Day 61 Denham
We got up pretty late today and we drove to the Ocean Park Aquarium. The tour started with a southern calamari squid. Southern calamari squid is most likely the squid you eat when having calamari. It was pretty cool and apparently, they only live a year. The next tank we went to was the venomous tank. It was full of lionfish and pufferfish and the guide even touched one of the lionfish on a part where it doesn’t have spines. After that, we went to a tank full of parrotfish and clownfish with a lot of anemones. We then went to a tank with a big eel in it that apparently could bite your finger off if it wanted to. We then went to the stonefish tank. They were so hard to see, and I didn’t even know which rocks were the stonefish until he dropped a fish in and one of them ate it. They were super camouflaged, and they don’t eat until the fish is directly above their mouth. They also lunge and swallow the fish in 0.015 seconds which is faster than it takes you to blink. At first, the fish know they are there but when they don’t move for days, the fish forget they aren’t rocks and get eaten by them. We then went into a tank full of different fish. There were some small stingrays in there and a lot of fish. There was some really big flathead on the rocks and in the sand and they even had 2 tiny nervous sharks in there. When they were feeding the fish, one of the pieces of blue bait landed next to a flathead and the fish were too scared to eat it. Some swam close to it and quickly swam away, and one finally picked up the courage to swallow it and quickly run away. They were doing this because the flathead has poisonous spines on their back. Apparently, the anti-venom is on their bellies though so if you get stung by one, just rub its belly on the wound. The next tank was outside, and it had some gigantic stingrays in it and lots of snapper. There was even a small grouper in there, and its mouth opened so wide to eat the fish. The next tank was definitely the best one. It was outside and more like a lake with a bridge going through it to a shelter in the middle. It was the shark tank and the guide pulled out a massive fish to feed them with. It looked like the scraps from a fishing shop as its head and meat above and below the spine was there. He had two strings attached to its eyes so he could lower it into the water safely. He dangled it in there for a little bit and them a massive lemon shark came and bit the entire tail. It tried to get the whole thing, except that fish was the fish for the whole day so he tried to fight it for the fish. It was pulling against him and even did a deathroll once to snap the meat off. It was splashing water everywhere and the splashing attracted their juvenile tiger shark. It tried to eat a little bit but was pushed away by the massive lemon shark. Eventually, the lemon shark took off a really big chunk of the fish’s tail and swam away. The tiger shark then came in and took a bit as well. After the shark tank, we went to another tank that had a lot of barramundi and small grouper in it which was cool to see them fed. After the aquarium, we went to a lookout point over the ocean. We saw lots of stingrays and shovelnose rays and we even saw a lemon shark swim into the shallows and back into deeper water. We then went back to the caravan and stayed there until dinner, where we drove to the beach and had dinner on a picnic table overlooking the beach.

The big lemon shark halfway through a deathroll

A sandbar shark coming in to eat the fish. Sandbar sharks have a super tall dorsal fin

The tiger shark swimming towards the fish

Two lionfish just on the surface of the water

The lookout point where we saw rays and sharks
