I visited the new Marine Life Park at Sentosa Island (Singapore) recently with some friends, and these are some of the shots from that weekday jaunt. The oceanarium here bills itself as Southeast Asia’s largest, and it’s not all too bad really. I estimate the largest tank about 30 x 30 metres, which is really quite huge. A good amount of space for the huge manta rays (wait for Part II) that glide gracefully within.
What I didn’t exactly like about the Park though was its poor sense of curation. There are a few big tanks – the highlights, scattered haphazardly around the aquarium, such as the shark tank; the mega-tank (forgot its name); and two humongous coral habitat pillars, but beyond that there are really too many small tanks to count, containing so many frankly uninteresting fish.
I say uninteresting, because once you’ve seen coral pillars filled with a gazillion colourful fish, other tanks with similarly coloured fish quite lose their impact on you (unless you happen to be an aspiring marine biologist). There were also some rather absurd exhibits, like the one with lobsters, or the one with the giant crabs, or worse of all the mangrove exhibit. Certainly one can make the argument for including variety, but lobsters and crabs properly belong in a seafood restaurant, and the colourless fish of the mangrove swamps just seem ridiculously out of place against their much flashier oceanic counterparts.
Lest I be seen as overly harsh now, I will say however that the oceanarium is much better than the Underwater World it replaced, and is an attraction that I would rank with the likes of the Sydney Aquarium. It’s a little costly, at SGD29, but then again stay for awhile and its like 3 hours of free air-con with pretty fish.
Other Places, Other Lives 