NMFRI Gdynia Aquarium

Akwarium Gdyńskie

Tambaqui

Colossoma macropomum

Tambaqui are the largest representative of the piranhas’ family. It lives in overgrown rivers and streams of the Amazon basin. Its characteristic feature are massive teeth. Due to its size, it needs a large aquarium, as it can sometimes attack smaller fish. It is a valued edible fish.

Pacu resembles piranha in shape and has one more thing in common with them. Both of these species fell victim to a bloody rumor that turns out to be quite innocent. In 2003, a lost representative of pacu was observed in the waters of the Baltic Sea. This initiated a considerable panic among tourists. The media reported that this fish likes in male testicles. This is absolutely not true! Pacu feeds on nuts and fruit that fall from the trees.

2017-07-27
Slender seahorse

Hippocampus reidi

Order: Syngnathiformes | Family: Syngnathidae

It is a coastal seahorse species, which inhabits coral reefs, areas overgrown with seagrass and seaweed, river mouths, and mangroves, from North Carolina in the United States, through the whole Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to Southern Brazil. The young prefer shallow waters, whereas adults can live in depths up to 55 meters. The average lifespan is 2,5 years and its maximum length is 17,5 cm. They are predators and often wait completely still for prey rather than actively chasing for it. Their diet consists of crustaceans, such as shrimp, copepods, gammarids, but also ostracods and nematodes. The juveniles mainly eat insects and the eggs of mollusks and crustaceans. They are poor swimmers, due to their body structure, but they make up for that with their prehensile tails, which can grab onto many different objects. They are active during the day, but they stop swimming when night comes and clatch onto corals with their tails and stay there until sunrise. They most often lead solitary lives, but couples are not a rarity, they are also seen in groups of more than two individuals. When it comes to the coloration, it varies from black to yellow, red, orange and brown, with many white spots, mainly on the tail. An interesting aspect is how quickly they can change coloration to blend in with their surroundings.

Similarly to a chameleon, their eyes move independently, so one eye can look down, while the other looks forward.

As a monogamous species, they couple up for life. During courtship, the male impresses the female with quick color changes and swimming displays. Males take care of the eggs, and they have a special pouch into which the female lays eggs, which are subsequently fertilized by the males. Young seahorses hatch after two weeks. These juveniles are sustenance for large pelagic fish, such as snappers or tunas. The Gdynia Aquarium is proud to have been able to reproduce these seahorses.

IUCN Red List

This is a ‘near threatened’ species. The development of coasts has caused the loss and degradation of their natural habitats, especially mangroves. However, the biggest threat is through bycatching during artisanal and industrial fishing. This species is utilized in regional medicine, the production of jewelry, charms, and amulets, whereas living organisms are sold as aquarium fish.

2017-07-27
Acropora sp.

2017-07-26
Baltic Museums: Love IT! (2017-2020)

The main objective of the project is to develop new IT-enabled tourism products for natural and cultural heritage tourist destinations in the SBR in form of multilingual BYOD-guided tours providing an enhanced visitor experience during and after the visit thanks to gamification, multimedia content, and augmented reality techniques.
The guides will provide informational and educational content to visitor’s lacking access to other types of guides due to high-season crowd or insufficient language skills, they are especially suitable for lone and cross-border travelers.
The common gamification service will make the visitors’ experience more involving, and will extend it out of a single visit fostering long-term relationship. A new region-wide brand (working name: South Baltic Spotter) will be introduced to make the new gamified products better recognizable and marketable, not only making the tourist offer of the SBR more visible and coherent to visitors but also forming a sustainable cross-border network of tourist destinations using the brand, open and prepared for new members joining.
The user-centric design process of the new products will involve organisation of special events during the off-season that will additionally serve promotional purposes and should bring in a new kind of visitors (IT fans) to the destinations. Both the gamified tourism products offered under a region-wide brand and the way the end-users are involved in design of tourism products are novelty in the SBR. The project outputs will directly benefit visitors to natural and cultural heritage sites in the SBR (by enhancing the tourism supply), managers of natural and cultural heritage sites (by providing solutions ready to implement and knowledge on how to do it), and indirectly managers of tourist agencies (with a new brand fostering the interest of tourists). The project will vastly contribute to increasing popularity of natural and cultural heritage sites of the SBR as tourism destinations.

Why are we doing this

The natural and cultural heritage assets of the SBR serve as a base for significant tourism services, which are also available in low season and in bad weather, and play a considerable educational role. There is still a large potential for the improvement of their use. The three main challenges are: to improve the quality experienced by the visitors, especially during the high season when the sites are cramped, and for those having language barriers; to attract new visitor target groups, especially in the low season; to make the tourism offer of the SBR destinations more coherent and recognizable. The opportunities are pointed to by the worldwide opinion-leading “NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Museum Edition”, three of them were selected that have not yet been adequately exploited in this regard in the SBR: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD, letting visitors use their own smartphones for a guided tour), Gamification (“the use of game-design and game psychology in non-game settings to engage the target audience and motivate specific behaviors”) and (Visitor) Data Analytics (which provides new information for management). There is a synergy in simultaneous implementation of these, as BYOD lets gamification to span out of specific location and country, and provides a crucial context for data analysis, i.e. identification of the same visitor in various locations. Another challenge is to prepare the hosting institutions’ personnel (mentally and in terms of technical knowledge and skills, also mentioned in the Horizon Report) and technical environment, necessary for these innovative developments to succeed. On the other hand, it creates an additional opportunity: letting the relevant products to be co-developed by users themselves in a hackathon events, which could help bring in a new type of visitors (IT enthusiasts) in the off-season. Introducing the new products under a common regional brand creates an opportunity to increase visitors’ awareness and build long-term relationship.
The chosen approach ensures the high user-perceived quality of the products (thanks to involvement of end-users on several stages of their development), provides cost advantages (outputs used by many institutions), makes efficient use of the project partners’ competencies (by knowledge sharing), ensures transferability of the results to other destinations (sharing of both know-how and solutions).

2017-07-26
Summer Cinema

During summer, we invite our guests to the screenings of nature films, which take place daily from 1 July to 31 August, at full hours from 11:00 to 18:00, in the Cinema Room, on the ground floor of the Gdynia Aquarium. It is not necessary to book entries. Entry is in the price of the admission ticket to the Aquarium. Number of seats limited.

2017-07-26
Summer Science Meetings

In the months of July and August, all parents with children visiting the Gdynia Aquarium will have the opportunity to participate in Summer Science Meetings. Laboratory classes are now available also for our individual quests They take place in the Biological Laboratory and are included in the price of the entrance ticket. They take place on working days (except 14.08) at 11.00, 12.00 and 13.00. These classes last about 30 minutes, the topics are changed every day and no reservation is required.

2017-07-26