Living Shores Aquarium Opens in New Hampshire

When your family travels take you to northern New Hampshire’s White Mountains this summer, you might not expect to find an aquarium and sea life center. But next to the popular Story Land theme park in Glen, the recently opened Living Shores Aquarium features 32,000 square feet of interactive tide pools, exhibits and immersive activities.

Large touch tanks replicate life in tidal pools, where children — and their parents — can watch up close and touch live sea creatures. In the Ray Touch Pool, four different species of rays glide through the water within reach; children can even feed them.

When visitors watch and touch four kinds of sharks, they learn these aquatic creatures are not all as scary as Jaws, and that sharks sometimes walk along the sea floor on their fins. Two pools contain invertebrates, one for larger and one for small creatures like shrimp, small crabs and feather duster worms.

Also in this pool are intriguing sea urchins, and children love to feel their flexible spines with their fingers. In the other tank are lobsters, crabs, hermit crabs, horseshoe crabs and large snails. In the freshwater Red Garra Touch Pool are Asian natives known as “nibble fish” because they will gently nibble at dead skin (they’re actually used in some spas for foot treatments).

Other exotic fish swim in aquarium tanks including colorful clownfish and blue tang from the Indo Pacific Reefs, as well as bright angelfish, butterflyfish and damselfish from the Caribbean and Western Atlantic Reef. A school of metallic silver moonyfish from the Pacific swim in formations so perfect they seem to be choreographed.

But for all the colorful and exotic fish, the romp of otters steals the show as they play hide-and-seek under grass mats, slide into the water, dive and play with toys. Kids also love the interactive experience of stepping through the double screen doors into the aviary, where brightly colored lorikeets swoop overhead and can be coaxed from their perches onto waiting fingers.