Visitors view marine life at Turkuazoo

 

 

 

Istanbul (Dunya) – I took a weekday afternoon off from work in December to visit the nearby Turkuazoo Aquarium, one of the big marine life facilities of Europe. 

Great white sharks, hammerhead sharks, manta rays, sting rays, and hundreds of other species, some known to attack humans, navigated gracefully inside the giant, thick, but transparent, main acrylic tank, surrounding an 80 meter (264-foot) underwater pedestrian tunnel that I walked through. 

Some 48 special tanks at the aquarium hold schools of omnivorous Piranha, capable of devouring cattle in seconds, colorful jellyfish, coral, and monstrous Japanese spider crabs and other creatures from rivers and lakes in rain forests in Southeast Asia and South America and the sea bottom.

Turkuazoo, which opened in 2009, is one of two facilities in the city where one can see some of the more than 32,000 species of marine and aquatic life that exists on the planet earth. The other facility, Istanbul Aquarium, is bigger, but offers a much less number of fish and aquatic creatures.

Located in Forum Istanbul Shopping Center, in Bayrampasa, on the European side of the city, Turkuazoo has more than 10,000 sea and aquatic fish and marine creatures in 48 giant tanks. It contains more than 50 species of aquatic and marine life.

With its 265 stores, Forum Istanbul is Europe's biggest shopping mall.

On week days, Turkuazoo and the shopping mall draw few visitors, because it is somewhat distant from main residential areas. But come weekends, middle and upper middle class Turks from all over Istanbul swarm the shopping center, which offers hundreds of foreign brands and fast food and international cuisine and traditional Turkish restaurants, and the halls of the aquarium are crowded. 

 

Rain forest waters

Upon entry into the aquarium, I travelled along a hall where two dozen thematic tanks contain aquatic life from the rain forests, including Lake Malawi, the Mekong and Amazon Rivers, where salt waters and fresh waters often mix.

In addition to the Piranhas, this section contains South American Arapaima, one of the world's largest tropical fresh water fish that reaches 2.5 meters  (7.75 feet) length and over 100 kg (220 pounds) in weight. The section also has the spiky Mata mata turtles, which resemble piles of rock. Mata mata turtles, which don't have teeth, are capable of swallowing fish with their powerful huge mouths that shut tight with their prey caught.  

Sea life off continental and insular cliffs is another section of the aquarium. Here you can see varieties of sting rays, skates and various sharks, including the Port Jackson Shark.

At one shallow tank with an open top, I fed small manta rays that came up and nibbled at my fingers. At another, I touched horseshoe crabs with their mighty pincers.

The Black Sea and Mediterranean sea life pools contain small fish, including sardines, the lovable anchovy, turbots, horse mackerel and the ferocious-looking but shy moray eels.

 

Great whites 

But it was a tour of the main tank that surrounds a pedestrians' tunnel that I saw the great white sharks for the first time. Many of these were at least 3 meters (9.3 feet) long. They can grow to be six meters (18.6 feet).

Although Steven Spielberg's film ‘Jaws,' based on Peter Binchley's novel by the same name depicts Great White sharks as ferocious man eaters, humans in reality are not the preferred prey of the great whites, experts say. 

The sharks in the main pool are well fed and don't harass the other marine life. Visitors can actually put on diving gear and go into the pool, accompanied by scuba divers at the facility, and swim among the sharks. You don't need to be a good swimmer to scuba dive, an attendant says. 

Global Aquariums, a Dutch-based corporation founded by South African entrepreneur Rob Hersov, 52, invested euro 15 million ($20 million) in Turkuazoo, and it is run by its Turkish affiliate Istanbul Sualti Dunyasi A.S.

Marinescape, a New Zealand-based developer which has constructed more than 20 large aquariums from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Singapore at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, in Southeast Asia, built Turkuazoo.  

The aquarium has more than 50 employees, including marine biologists, scuba divers and engineers.

Since it opened more than three years ago, more than 1 million people have visited Turkuazoo.