A Day at the Museum

MCS South East Visits the Horniman Museum aquarium

The Horniman Museum's aquarium is one of London's oldest surviving aquaria. Frederick Horniman is said to have been inspired to construct an aquarium in the Museum after viewing the Horniman Aquarium at the Great Exhibition site.

In July 2006 a new modernised aquarium opened at the Museum. Located in the basement, it contains 15 vibrant displays including among others, a Fijian reef, a tropical rainforest, mangrove and UK rock-pool display.The Aquarium was founded in 1903 under the supervision of eminent zoologist and ethnographer Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940). Haddon was a correspondent of Phillip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), the Victorian naturalist consulted by Charles Darwin. Gosse set up the first marine aquaria in Britain and also wrote the first descriptive catalogue of British marine invertebrates.

We all arrived and met for tea and coffee in the café adjacent to the entrance, not a bad place to spend a damp Sunday morning if you are in the Forest gate area of South London. Our guide for the tour is the aquariums creator Jamie Craggs. Jamie has been part of the collaborative research project CORALZOO, which aims to optimise the sustainable breeding and husbandry of captive stony corals through scientific research.

Aquarists can then implement their newfound knowledge of coral husbandry in their aquarium systems, which hopefully will decrease demand for wild-caught coral specimens.

The museum now breeds its own coral by both sexual and asexual methods and when we visited the Fijian Coral reef display we were able to see this work at first hand. The pictures on the right show the same part of the tank at different times. The left was shot during the visit while the right hand insert, which was found on the internet, had been taken at a previous unknown date. But you can see the difference between the two pictures in the development of coral growth and the amount of individual corals present.

This has primarily been achieved by taking cuttings from their existing corals stock and then allowing them to grow in tanks located behind the scenes, before being placed back in the exhibit. The research that is taking place here into the reproduction of corals should be useful to the commercial aquarium industry, allowing them to produce their own coral stock in captivity and therefore not be dependent on coral which has been removed from reef ecosystems.

The aquarium also has displays on the UK’s seashore and coastal waters, including a large lobster who was feed in order to entice her out from under her rock for us to view. Plus a British pond, mangrove swamp with four-eyed fish, invisal sea horses you cannot see (well I never saw them) and poison frogs from the South American rain forest.

One of the most interesting displays, were the Black Star Northern Sea Nettle jellyfish, these creatures with their long tails of stinging nematocysts cells swim around their tank with an almost hypnotic pulsation (see video below). They were fed to show us how they actively hunt the poor brine shrimps which are dropped into the tank with them. The resulting melee producing a tangled mess of stinging tentacles between the jellyfish. The museum breeds its own supply of jellyfish, from polyp to medusa in a series of tanks which finally look like flooded tumble driers, as shown below.

We were also allowed behind the scenes to see how the water for the display tanks is specially prepared in massive drums that reach up to the ceiling. The water control for any aquarium is a highly advanced process as any change in the composition of the water can have disastrous consequences for the organisms within a display tank. The water goes through several filtration stages before minerals and other nutrients are added back into the water to provide correct Ph and environmental conditions.

The last part of the tour was a view of the room where the corals, jellyfish and seahorses are bred. Here we were able to see the stages of development of the jellyfish and corals, while in their own tank were three tiny seahorses attached to the only piece of sea weed in the centre of the tank.

We must say a big thank you to Jamie for the time he spent showing us around the aquarium, his knowledge and passion for the subject could not help but encourage us to do more for our marine environment in the future.

If you live in or around London the Hornimans museum is well worth a visit, it may not be the biggest museum in London but it makes up for this with the standard of its displays and quality of exhibits. You can find out what’s on and directions from their website: http://www.horniman.ac.uk/

The museum is open daily:

10.30am - 5.30pm except 24 - 26 December, with the gardens open from 8am till sunset most days.
Entrance to the Museum and Gardens is FREE.  But a charge is sometimes made for major temporary exhibitions.