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

Rivers to the Sound

Leaving the salt marsh, visitors enter a river-woodlands habitat stocked with salmon and sturgeon, which share a special ability: they migrate as adults from the salty ocean up freshwater rivers to spawn. (Going from sea water to freshwater would kill most species of fish.)

Also migrating from salt to fresh water are eels in a special exhibit that looks like an urban culvert.

Displays in this gallery explain the Long Island Sound watershed, which encompasses all the rivers and streams, large and small, that directly and indirectly empty into the Sound. Here, visitors see that the Sound’s watershed reaches all the way to Canada (where the Connecticut River starts) and discover that you don’t need to live right on the Sound to affect the health of the Sound.

On display are reptiles that live in watershed and woodland habitats: snakes and turtles, even a big snapping turtle named Franklin.

This woodlands habitat also features Belle and Lou, two playful North American river otters. The otters – among the visitor favorites – splash in a waterfall, frolic in 1,200- and 2,800-gallon pools, and explore their simulated woodlands shoreline.