Aquatic Zoos - Captive Animals Protection Society

Using the search engines available on the British Library computers for the three databases, entries that
contained the names of the 31 public aquaria investigated were sought. In order to find any possible
scientific article mentioning the public aquaria in any capacity (even if the article was not a study
undertaken in the aquarium or by the aquarium researchers, but just a reference to it) different
combinations of names, new or old versions, hyphenated or not, or the name of the town where the
public aquarium is located together with the word ‘aquarium’, were used through the searching process
involving all the entry fields. As a result of using this method it was hoped that no article mentioning any
of the UK public aquaria investigated would ‘slip the net’.
From the millions of article entries that were sought covering a period of 25 years only seven references
involving the public aquaria investigated were found. These references represent 23% of the UK public
aquaria. Taking into account the time scope of the databases and the size of the aquaria sample, this
means that the UK public aquarium industry as a whole publish an average of one scientific article every
30 years. No entries since 2002 were found, and the 2002 entry corresponded to an acknowledgement
of one researcher thanking one of the public aquarium for having provided him with some anemones for
some stress-inducing experimentation (which raises the whole different issue of ethically acceptable
research). The next entry was 1999, so in total only one article mentioning half the UK public aquarium
population in the last four years.
In order to check that the databases were covering all articles involving aquaria, a search for the
keywords ‘aquaria’ or ‘aquarium’ was performed. The result showed 5,187 full articles from ESTAR, and
18,708 from Zoological Records and Biological Abstracts together. Using the words ‘fish’, for instance,
produced 66,932 entries for ESTAR and 374,105 entries for the other two databases. Therefore, the
databases do cover fish and aquarium research, and nonetheless only seven entries were found for the
public aquaria studied.
These results clearly show that scientific research is not, by any means, an integral part of the UK public
aquaria work, despite some public aquaria claiming otherwise. Indeed, two or three public aquaria seem
to be involved, according to their own literature, with some Universities in some scientific research, but
either this is a fairly recent development that has not produced many scientific papers yet, or this is not
‘scientific’ research per se because it is not providing scientific papers available to the scientific
community (perhaps only internal ‘husbandry’ papers for the trade, which could be found in any
profession without any claim that scientific research is in the making).
Perhaps the ‘research’ claim comes from the fact that some students may have used public aquaria as
the site of any of their pre-graduate dissertations/assignments –or similar ‘training’ activities– which do
not produce scientific articles or theses. If that is the case maybe an ‘education’ claim could be more
appropriate, although providing a site for someone to develop their own project hardly qualifies as
‘teaching’. Or perhaps the public aquaria attempts –successful or not– to breed, feed or transport
aquarium stock are interpreted as scientific research, although this would be as misleading as describing
rare-breed pet breeders or professional gardeners as scientists. Most likely, though, is that public
aquaria, as any other zoological collection, are responding to the conservation/education/research
criteria imposed by the European zoo regulations, as well as executing PR and marketing strategies first
developed by the World Zoo Organisation (WZO) a few years ago through its International Zoo
Marketing Conferences.
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