Sea World

R and I went to Sea World on Saturday. It was R's Christmas present, as he loves the fishies. At first, as we were walking around, we thought it was mostly an overpriced zoo, and not that good of one as I have seen better animal exhbits at free zoos. But then we went to see the Shamu show and it was soooo awesome. It was really just a twenty minute chunk of a rehearsal for a new show, but is was still so cool. In parts, the smaller killer whale pushes the trainer around in the water, and jumps out with her kind of standing on the whale's nose and then the whale floats on her back and the trainer lays full length on top of her. It was pretty cool. And the whales are so big! We also saw the sea lion show which was funny and involved an otter with a sword, and the dolphin show where we finally got splashed.

Generally I disapprove of the animals in captivity, and the large sea mammals are especially bad because they travel such large distances in in the wild. When they are in captivity though, I think it is good to have them do shows or performances, as long as they are trained without harmful techniques, or made to do things that could hurt them. I think it can be a very good enrichment. I also got the feeling that the killer whales were big hams. They kept coming up to the underwater viewing window and looking at all the people.

The pictures are of one of the coolest animals we saw -- a sea dragon, which is closely related to the sea horse. The other is of the shark tunnel which was one of my favorite things. I love sharks!