New aquarium show is Jaws-dropping
New York’s sharks have found a permanent home, and it’s not on Wall Street.
“Ocean Wonders: Sharks!,” which opens Saturday, is the first new exhibit at Coney Island’s New York Aquarium since Hurricane Sandy flooded the place. The show’s nine galleries, brimming with fish and facts, try to undo the bad rap wrought by “Jaws” and “Sharknado.”
“If you’ve ever been in the waters surrounding New York above your knees, you’ve already been swimming with some of the 26 species of sharks that are found here,” says aquarium director Jon Forrest Dohlin. “Sharks are not a threat to us; we have been a threat to sharks.”
Housed in 800,000 gallons of water — some of it over a tunnel-like walkway — are 18 species of sharks and stingrays. You may just spot Ray Charles, the 400-pound roughtail stingray with a more than-6-foot wingspan.
Visitors to the 57,500-square-foot exhibit can test their luck with a touch tank, featuring white spotted bamboo and epaulette sharks on the new building’s rooftop deck, or come nose-to-nose with a zebra shark in that all-enveloping, 40-foot-long tunnel, which holds a recreated coral reef. Tablets and other interactive elements explain the unique characteristics of sharks and the dangers they face both locally and around the world, namely “finning”: Once fishermen remove their fins for such delicacies as shark-fin soup, the fish can no longer swim.
One of the first to get a peek into the tanks was Coney Island native Rosario Dawson, at the aquarium for a preview. “I used to want to be a marine biologist, then I became an actor,” she tells The Post. “Maybe one day I’ll play one.”
The actress is particularly interested in the ecological efforts of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the organization that manages the aquarium as well as the Bronx and Central Park zoos.
“Those plastic bags and straws all go into the ocean,” she says, “and that has a ripple effect that eventually comes back to bite us, more likely than a shark will.”
Those eager to take home a memento or two will find $48 plush sharks and $7 shark-tooth necklaces in the gift shop. Or grab a bite while you’re there: Dohlin suggests the sustainably sourced $14 crab roll at the aquarium’s Oceanside Grill.