the coral reef exhibit. The final phase will be the opening in spring 2002 of a $32 million underground addition being built to house a huge Philippine ocean reef exhibit.
Eventually, Bluestone said, the Shedd will make over all of its exhibits in the original building to show off marine ecosystems in the Pacific islands, Florida and the Caribbean, Central Africa, and the Illinois region.
The staff decided to create the Amazon exhibit first because it is such a key part of the natural world, he said.
“We felt the big story we needed to tell our visitors is the interconnectedness of all things in nature,” Bluestone said. “You can take an ecosystem from any part of the world and use it to show how everything in it, when it is healthy, works for the benefit of every other living thing in it.
“But when you take any one element out of it, the whole system suffers.”
The exhibit, which carries no extra charge, begins by showing a shoreline along the Amazon during the dry season. Computer screens identify the animals living in that habitat, allowing visitors to call up more detailed information if they wish.
From there, a wall of falling water announces visitors are entering the rainy season environment. Every year the Amazon rises up to 30 feet during the rainy season, spreading out as far as 40 miles and inundating the forest floor.
This section features many of the river’s fish species, including flesh-eating piranhas and three-foot-long arawanas, muscular leapers known as water monkeys that can snatch birds, bats and frogs in the air. It also includes seed- and nut-eating fish species that swim through the forest floodplain during high water, dispersing seeds and nourishment that the forest depends on for renewal.
Pygmy marmosets occupy a habitat with dwarf caiman, snappish cousins to alligators. A horizontal mesh screen separates the two species so that if a monkey should slip and fall, it won’t become a caiman snack.
Another portion of the rainy season exhibit contains creatures living in shallow waters thickly matted with flowering plants, known as “floating meadows.” This is where the giant anacondas live and is the breeding and nursery area of many fish and other animals.
A deep-water, main-river channel section displays 10-foot-long arapaima, one of the largest freshwater fishes in the world.
Several smaller “focus tanks” scattered through the exhibit show off a variety of creatures rarely seen outside the jungle: bullet ants feared by humans for their painful sting; frogs with toxic skin that indigenous hunters gather to make poison darts for blowguns; dinner plate-sized tarantulas that eat insects, lizards, frogs and sometimes even birds.
The last portion of the exhibit shows that the flooding river is not a disaster for the rain forest, but a boon. It includes a tank that demonstrates ongoing research in the river, filled with fish recently netted in the Amazon and brought to the Shedd. Many of them are new species still not described in scientific literature.
