Honolulu Aquarium

The Honolulu Aquarium was quite small but unique in a few ways, for one thing it displays the Nautilus (a "living fossil"), last I heard it was the only aquarium to do so, quite a fascinating creature, also, the aquarium displays several rare or endangered creatures simply because Hawaii has a very high number of these. Of course, the creatures on display, being tropical, were also exotic, highly colored, and beautiful. :)

I think this was just leaving or returning from our trip, we were just outside our hotel anyway :)

Caleb at the outdoor tidal pool, he wanted to dip in and feel the fish, but that was not allowed :D

The sun was hot but thankfully umbrella's are often offered for shade. Derek and BaBa are watching the two Monk seals.

Monk seals are unique to Hawaii, and they are endangered, there are only aprox 1,200 left in the wild. One of the two here at the aquarium was brought in as an orphan with large scars on it's body. While we were at a beach in Poipu we got to see a wild seal lounging on the beach, it was fully cordoned off and seemed to be pretty comfy with the ppl milling around it :) There are large fines for disturbing the seals and turtles as they are quite endangered.
I used to think that numbers like 1000 were not that scary for a species, but was not thinking of the problem of the gene pool, it has to be quite big or inbreeding will finish the species off :(

Due to bad film (old) this is a terrible picture but I wanted to post it anyway because the trees were just so amazing, and we had fun playing around them. One tree had so many root thingys coming down Derek and I had to literally search through them to find the trunk in the center, it was not visible at all from the outside! The expanse of trunk/roots and the branches cover over head was tremendous! Could shade a whole herd of elephants I am sure! ;)