I have an embarrassing admission to make: I love fish, I love aquariums, I grew up in the Washington area, and I had never been to the National Aquarium in D.C. Until today. In my defense, the National Aquarium is basically one big room in the basement of the Commerce department, it doesn’t have a very good reputation, and it is dwarfed by the ginormous, beautiful National Aquarium in Baltimore. But I happened to have a pass for free admission that expired tomorrow, so this afternoon I finally stopped in.

First, let’s dispense with the basement issue. What are you going to do with natural light in an aquarium, anyway? (Ok, the Baltimore aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium do lovely things, I know, I know. But this aquarium gets by without it. So there.) It’s the nation’s oldest aquarium – established in 1873 in Woods Hole, it bounced around a bit over the years, then settled down in the 1930s, after the Commerce building was built. It got a much-needed renovation in the last few years.

Ok, there are no adorable marine mammals. But a lot of people would argue that you shouldn’t have them in captivity anyway. Instead, this aquarium has baby alligators on loan from an alligator farm; when they get too big for the space, they’re shipped back to Florida and end up in the wild, as part of the conservation efforts for the American alligator. Here’s their spiffy Everglades-style habitat:

And let me introduce my new alligator friend:

I like his goofy grin.

Most of the exhibits were about U.S. waters, with a particular focus on the National Marine Sanctuaries – that’s the connection to the building, you know, NOAA and everything is under the Department of Commerce. But they also had a corner about the Amazon, with this awesome snake.

I’ve been told you should never go walking in the rainforest with a herpetologist, because they will point out things like this all the time, when you might have been happier if you’d stayed ignorant. The emerald tree boa mostly eats birds. It gets its teeth into a bird, squeezes it to death, then pokes around until it finds the head (the proper end to start swallowing from).

This tank represents life in Brazil’s Rio Negro. It is appearing in this blog post because it is gratuitously pretty. Also, those are real water plants, not plastic. So that’s nice.

There, wasn’t that pretty?

This gray tree frog lives in North American bogs. Well, not *this* one. This one lives in a tank.

It’s a nice little aquarium. It’s not super flashy and it sticks to the smaller animals, but they’re well presented, and I thought the emphasis on U.S. protected waters was a clever way to focus a small collection. (And then there’s the random Amazon section, but hey, everybody loves the Amazon.)

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