SEA-WATER MYSTERY

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LX, Issue 11047, 22 February 1933, Page 3

SEA-WATER MYSTERY

f LIFE-GIVING'ELEMENT. One of the principal attractions at the Zoo is the aquarium, and Mr Boulenger, the Zoo expert, has just been revealing spme of its secrets (says' a Reuter message). The sea-water used in the aquarium comes from the Bay, of Biscay. Homecoming ships take it in as ballast, and discharge it at Tilbury into carriers that bring it up the Thames to near Westminster* These in turn transfer it into motor water-tanks in which it is brought up the Regent’s Canal to the Zoo. v

Two hundred thousand gallons of sea-water are stored in an underground reservoir in Regent’s Park. As it is needed it is pumped to another reservoir high up on the-Map-pin Terraces on which the goats .and bears disport themselves, and thence flows down to the aquarium underneath. .

The sea-water could be made artificially, but it would cost more than the cost of transport from the Bay of Biscay. The artificial sea-water also has the disadvantage that fish placed in it always go blind and eventually die. The addition of only two- per cent, of 'real sea-water to artificial sea-water corrects this trouble. It proves, according to Mi Boulenger, that in sea-water there is some mysterious element indisr pensable to health which no chemist has up to the present been able to analyse.