For most people in Taiwan, fish in glass tanks have only a handful of uses.
Restaurateurs like to display them at the fronts of dining rooms to serve as visual menus. The average family or office, meanwhile, pays hefty consultation fees to have them installed according to the rules of feng shui, which, in the simplest terms, is supposed to bring in more money.
The National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium (國立海洋生物博物館), which opened in February last year in Checheng, Pingtung County, will probably not impact any of that, but it's at least purporting to have a more educational and eco-conscious use for the fish tank.
Billed as "the largest aquarium in Asia" and "the first aquarium in Taiwan," the marine life museum now consists of two major halls to showcase the aquatic plants and animals of Taiwan, as well as research facilities designed to study them.
The aquarium is located near Kenting, the country's prime beach resort on the Hungchuen peninsula at the southern tip of the island. The clear, tropical waters and the reefs buffeting the peninsula make the region one of Taiwan's choice diving spots.
For anyone interested in scuba diving or snorkeling in the area, the aquarium is a good way to acquaint oneself with the local marine life, especially dangerous fish like moray eels, lion fish and stone fish, which are hard to spot and highly poisonous to the touch.
A tour of the aquarium starts in Hall One, "Waters of Taiwan," which moves from the fresh water fish of Taiwan's lakes and streams to the fish of estuaries and near-coastal areas and then on to ocean life, culminating in a 3.7 million-liter tank where Scandinavian women give fish-feeding performances several times a day.
Most surprising are the healthy fresh-water specimens, especially the hefty carp and trout in tanks representing Taiwan's mountain reservoirs.
Tour guide Peng Hsu-hsia (彭淑霞) explained that "fish which live in reservoirs tend to get pretty fat, because there's lots of food and they don't get much exercise."
Hall Two, "Coral Kingdom," is devoted to the reefs around Taiwan. The building's design simulates the experience of submerging into the reef by leading visitors down a gradually sloping floor into the tank. This hall is best known for a 5.6 million-liter tank that is traversed by 81m of underwater tunnels, bringing one through a pristine seascape of natural table coral and tropical fish too numerous to name.
Reefs and coral life are a major focal area for study by the scientists and researchers working with and through the aquarium. Among other projects, researchers at a nearby dive site, Maobitou, are involved in photographing and documenting conditions at several areas of the reef that have been tagged with small plaques. Many of Taiwan's reefs are disappearing due to a combination of causes, including hordes of divers walking over coral and killing it, sedimentation, in which muddied water starves coral of sunlight, and nutrification, in which ecosystem imbalances allow algae to breed unchecked, depriving coral of water-borne nutrients.
On the Hengchuen peninsula, one culprit for reef death is the Second Nuclear Power Plant, which disgorges its heated runoff onto adjacent reefs, one of which is located immediately next to the popular tourist beach of Nanwan.
The power plant is located about 10km away from the aquarium, and aquarium researchers, like those at Maobitou, are actually using the power plant's destructive effects to gather knowledge they hope will help save reefs in other parts of the world. By charting the accelerated coral bleaching process in the power plant-heated waters, they hope to form a gauge to assess reef damage, especially for many parts of Southeast Asia, where water temperatures have slowly risen in recent years.
RSS