Visiting the National Aquarium in Baltimore: The Chesapeake Bay Inside and Out

Baltimore's Inner Harbor is a busy place — musicians playing, office workers on their lunch breaks, visitors photographing the ships. At its centre stands a glass-walled building: the National Aquarium.

Maryland connections

Despite its national name, the aquarium is full of links to Maryland.

• Its setting. On the edge of the harbour, it has some of Baltimore's best views of the Chesapeake Bay, and a walkway between its two buildings passes over the water — an attraction in itself. The bay outside is a reminder that these creatures are not confined to a museum.
• Living Seashore. In an interactive touch pool, grey stingrays and gold-speckled skates glide under children's hands. The exhibit is not specifically about the Chesapeake, but it shows local visitors the animals of the beach and the water beside it.
• Maryland: Mountains to the Sea. Divided into four sections, it follows the water cycle from an Allegheny stream to a tidal marsh, along a coastal beach and out to the continental shelf.

Conservation work

The National Aquarium is a conservation nonprofit that works to protect the Chesapeake watershed and restore natural areas that in turn protect and clean the water. It cleans up and revives tidal wetlands through habitat restoration projects.

The aquarium stresses that the bay matters beyond its wildlife habitats: it underpins the local economy, as home to two of the five major shipping ports in the North Atlantic and a source of seafood and of the swimming, fishing and boating that support local businesses — and keeping those benefits depends on caring for the bay.

The same world

The article's point is that the aquarium is not a separate world but a view of the one we live in, arranged to show how water runs through everything: how rain falling on a rainforest connects to water from the tap, and how a waterfall in Australia can resemble those at Great Falls.

Sources

• National Park Service, Chesapeake Bay, "Visiting the National Aquarium" (an abridged article). https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/visiting-the-national-aquarium.htm
• The photograph, credited to a Chesapeake Bay Program photographer, is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.