National Aquarium of New Zealand

The National Aquarium of New Zealand, formerly Napier Aquarium, is a public aquarium on Marine Parade in Napier, New Zealand. It was started in 1957 and moved to its present location in 1976. It is owned by Napier City Council. In addition to many fish species, exhibits include kiwi, tuatara, American alligator, turtles, little penguins and some lizards.

History

In 1957, members of Napier's Thirty Thousand Club and the Hawke's Bay Aquarium and Water Garden Society decided to create a public aquarium with tropical fish and unusual specimens of local fish in the basement of the War Memorial Hall that was being built on Marine Parade.

The aquarium moved to its current location on Marine Parade in 1976. In the first year of its life, it attracted 230,000 visitors at a time when the population of Napier was about 50,000. In its first 5 years of operation over 750,000 people visited.

The aquarium acquired from Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., in 1979, trading seahorses for them. In 2019 the 21 elderly piranhas remaining were euthanased, as new government rules no longer allowed them to be kept in the aquarium's tanks.

In 2002 the aquarium underwent a NZ$8 million extension and renovation which included the addition of a 1.5 million litre oceanarium with a 50m acrylic tunnel and the replacement of all the original tanks with newly constructed ones. It was renamed the National Aquarium of New Zealand.

Text imported from Wikipedia article "National Aquarium of New Zealand" and modified on April 4, 2022 according to the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license.