Touch Tank Exploration
Our touch tanks are teaming with live shells, including lightning whelks, tulip snails, and conchs, plus sea stars, horseshoe crabs, sea urchins, hermit crabs, oysters, and more. Plus, our aquarium displays will introduce you to some of the more unusual fish in Tarpon Bay and the surrounding waters, including puffers, filefish, pipefish and sea horses!
This is an awesome program whether you get your hands wet or just stand back, learn, and enjoy. Enjoy it as a single activity (~ ½ hour) or as part of the Nature and Sea Life Cruise. Great for a rainy day, too.
DID YOU KNOW?
With the head of a horse, the tail of a monkey, and the pouch of a kangaroo, the sea horse is one of the most unusual fish in Tarpon Bay. Its body has prickly, spiny plates instead of scales and is well-camouflaged to blend in with its surroundings. Sea horses spend most of their time clinging to seagrasses and feeding on tiny crustaceans like shrimp and isopods. Perhaps even more unusual is the fact that male sea horses give birth, not females. The female injects her eggs into the male in a slotted pouch below his stomach. He fertilizes the eggs, and more than 200 baby sea horses hatch a week later. |
Tarpon Bay Explorers is the licensed concessionaire of the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge, providing recreational and educational opportunities to the public under contract with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
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