Shed Aquarium in Chicago The city of Chicago is home to over 70 museums all striving to educate us about a wide variety of topics ranging from architecture to culture to science. Some of our most well-know museum destinations and places that regularly make the top ten lists of things to do in Chicago are the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum of Natural History, the John G. Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Some of our museums transport us to different times in history, while others exhibit the phenomena of our industrial world or educate us about space, but none open our eyes to a new world quite the way the John G. Shedd aquarium has done f or close to a century. Shedd aquarium opened in 1930 as a compliment to the
Field Museum of Natural History and was started with a donation of $3 million from John Graves Shedd. Mr. Shedd began working as a stock clerk at Marshall Field & Company in 1871 and thirty years later had become their second president. He had a dream “to construct, maintain and operate an aquarium or museum of aquatic life exclusively for educational and scientific purposes….” In order to fill the original marine animal habitats, over one million gallons of saltwater were shipped via train from Key West to Chicago. These exhibits showcased fish from the Caribbean and South Pacific that had never been seen before in the U.S. alongside native fish from the Great Lakes, and because of its incredible diversity of sea life, Shedd came to be known as “the world’s aquarium.”
This iconic Chicago institute houses an incredible variety
of marine life including but not limited to a rehabilitated green sea turtle named Nickel who lives in the 90,000-gallon Caribbean Reef habitat, an Australian lungfish called Granddad who has been living there since 1933, an incredible jellyfish exhibit, wonderful Pacific white sided dolphins and beluga whales in the Abbott Oceanarium, and a fantastic, new cownose ray touch tank. With over 5 million gallons of water and more than 25,000 fish, Shedd Aquarium boasts an amazing collection of sea creatures that can’t help but open our eyes to the incredible variety of life found in our world’s waters.
With the recent release of the documentary “Blackfish,” the ethics of zoos and aquariums have once again been brought into question. This film follows the story of Tilikum, a performing orca responsible for killing several of his trainers while in captivity, with the goal of challenging us “to consider our relationship to nature while revealing how little we humans have learned from these highly intelligent and enormously sentient fellow mammals.” Its release has sparked strong anti-aquarium sentiments as many people extrapolate the ill effects of housing an orca into an opposition to all animals kept in captivity. The argument here is of course that it is unnecessary and inhumane to keep animals in artificial habitats a fraction of the size of where they live in the wild while exhibiting or training them to entertain us, and if viewed from this “animals as entertainment” perspective, I would tend to agree with this opinion. I am of the opinion that some animals are just too large to be properly housed in captivity, and am also aware that not all institutions adhere to the strict health and welfare guidelines practiced by the majority of U.S. facilities, but entertainment is decidedly not the goal or purpose of displaying animals in reputable zoos and aquariums.
The driving force behind public institutions such as Shedd
is education. If humans are to understand the impact we’re having on our planet and all the animals that share it with us, we need to be able to see them face-to-face and interact with them on a personal level. Photographs and videos are not quite enough to illustrate the importance and beauty of the diversity of animal life on Earth, and captive environments give us the opportunity to connect with all these amazing creatures in ways that most people will never experience in a wild setting. Our relationship with zoo and aquarium animals can be perfectly summarized by this quote from the Senegalese environmentalist, Baba Dioum: “In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we have been taught.” We need to understand these animals in order to develop an appreciation for them and ultimately want to protect them and their natural habitats, and places such as Shedd Aquarium promote this important mission of conservation through research, public programming and outreach education. Nothing can replace the wonder of touching a stingray, or the awe inspired by seeing a dolphin catapult 15 feet out of the water, and these are the experiences that as a child determine what kinds of adults we will become. I have been going to Shedd since I was three years old, and I can honestly say that it positively shaped my life. Between the Aquarium and the Field Museum, I developed a deep appreciation and respect for all living things and where them come from, principles that have pervasively governed my career decisions and life choices, and I would not be the person I am today if it weren’t for my time at these enriching institutions. Written by and Photography by Alex Rose
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