HALIFAX—A local group is floating the possibility of opening an aquarium in the Halifax area after making a splash this summer with their touch tank hut on the Dartmouth waterfront.

Magali Grégoire of the Back to the Sea Society, a registered charity that promotes ocean education, said the small blue hut near the ferry terminal has welcomed more than 7,000 visitors and hundreds of students and day camp participants this summer — including plenty of repeat visitors.

“We have people who tell us they’ve come six to eight times,” she said.

The touch tank is exactly what it sounds like: there are two large tanks on display where visitors can touch and handle a variety of small sea creatures, including sea stars, urchins, several types of crabs, sea anemones, snails, shellfish, and sand dollars.

Grégoire said being able to pick up and touch them lends a more interactive experience than reading about them in a book or watching about them in a documentary.

“When people actually get to see marine life up close, you just see a spark of curiosity in their eyes, and they ask a lot more questions than they would if they saw it on a screen,” she said.

The society operates on a catch-and-release philosophy, where the animals are caught locally at the beginning of the season and released back into the wild at the end of the season.

The touch tank began as a five-weekend experiment last year to see how popular it would be. Over those weekends they welcomed 1,800 visitors — an average of 180 a day.

Have Your Say

Now that Grégoire knows there’s enough demand for a touch tank hut, she said the society is looking into someday opening an aquarium in Dartmouth.

“Having a city that’s so close to the ocean and so connected in our culture, in our location, it just seems almost silly not to have an aquarium to showcase all the life that’s so close to home,” she said, adding she believes an aquarium would be a big draw for both tourists and locals.

“It’s really surprising the amount of people that grow up with the ocean as their backyard that don’t realize all the animals that we have in the ocean.”

Grégoire’s ultimate vision isn’t a massive, large-scale facility like Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada in Toronto, or the Vancouver Aquarium, which both boast thousands of specimens from hundreds of different species, both local and exotic.

Instead, she said this aquarium would be largely modelled after the more modestly-sized Ucluelet Aquarium on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

“We’re going to be looking at 40 to 50 aquarium exhibits, with a few of them being touch tanks,” she said.

“Only local marine life, so only things that would fit within a catch-and-release philosophy.”

She said they would like something at least two stories high, so they can have a dedicated programming space where they can bring classes and day camps.

In the fall, Grégoire said they will begin putting together a feasibility study to present to the city.

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Tony Mancini, a Dartmouth councillor, said in an interview that he likes the idea of an aquarium in the community, but he’s looking forward to seeing how feasible it is before taking any further steps.

“It’s not the first time an aquarium has come up to be considered in HRM,” he said.

“The concept of an aquarium sounds great, but what does that look like, where does the funding come from? There’s a lot of questions.”

He noted that Dartmouth has changed a lot over the past few years, and he believes an aquarium will help breathe new life into the area.

The touch tank hut closes for the season on Labour Day.

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