THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 15, 1996 TAG: 9606210727
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: SPECIAL EDITION: A VISITOR'S GUIDE TO THE EXPANDED VIRGINIA MARINE
SCIENCE MUSEUM
SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY
STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 82 lines
You're descending along a narrow canyon into a dark and mysterious underwater world.
Because of intense pressure that would crush a human, you could not make this journey to the depths of the ocean without traveling in a titanium-clad submersible.
Fortunately, you are. Or at least in the museum's version of one, a viewing station for the huge Norfolk Canyon aquarium.
Visitors enter through a canyonlike corridor - there's a sense of entering the murky deep as they do - to a viewing area behind a 9-inch-thick acrylic, floor-to-ceiling window at the bottom of the tank.
The interior of the aquarium, a 300,000-gallon tank in the main building, is designed to resemble the terrain of the Norfolk Canyon, a dramatic gash in the continental shelf off the Virginia coast.
One has a choice of standing or sitting in an open viewing area or entering one of two smaller nooks. One looks like a shipwreck. The other is a room with the steel-walled look of a deep-diving submersible.
As you enter and behold the switches and dials, flashing lights and beeping sounds of the deep, then peer through viewports on the walls and ceiling, you realize that the room is built into the tank and you're in it.
And immediately you're eye-to-eye with the creatures of the canyon. Swimming toward you, then veering away may be one of several sharks.
Unlike some of their wild cousins, the museum's sharks are not exactly primeval predators because they don't have to hunt for their next meal. Knowing dinner is on the house, they've been described as ``laid-back.''
But that doesn't detract from their evil looks.
The largest at this point is a 7-foot sand tiger shark, a slow-moving creature with ominous toothy jaws. One of the fastest is the blacktip shark, cruising in search of food. There's also a yellow-brown lemon shark with two equal-size dorsal fins; a nurse shark probably resting on the bottom, opening and closing its mouth to force water over its gills; a brown shark skimming among the canyon's rocky outcroppings; and a bonnethead, a small species of hammerhead, perhaps inspecting the tank for minute electrical signals given off by prey.
During their stay at the aquarium, the sharks will continue to grow, some reaching 10 to 12 feet in length.
Among the other creatures to be found in the aquarium are a variety of rays. One, the cownose, glides gracefully as it flaps its fins like a bird in flight. There's the small Atlantic stingray with its pointed snout and the roughtail, capable of growing to 14 feet, with venomous spines on its tail. On closer inspection, visitors also might find the smalltooth sawfish, which slashes its victims with its saw; the spiny dogfish, which hunts in packs; and one of the meanest predators of all, the great barracuda, an aggressive feeder with heavy underslung jaw.
Like the well-fed sharks, these other bullies of the sea are expected to be non-combative.
The aquarium fish swim in and around the remains of a simulated shipwreck: oil drums, spilled cargo, a propeller, an anchor and other debris. Visitors to the viewing area will notice that the sides of the shipwreck compartment extend into the tank.
The real canyon, probably cut through the continental shelf by an ancient extension of the Susquehanna River, plunges a mile and a half to the ocean bottom where fierce cold, deep darkness and dense pressure make for strange, slow-moving creatures. It is the upper reaches of the canyon, brimming with life, that the museum highlights.
Numerous fish species will inhabit the tank, including spotted goatfish probing the bottom for food, perhaps changing color from white to red depending on the time of day. Visitors also might spy thick-lipped cunners with protruding canine teeth. Lending splashes of color are yellow snappers, queen angelfish, and blue parrotfish. Banded and spotted butterfly fish may weave and dart nervously about.
The museum's Norfolk Canyon is a make-believe world, but it closely resembles one of the most intriguing parts of the undersea landscape just off Virginia's coast. MEMO: Note: This exhibit will open later this month. ILLUSTRATION: ARTIST'S CONCEPTION OF THE 300,000-gallon norfolk
canyon aquarium.
JOHN EARLE / The Virginian-Pilot by SS