A Day At Discovery Cove

[reefiness]

I was at discovery cove in Orlando Florida yesterday for the first time. I was looking forward to going for such a long time and thought it would be a great experience. I got their early in the morning and everything was going well as we started out with an 8:50 appointment at the dolphin lagoon for our dolphin interaction. So this went over very well and i enjoyed it a lot, then next stop was the "coral reef". I get there and it was a rather large pool with several islands in the middle of it which broke the pool up into several main canals in the tank where we were able to dive to a depth of about 12-15ft before hitting the ground. So as for the content of the pool, i was not very impressed, they had a large variety of livestock but didn't seem to care much for the health of the fish. The tangs in particular were very unhealthy. Through out the whole tank i must have seen about 100 purple tangs with about 95% of them being infected with either HLLE, fin rot, or both. And another species which stuck out as being very sick was the sailfin tangs they had. I noticed most of them being the red sea sailfins and i saw about 75 of these sometimes swimming in groups of about 12, 100% of these were infected with HLLE and many also with fin rot. Along with this i noticed 1 Moorish idol in the beginning of the day which was hanging out in at the bottom of the tank at about 8ft and was hiding. he had no fins and looked very unhealthy.
So i went up to one of the workers who cared for the livestock and seemed the most educated and asked what they do to treat the diseases in the tanks and she says "when ever we have a species that is sick, we will take them into a tank in the back and cure for them." so i said that i saw a lot of purple and sailfin tangs in the tank which had very bad cases of HLLE. And the response i got disgusted me, she said, " those fish are more prone to getting infected with HLLE and we cant care for that many at one time."
In addition to this, the coral reef had zero coral, and it was all artificial which also disappointed me, And i keep going on about this, but i'm on vacation and don't want to spend much more time talking about this at least until i get back home. So, if you have any other question you would like to know about how i felt about this or anything, ill check back when i get back home and let everyone know and possibly talk a little more about the negatives i found in the park.

 

[santiago]

i have been there too and also noticed that their purple tangs, sailfin tangs, and moorish idols were also in bad shape, i asked the trainer that was our guide about that and he told us that they try and help the fish and that if they keep having problems with that kind of fish that they will discontinue getting that fish. i personally wouldnt expect them to have live coral, it would be an injustice to the corals

because that would mean that those corals would have to deal with little kids wanting to touch them, and i believe the trainer said that there is a total of 3 million gallons of water in the park, swimming in the ocean with corals and swimming in a 3 million gallon tank, minus all of the other pools, ther is a big difference. overall i thought that the park was a very nice park, especially since they only let in a 1,000 guest a day, did you meet calypso the trained shark, did you do trainer for a day?

 

[mkzimms]

my girl and i really wanted to go while we were down there... just couldn't swing it with the cash situation. we were very dissapointed with sea world though. we figured sea world would have an amazing reef, this is what we got...

i dont know who the people in the picture are, but they were AMAZED by the one rock of GSP's... i clearly was not.

 

[coral keeper]

Originally Posted by mkzimms
http:///forum/post/2674121
my girl and i really wanted to go while we were down there... just couldn't swing it with the cash situation. we were very dissapointed with sea world though. we figured sea world would have an amazing reef, this is what we got...

i dont know who the people in the picture are, but they were AMAZED by the one rock of GSP's... i clearly was not.
sorry lol, but I can't just stop laughing! ROLFLMAO!

 

[mkzimms]

it would be ridiculously funny if it weren't true

the highlight of the sea world trip was looking at the seahorse tank and having my girlfriend talking about how much better our seahorse tank is with in earshot of the staff.

 

[reefiness]

i actually didn't do the trainer of the day program at discovery cove and didn't meet the trained shark.
And about the corals i agree that the corals would be in a bad environment in there but i don't understand why they advertise there being coral in the tank on their website if there really is no coral in the tank.
http://www.discoverycove.com/enjoy.aspx
if you use that link and under the bird aviary you use the "click here" you get a full list of what they claim to have in their park and i was going through those and seeing what they really had and i found that about half of them were not there and that they also try to double up on some of the species by using different names for the fish to try to get a larger looking list. Also if you go to the bottom of that list you will find the names of a few corals which they say are in the tank which were not.

 

[santiago]

you were right, they should fix that, i feel like complaining now. what did you like about the park?

 

[stdreb27]

lol, I didn't actually see them say they have corals. Just inverts. And in their coral tank they have a giant list of fish that aren't really reef safe... O well, what can you expect. I didn't know that blennies and gobies were barracudas...

 

[xdfireguy]

Discovery Cove was a big disapointment for us too. I should have expected the "coral reef" to be a concrete jungle. The best part of DC was when they brought the two-toed sloth out and the aviary.
SeaWord Orlando had a much better aquarium setup (with live coral) under the log plume type ride. They had a much better display there than in the shark exibit. The one photographed above was a joke! The mural on the canopy looks better than the tank.

 

[kikithemermaid]

I went there when I was 11. I've been aspiring to work there ever since. Oh no.

I don't remember any aquariums for some reason.