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A company called the National Marine Aquarium, set up two years ago,
is seeking £20 million from private investors and public funds to
build a ‘world-class’ aquarium at Plymouth. The latest scheme to raise funds
for a major aquarium in Britain is ‘further along than any other likely
development’, according to its director, Geoffrey Potts of the Marine Biological
Association in Plymouth. David Attenborough, the naturalist and broadcaster,
and Crispin Tickell, warden of Green College, Oxford, have backed the scheme.

A major aquarium for Britain is not a new idea. According to Robert
Travers, director of Aqua2000, virtually every dockland redevelopment scheme
over the past decade has toyed with the idea. Travers’ company recently
failed to secure a dockland site at Liverpool, and is ‘still looking at
various sites in London’, including Docklands and Regent’s Park. The major
problem is ‘convincing the British business community to invest in something
that’s never been done here before’.

Potts remains optimistic that he will find the funds to build ‘a landmark
building, that will be something like the Sydney opera house for Plymouth’,
on a site overlooking the sea. The aquarium, containing 10 exhibits including
a reconstituted coral reef and a walk-through shark tank, would ‘educate
the public while entertaining them’. But Potts says it would be far more
than a building and a collection of animals and plants. He sees it as becoming
a ‘centre devoted to marine issues – an independent organisation with environmental
experts and volunteers, running courses, funding fellowships and campaigning
for the protection of the seas’.

It will ‘satisfy people’s environmental aspirations at all levels’,
and be enormously prestigious, he claims. ‘This country has the capacity
for six. Once one gets under way, people will see what they have been missing.’

Gordon Reid, curator-in-chief of Chester Zoo, thinks it is ‘a super
idea – nowhere in Britain or Europe approaches the spectacular set-ups that
exist in the US’. There, large, modern aquaria – with vast cylindrical or
tubular tanks that people can walk round or through as sharks and sea turtles
glide by – have proved very popular with the public. Notable examples in
Baltimore, Boston and Monterey in California each attract more than a million
visitors every year.

Plymouth is the best site for an aquarium within Europe, Potts argues,
because it is already the centre of excellence for marine science in Britain.
And a coastal site would allow ‘synergy with the sea, which gives it more
meaning than if it were stuck in the middle of the M25′.

Captive breeding schemes, along with research into the nutrition and
reproductive biology of the captives, can be vital for the conservation
of endangered fish and aquatic invertebrates, Potts says.

Reid of Chester Zoo, a fish specialist, says at the moment ‘captive
breeding of fish and aquatic invertebrates is very limited in Europe’.
He is now trying to coordinate and initiate schemes to save, for instance,
the endangered cichlid fishes found only in East African lakes. The zoo
has just become the first to breed the endangered Oman blind cave fish.

Although Reid is enthusiastic about the plan for a national aquarium,
he argues that captive breeding programmes should be a priority. Any new
venture should ‘not just tell the public about the world environment, but
ensure that the display itself is self-sustaining’. For instance, it is
now technically possible to establish living, growing coral reefs that do
not need to be topped up with animals from the wild. ‘These days,’ says
Darrell Siebert of the Natural History Museum in London, ‘it is difficult
to justify bringing in animals from the wild just to put on display.