Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium
Interesting facts
- In 2020 its researchers became the first to raise shark embryos to birth in an artificial uterus, hatching two deep-sea lanternsharks after five months.
- Its Kuroshio tank was the largest aquarium tank in the world until the Georgia Aquarium overtook it in 2005.
- After a bottlenose dolphin named Fuji lost most of its tail to disease, the aquarium and Bridgestone built it the world's first artificial tail fin.
- It achieved the first captive breeding of the salamander shark, monitoring its eggs by ultrasound for 18 months until they hatched.
- Its sea turtle pool was the first in the world to breed hawksbill turtles to a third generation in captivity.
- Over more than 30 years its researchers have identified about 1,900 humpback whales off Okinawa by the patterns on their tail flukes.
- A new genus and species of starfish described with its help in 2024 was named Churaumiastra in the aquarium's honour.
- A flower hat jelly it described in 2019, Olindias deigo, was the first new species in its genus for 114 years.
- The predecessor aquarium on the site, opened in 1976, was designed by the architect Fumihiko Maki.
- Visitor numbers jumped from about 430,000 a year at the old aquarium to 2.75 million in the first year of the new building.
Why it is worth it
The reason to come is a single wall of water. The Kuroshio Sea, the aquarium's main tank, is 35 metres long, 27 metres wide and 10 metres deep, holds 7,500 cubic metres of seawater and is viewed through an acrylic panel 8.2 by 22.5 metres and 60 centimetres thick – the largest such panel in the world when the building opened in 2002. Named after the warm current that sweeps past the Ryukyu Islands, it is stocked with the open-ocean giants of these waters: whale sharks gliding slowly across the glass, manta rays banking beneath them, and schools of fish that turn the whole tank into one moving surface. Standing in the dim hall in front of it feels less like looking into a tank than like looking out of a submarine.
The aquarium stands in Ocean Expo Park on the Motobu Peninsula in the north of Okinawa's main island, on the site of the 1975 International Ocean Expo. Its predecessor, opened there in 1976, became one of the first aquariums anywhere to keep whale sharks and manta rays over long periods; one whale shark has now lived in its care for about three decades. The present building, by the Okinawan architect Yukifusa Kokuba, replaced the ageing expo structure. Its name was chosen by public vote: chura is Okinawan for beautiful or graceful, umi Japanese for sea. The world's first birth of a manta ray in an aquarium happened here in 2007, and in 2024 an all-black reef manta in the Kuroshio tank gave birth to equally black pups.
The route through the building follows the sea downwards, from the reef to the abyss. An open-roofed Coral Sea tank, fed around the clock with fresh seawater pumped from 350 metres offshore and lit by natural sunlight, grows some 450 colonies of reef-building coral of around 80 species modelled on the reefs of Motobu, and they have spawned together on schedule year after year. A separate tank reproduces the shallows and cave-riddled depths of Okinawan reefs with about 180 species of fish. Deeper in the building, the deep-sea galleries show animals collected from below 300 metres around Okinawa, several of them species the aquarium's own researchers have described for the first time.
Getting there
The aquarium lies in Motobu, about 14 km from the city of Nago; Naha Airport (OKA) is roughly 60 km away in a straight line and about two hours by car via the Okinawa Expressway. Several express buses from the airport and central Naha – among them the Yanbaru Express, the airport limousine bus and expressway bus 117 – run to Ocean Expo Park without a change; other routes connect at Nago Bus Terminal. The park has free parking.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium , formerly known as the Okinawa Ocean Expo Aquarium, is a public aquarium located within the Ocean Expo Park in Okinawa, Japan. The aquarium's Kuroshio sea tank was the largest aquarium tank in the world until it was surpassed by the Georgia Aquarium in 2005.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
26.69439, 127.87794per Wikidata