Coral World Location: Charlotte Amalie - St. Thomas Island, United States Virgin Islands Day 21 by Wayne & Karen Brown

Coral World is a an aquarium and marine park that has many of the corals and fish that live in the waters around the Virgin Islands. This will give as a chance to see some of the fish and other animals that we didn't see, and some we did, during our expedition.

From the dock we take an open air taxi on a 20 minute ride up and down the narrow roads to the east end of St. Thomas. We are going to Coki Beach, where Coral World is located. Coral World is on a rocky point that sticks out into the Caribbean Sea. Besides having lots of aquariums Coral World has something special that most aquariums don't have, an underwater observatory. The underwater observatory is a tower the sits on the sea floor about three stories underwater and about 100 feet from the shore.

When we arrive at Coral World we head right to the underwater observatory. We enter the observatory through its domed roof after walking across a bridge from shore. We descend down the tower on a spiral staircase. Dim blue light filters in through large windows on the sides of the tower. Unfortunately the water is a little murky so, as we look out the windows, the underwater visibility is not very good. We can only see about 30 feet into the water away from the tower. The coral reef here is not very exciting. Many of the corals are dead. We see some parrotfish and an occasional trumpetfish cruising past the windows. We saw a lot more fish and pretty corals on our scuba diving and snorkeling during the expedition. We guess that if people were not divers what they would see here would be more exciting for them because they would not know how exciting it can really be underwater.

As we were walking to the observatory we saw a sign with times for a shark feeding at Shark Shallows. We don't want to miss that so we hurry from the underwater observatory to look for Shark Shallows. We find Shark Shallows just in time for the shark feeding. Dressed in a wet suit an aquarist is standing next to a shallow pool with three sharks swimming around in it. He has a bucket of cut up pieces of squid. He leans over the pool and dangles some of the squid over the water. The sharks know that it is feeding time. They have all bunched up at the end of the pool near the food. These sharks are all young nurse sharks 2-3 feet long. (We dove with nurse sharks on Day 3 and Day 8.)

After the sharks are fed all the squid the aquarist reaches into the water and grabs one of the sharks! The shark wiggles in the aquarist's hands as he shows everyone this 2 1/2 foot long nurse shark. He points out the two feelers sticking out into front of the shark's mouth. These are called "barbels" (Bar-bells). Nurse sharks use their barbels to help them find their food. They wiggle their barbels in the sand to locate crabs and worms that may be hiding in the sand.

Before he puts the shark back in the water the aquarist lets our student explorers, Michael, Nathan, and Thomas, pet the shark to feel its sandpaper-like rough skin.

Now that the shark feeding is over we can take some time and walk through some of the aquariums here and look for animals that we did not find underwater during our expedition. There are many tanks with different sizes and kinds of colorful tropical reef fish. Some fish we have seen already and some we have not. There is one fish here that we had hoped to see during the expedition. Unfortunately it is small and is usually well camouflaged on the reef. It is a seahorse!

The seahorse we see in the exhibit tank is about 5 inches tall. It is called a longsnout seahorse because of its long mouth. A seahorse is a fish, but it is not like any other fish you will ever see. A seahorse is like a bunch of animals all rolled into one! The seahorse has a head like a horse; a long skinny mouth like an anteater; eyes like a lizard that can look two different ways at the same time; a hard outside skeleton, like an insect, called an "exoskeleton"; and a long flexible tail like monkey!

The strangest thing of all about the seahorse is that a male seahorse has a pouch on his front like a kangaroo. When the mother seahorse lays her eggs she lays her eggs in the pouch of the father seahorse. So, it's the father seahorse that gets pregnant and has the babies underwater!

We have been walking around Coral World for almost three hours! There are still more things we could see, but we need to return to Yorktown Clipper.

As we walk toward the exit we spot an another animal we have not seen here before. It is a large iguana, about 3 feet long! It is sitting on a wall soaking up the warm sun. We saw lots of iguanas on last year's expedition in Central America (From the Jungle to the Sea Expedition). Even though iguanas live in the Virgin Islands there are probably not as many living here and they are also well camouflaged. Even though iguanas are protected in the Virgin Islands some people like to eat them. They call them "island chickens", because they say iguanas taste like chicken! This iguana does not seem to be scared of us. It is probably used to seeing people here and the people at Coral World probably feed it!

We leave Coral World and another open air taxi takes us back to Yorktown. It is now time for us to pack up all of our clothes and equipment because tomorrow our expedition ends and we all fly back home.

Before we leave we will interview our student explorers and have them tell you what they thought about our expedition. We will ask them what they liked and didn't like and what their favorites things were.

Join us tomorrow for our interviews with our student explorers.

Best Fishes,
Wayne & Karen

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Coral World is place to see many of the underwater animals that live around the Virgin Islands.

We went down about three stories into this underwater observation tower to see the coral reef without getting wet!

You can see the two barbels sticking out in front of the nurse shark's mouth.

This longsnout seahorse (about 5 inches long) has his tail wrapped around a piece of fire coral.