Hanging with the fishes

We went to the aquarium today. It was like that credit-card ad where the dad rolls out of the office on a Tuesday to take his kid to see the beluga whales, except this was a weekend so we didn't have to take a vacation day. And the wife and in-laws were along, so we barely had to deal with the kids. And we didn't pay. Hell, we didn't even drive.

Now we like aquariums, and this was a good one, nicely laid out and well-presented, but as we were wandering from one collection of gill-breathers to the next, something struck us.

You want make sure that nobody looks at a tank? Put fish in it.

That may sound odd, but it's the god's truth, even at an aquarium. If you have a tank with 10 things in it, and nine of them are fish, people are going to be magnetically drawn to that 10th thing. Generally doesn't matter what it is -- crab, turtle, jellyfish (come to think of it, they segregated the jellyfish, which is a pretty fine idea; that's why they're running aquariums and we're lying here in our underwear typing). But you get the idea: The non-fish rule the aquarium.

This aquarium had a few other kinds of critters, and they had their own displays and sometimes their own rooms. The penguins. The butterflies -- bugs, mind you, but they still seemed to wax the fish in the popularity contest. The river otters were total rock stars. You may as well take that weird-looking kid from "Twilight" and drop him off at the local mall and see what happens. That's what happens when you put some hell-for-leather river otters in the middle of a bunch of fish displays.

Not every all-fish tank was a loser with the crowds, but even then, most of the fishy stars were, well, non-fishy. The serial killers, like the sharks. The mass murderers, like the pirhanas. The freaks, like the sea horse that looks like seaweed or the catfish the size of a minivan. And the rays -- we don't know if they're fish or not, but even if they are, it doesn't make much difference. They might be fish, but they're not like fish. We're in the same general mammalian grouping as a marathon runner, but that's where the physiological similarities pretty much end.

The one honest-to-God fishlike fish that seemed to get the crowd fired up was the clown fish, and of course he doesn't count. He's Nemo. He's a movie star.

So we found ourselves drawn to the loneliest tanks in the building, the ones full of fish that weren't too big, weren't too colorful, weren't too exotic. No crowding, no pushy kids and, hey, maybe a technicolor shrimp or somesuch might pop out of a hole in a rock and liven things up.

Unable to escape the building without being routed through the gift shop, we waded into piles of merchandise showing everything but fish. One daughter got something with a penguin on it; the other, an alligator. In their own house, the fish are second-class citizens. They must feel like the PGA Tour players who think the people coming through the turnstiles are there to see them. Sorry, boys, they're not here to see golfers; they're here to see Tiger.

In the end, the fin-and-gill set didn't get much attention until the end of the day, when we went to dinner and somebody ordered fish and chips. Small consolation.