Grown-up sleepover
Adult Aquarium Overnight features drink, dinner options
You asked, and the ABQ BioPark Aquarium listened.
It will host its first Adult Aquarium Overnight on March 1.
“Other aquariums throughout the U.S. are starting to do them, and it’s something we’ve often had a request for at the regular ones, ’cause we usually have, I would say, about 10 percent of the people that come to our regular aquarium overnights are couples or friends — no kids, I guess I should say,” said Pamela Dupzyk, education coordinator for the BioPark Aquarium and Botanic Garden. “So we thought, let’s give it a try and see how it will go.”
Alcohol will be available for purchase at this event, for ages 21 and older. The Shark Reef Cafe will have full dinner options, and there will be plenty of activities inside the aquarium.
“We’re going to do a station on fish anatomy where we’re going to do an actual fish dissection and look at what does it look like inside a fish and makes a fish a fish. And what are gills? And how do those work? And what does a scale look like under a microscope? So some really cool kind of in-depth fish stuff, and then we have a fun thing; we’ll be doing a ‘Sex and the Sea Jeopardy’ activity so they’re all questions of mating rituals of animals and stuff for Jeopardy games that will be going on.”
A touch pool featuring invertebrates, including sea stars, hermit crabs and sea urchins, will be open. There also will be some stations with ocean experiments.
“One is a kind of fun one with ‘What’s Blubber?’ So you’ll get to stick your hand and hold a bunch of basically shortening and then stick it in ice and see how that insulates,” Dupzyk said. “We’re trying to make kind of more fun, but sometimes a little funky activities. We’ll be talking, too, about sustainable seafood, because that’s the perfect group of people to be talking about how to purchase seafood responsibly and what does that mean and why is that important. We’ll have our mangrove touch area too, which has rays and sharks. We have a couple different types. We have a bamboo shark and some stingrays in there.”
There will be music and bar-type trivia games with an ocean theme . A movie will be shown before guests retire for the night. Guests can bring sleeping bags and cots. In the morning, attendees will be given a behind-the-scenes tour of the aquarium.