Description:

Set out below is a small selection of what the Oceanarium at Bournemouth has to offer.

The Dive Cage

Discover the new Interactive Dive Cage, which submerges visitors in a 270-degree continuous view of the ocean. Interactive touch screens bring visitors up close to sea creatures through a series of animated experiences, games and challenges. Visitors can pit their wits against a playful dolphin or test their knowledge of how a great white tracks its prey. It also features an amazing encounter with a blue whale that swallows the whole Cage, taking visitors on a journey through its digestive system. When the whale comes up for air, the Dive Cage is ejected through the blowhole and then it splashes down into the ocean.

Here are just a few amazing facts you can discover when using the Dive Cage.

• Manta rays usually grow to around 6.7 metres across and 1200 kilos, though they have been reported at 9.1 metres and 1400 kilos, making them one of the largest creatures in the ocean.

• Great White Sharks can detect one part of blood in one million parts of water and this sense is 10,000 times more sensitive than that of humans.

• Dolphins do not have vocal cords, but instead use six air sacs near the blow whole to vocalise. Each individual dolphin has its own signature whistle, used to identify individuals, with about 30 different sounds used for general communication.

• The tongue of a Blue Whale is the same size as an elephant (around 4 tonnes), 50 people could stand in its mouth.

                And here are a few of the more technical facts about the production

• If one person were to interact with all of the content in the Dive Cage, it would take almost 2 hours, with approximately 500 buttons being pressed in the process!

• The creatures' skin textures are made up of nearly 600 million pixels, that's the equivalent of taking a single picture with a 580 Mega Pixel camera!

• The virtual water is created in many stages; modelling, animation and rendering; lighting effects and colour correction and finally, compositing. To create just 10 seconds of virtual water took almost 1800 hours worth of computer time and a week of man hours!

• If you were to render (generate) all of the animated content found in the Dive Cage experience on your home computer, it would take an estimated 11,160 hours! That's 465 days.

The Amazon

The Amazon is the largest and most powerful river in the world. It's vast rainforest supports a diverse range of plant and animal life, with the river itself forming part of the massive Amazon Basin covering an area measuring 2.5 million square miles.

It is fed by over a thousand tributaries and accounts for a fifth of all the water that the world's rivers pour into the sea.

The source of the river is high up in the mountains of Peru with its mouth in Brazil, making its total length 4,500 miles (6,280 km), earning the title of the second longest river in the world behind the Nile.

The Amazon and its surrounding rainforests may hold up to 90% of all the world's animal and plant species and produces 10% of medicines used in this country.

Scientists estimate that it is the home of 250 species of mammals, 3,000 freshwater fish, 1,800 birds, 10,000 trees and 70,000 plants species.

There are so many different varieties of insects still being discovered that experts simply don't know how many there are - some believe it may run into hundreds of thousands.

The Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is actually made up of around 2,100 individual reefs and 800 island or coastal reefs.

Despite its enormous size - 2,000kms long and covering a total area of 350,000kms - the reef has actually been formed, over millions of years, from the skeletons of tiny marine organisms called coral polyps.

Related to sea anemones and jellyfish, these polyps secrete a hard, outer skeleton made from calcium as a defence against predators and as a means to anchor them.

When they die their skeletons remain behind. New polyps attach themselves to the old skeleton and the cycle starts again with each new generation building on the remains of the previous one.

Coral reefs have been described as the ‘rainforests of the deep' because of the incredible variety of life that they support. The Great Barrier Reef is made up of 400 species of coral and over 2,000 species of fish ranging in size from tiny cleaner wrasse to huge sharks.

Literally thousands of other creatures ranging from jellyfish to sea turtles, starfish to whales and shellfish to sea birds rely on the reef to support them.

The Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean Sea covers nearly a million square miles and borders three continents: South Europe, Western Asia and Northern Africa.

It is also one of the world's youngest seas - until approximately five million years ago the area was a hot desert dotted with shallow salty pools of water. All this changed when rising water levels in the Atlantic formed a gigantic waterfall across the Strait of Gibraltar filling the Mediterranean Sea to its current level.

Today the Med is connected to the Black Sea through the Dardanelles and the Strait of the Bosphorous, and (since 1869) the Red Sea through the man-made Suez Canal.

In addition there is:

•   Cove giftshop

•   Offshore Cafe

•   Educational visits

•   Groups and coach parties

•   Birthday parties

•   Private evening hire