My vote for most interesting creature . . .

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We went to Balboa Park today and slammed through the Science museum in under two hours. It’s not the Exploratorium and ’nuff said about that. Yesterday we had a deal more fun at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. My favorite “new” critter (as in, an animal I’ve never seen before in an aquarium) was this guy.

bathynomus_giganteus1

My first reaction was (and, honest, my brain adopted a real Bill-and-Ted mode with this thought), “Whoa, dude, giant underwater pill bug!” And I was right. This is the giant marine isopod, which can grow to nearly four pounds and thirty inches in length. They are scavengers who can live for many weeks without food, and when they do find food, they promptly eat themselves into a coma.

Jake was not surprised, but then, Jake has an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly everything thanks to the dovetailed mentoring of Wikipedia, Cracked, and TV Tropes. In this case, Cracked had sown our son’s fertile mind with information. (Cool article. Read it.)

We saw nudibranchs, too, but I suspect I might have seen them before at the Steinhart Aquarium, or perhaps the aquarium in Vancouver. We took the Behind the Scenes tour as well, and the highlight of that was the archerfish: