Life Support Tech keeps Your Favorite Aquarium Up and Running
CHATTANOOGA, TN – This week on Tech Byte we were invited to look at the Tech behind the life support systems (LSS) at the Tennessee Aquarium. It’s an interesting view that not everyone gets to see and it’s way more complex than you might think.
Maintenance Supervisor Les Lawrence tells us how they manage to keep all the creatures alive in a massive facility. “Each one is unique in its own way, determining which species of fish is in there. Temperature of the water. Based on what part of the world that fish is from. It’s either from Soddy Lake or from Saudi Arabia,” says Lawrence. “Freshwater, saltwater, different types of salinity in the water. You know, the obviously the Nile or the Amazon is going to be different than the Tennessee River compared to, you know, obviously, the Pacific Ocean. So each tank is, different in that aspect. Size, location in the Earth.”
The aquarium is one of the larger fish tanks in the world holding 1.4 million gallons of water and recirculating 25 million gallons a day! To be honest, when the aquarium was built back in high school we always assumed they just pumped the water from the Tennessee River in but that’s not at all the case.
There is plenty of filtration, some sand filters like you might see in your pool but according to Les, they keep the tanks clean and inhabitable in their own way. “we’re unique in that we use ozone, so it’s O3 instead of O2 like oxygen. Same thing that’s around there. Ozone. Inject that into our tanks. It’s a really good oxidizer. It breaks down organic matter, old food. Fish waste,” says Lawrence. “We use UV sterilizers where we throw water through a tube that, has UV light. Then you roll into a bio tower, and you really trickle watered down from the top through a bunch of media, picks up different algae and bacteria’s that are good for the water. And then, you know, it’s obviously going back to the system.”
All the pipes are labeled and color coded for tours like ours. There is a crew that works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year of about 20 people that keep water flowing and filtered to all the inhabitants of the aquarium. For more information or to get tickets, visit tnaqua.org.
