The Melbourne Aquarium is located in the city centre on the banks of the Yarra River. The building is in the form of a ship docked at the riverfront. Opened in 2000, today the aquarium is considered one of the best in the world. It has an extensive collection of inhabitants of the South Seas and the entire Antarctic region, and regularly hosts exhibitions of the underwater world of the Great Barrier Reef.
The aquarium features royal and sub-Antarctic penguins brought from New Zealand, a variety of fish and marine mammal species, scorpions and tarantulas living in deep grottos. To reproduce natural conditions, the expositions contain real snow and ice. In addition, the Southern Ocean exhibit introduces coral atoll life, mangrove trees, flora and fauna of estuaries and inhabitants of underground caves.
But of course, some of the aquarium's main inhabitants are the huge grey nurse sharks and rare flathead basking sharks that live in the world's first 2.2 million litre circular aquarium. It is designed so that viewers themselves become the object of observation of the marine life swimming around them.
The Melbourne Aquarium is also involved in conservation programmes, such as a programme to increase the numbers of nurse sharks, which have almost disappeared from Victorian waters, and a programme to restore the population of giant sea turtles. The latter are raised in an aquarium and then released into the warm waters of Queensland.
