National Aquarium of Baltimore

Jumping jellyfish! Leaping lizards! Diving dolphins! Don’t hide your enthusiasm for Baltimore’s National Aquarium! Over 1.6 million visitors per year sure don’t!

Opened in 1981, the National Aquarium is world-famous and undoubtedly Maryland’s leading tourist attraction. Whether you’re an educator, a student or simply a visitor wanting to look at the magnificent exhibits, the National Aquarium in the Inner Harbor has a lot to offer.

The mission of the National Aquarium is to “provide transforming experiences that encourage people to enjoy, respect, and protect the aquatic world.” And that is precisely what it does. View a life-size model of a Humpback Whale, see the concepts of surviving through adaptation come to life, visit a coral reef, and learn what jellies are telling us about the health of our oceans.

Housing more than 16,000 creatures, the National Aquarium exhibits a variety of species in their naturalistic habitats. You’ll find animals such as stingrays, sharks, sea turtles, bullfrogs, phytoplankton, monkeys, sloths, iguanas, puffins and thousands more. You can also catch an up-close view of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins as they leap and tumble with the National Aquarium trainers in the live-action Dolphin Show, “Our Ocean Planet.”

For more information, check out their web-site: (http://www.aqua.org/)