Your Aquarium Journey
Your Aquarium Journey
The Sound and Beyond
Hokin Family Sound Voyage galleries
Rivers to the Sound
Depths of the Sound
The Ocean Beyond the Sound
Jellyfish Encounter
Sea Turtles

Hokin Family Sound Voyage Galleries

Salt Marsh

Then cross over the bridge above the seals into the Hokin Family Sound Voyage galleries – your trip through Long Island Sound.

You’ll enter at the shallow Salt Marsh and proceed deeper and deeper through 20 marine environments to the deep ocean waters of the Sound and the ocean beyond. These exhibits offer a realistic look at each successive level of various habitats found in the Sound.

Entering the salt marsh area, visitors find five tanks filled with life from this “fragile nursery of the sea.” Marine life that thrives in the sheltered marshes includes fiddler crabs, diamondback terrapins, seahorses and pipefish, Atlantic silversides, mummichogs, shore shrimp and a flatfish called hogchokers.

Visitors also learn about the Eastern oyster, which flourishes in the Norwalk area because of the near-perfect oyster conditions: a clean sandy bottom, protection from heavy wave action by the Norwalk Islands, and removal of loose sediment by river currents. Historically, the largest oystering operations on the East Coast have been based on the Chesapeake Bay and in Norwalk.