Aquarium Berlin
| Aquarium Berlin | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| place |
Budapester Strasse 32 10787 Berlin |
| opening | 1913 |
| organization | |
| management |
Andreas Knieriem (Zoological Director) , Gabriele Thöne (Commercial Director) |
| Sponsorship | Zoologischer Garten Berlin AG securities identification number (WKN): 503 180, International Securities Identification Number (ISIN): DE0005031801 |
 The Berlin Aquarium, entrance at Olof-Palme-Platz |
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The Berlin Aquarium has existed since 1913. After almost complete destruction in World War II , problematic reconstruction and subsequent extensive renovation and expansion, it is now one of the most species-rich facilities of its kind in the world. In addition to marine and freshwater inhabitants, amphibians , reptiles and insects are also shown. The house is located in the Tiergarten district of Mitte district, on the grounds of the Zoo . A second, much-used entrance leads directly into the building from Olof-Palme-Platz on Budapester Strasse . If desired, both the aquarium and the zoo can be visited with combined tickets. Differentiated programs are offered for children and young people. Together with the Zoological Garden, the Berlin Aquarium is a listed building . Both institutions are run jointly as a listed , non-profit company .
history
prehistory
The first aquarium in Berlin, founded by Alfred Brehm , existed from 1869 to 1910 on the north side of Unter den Linden and Schadowstrasse near the Brandenburg Gate . But on September 30, 1910 it had to close for economic reasons, the house in an attractive location was demolished and replaced by a new building. The animal populations went to various external aquariums. After that, Berlin remained without a large show aquarium for three years. The management of the Berlin Zoological Garden had previously conducted lengthy, inconclusive negotiations about a connection between the two institutions, for example through a joint new building on the zoo's premises. The Actien-Verein des Zoologischer Garten finally decided to build an aquarium on its own responsibility and increased its share capital by 500,000 marks to 3.3 million marks (adjusted for inflation in today's currency, this is around 19,239,000 euros).
1911 to 1945
The then assistant director, Oskar Heinroth , who was to be the custodian of the new aquarium, designed the zoo concept and managed the overall planning. The old machine yard of the zoological garden could be used as building land. Between 1911 and 1913, a three-story building 53 meters long and 35 meters wide, designed by the architects Zaar & Vahl, was built on today's Budapester Straße - at that time still part of Kurfürstendamm - for construction costs of around 1.14 million marks . A residential and office building was built on the west side. The artistic decoration of the building was designed by the painter Heinrich Harder , a specialist in the representation of prehistoric animals. The subject of his reliefs , majolica and mosaics were the early, now extinct, predecessors of the animals shown in the aquarium. In front of the entrance to the aquarium from the side of the zoological garden - originally planned and designed as the main entrance - the life-size replica of the Iguanodon , an erect five-meter-high dinosaur from the Cretaceous period , also a work by Harder , stands as a special accent . The centerpiece and main attraction of the house was a crocodile hall with a suspension bridge , 27 meters long and ten meters wide, which extended over several floors. Such a zoological facility under the roof, which visitors can enter directly, had never existed before.
The lower floor, the actual aquarium, housed freshwater and marine life, on the upper floor mainly reptiles and amphibians, on the top floor beetles, bees, spiders, butterflies, etc. The salt water for the marine life initially came in barges from the North Sea via the Elbe to the Tiergarten lock on the Landwehr Canal , from where the Berlin fire brigade pumped it through a hose line one kilometer in length into the aquarium basin. After the First World War , this process turned out to be too expensive; As in the past in the Unter den Linden aquarium, artificial sea water was now produced by dissolving various sea salts in fresh water.
The aquarium was opened on August 18, 1913. Due to the First World War and the general emergency situation in the first post-war years, the company was initially only moderately successful. After 1923 a rapid development began to become the most species-rich aquarium in the world. When it opened, there were around 400 species of animals; In 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War , there were 746 species with 8532 individual animals. During the war, on 23./24. November 1943, a direct bomb hit in the crocodile hall destroyed the house to the ground. The outbuildings were also devastated by the effects of the war. Shortly after the end of the war, Oskar Heinroth, who had been appointed director of the aquarium in 1929, died on May 31, 1945.
After 1945
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The reconstruction of the almost completely destroyed zoological garden under the difficult conditions of the early post-war period was directed from August 1945 by the zoologist Katharina Heinroth , Oskar Heinroth's widow, together with the zoologist, biologist and paleontologist Werner Schröder , who was initially appointed commercial director and from 1952 Was director of the aquarium. For financial reasons, the aquarium building was rebuilt on the ruins of the old house, the basement of which had been preserved. The facade, which had previously been richly decorated with images, was given a uniformly plastered surface due to lack of funds. In September 1952, marine and freshwater animals could be shown again on the ground floor, in November 1956 the crocodile hall and the snake department opened, and in 1959 the insectarium was completed. As early as 1968, the Berlin Aquarium was able to show the world's most species-rich collection, including numerous animals imported to Europe for the first time.
Around 25 years after its reconstruction, the building began to experience increasing problems resulting from the material deficiencies in the first post-war period. The whole house had to be renovated step by step, but at the same time remained restrictedly accessible to the public. For most of the animals there was temporary accommodation in the aquarium itself. The crocodiles had to be relocated, they lived temporarily in the hall of the historic antelope house . A new, modern extension to the east of the aquarium was helpful in this phase, as part of the animal population could be relocated here. The technical and scientific planning for the extension and for the renovation of the old building was in the hands of Jürgen Lange; he was appointed custodian of the aquarium at the beginning of 1978 after Werner Schröder had retired.
Between 1978 and 1980, the octagonal extension, designed as a landscape aquarium, was built for seven million marks. In five relatively spacious basins - compared to the small-format showcases in the old building - sections of the flora and fauna of special biotopes are shown, including the respective bank vegetation. Two of the pools are themed on the Coral Sea , two show South American rivers and another show the waters of Southeast Asia . Also in the new construction area there is an all-round pool with a capacity of 50,000 liters for North American paddlefish and a 40,000-liter pool for sharks and sea turtles . Various technical facilities are housed on the roof and in the basement.
The extensive renovation of the old building was completed in 1983, the total cost was 27.4 million marks. The sculptor Hans Joachim Ihle took on the artistic design of the building, in particular the restoration of the facade decorations. Some of the badly damaged mosaics were preserved in fragments, five of Heinrich Harder's original 14 original designs and a number of old photographs of the facades were still found. Using this material, the old animal motifs could be reconstructed. The scientific accuracy of these representations was an early subject of discussion. A description from 1913 stated: “Such reconstructions may be dubious for the highly scientific museums because the imagination must necessarily play a more or less important role; the zoological garden as a more popular educational institution may dare to do this for a good cause ”.
Livestock
In total, around 13,000 animals of more than 1,000 species are kept in the zoo aquarium. The animal population is presented in a brochure of the aquarium, the individual chapters each deal with either a genus , a family (e.g. iguanas) or an order (e.g. butterflies):
Marine life: scyphozoa , Hydro jellyfish , sea anemones , corals , coral anemones , soft corals , sea fans , tube worms , crabs , horseshoe crabs , snails , mussels , squid , echinoderms , sea urchins , sharks and rays , dogfish , eels , frogfish , monocentridae , soldier fish and squirrel fish , John Dory , tube mouths , lionfish , groupers , tilefish , grunts , Argus fish , bat fish , butterfly fish , angelfish , cardinal fish , anemone fish , jack fish , remora , wrasses , gobies , sea wolves , surgeon fish , rabbit fish , trigger fish , boxfish , puffers and porcupine fish .
Freshwater fish: carp fish , arowana , tetras , eel , tilapia , catfish , rainbow fish , four-eye fish , archer fish , labyrinth fish , lungfish .
Reptiles: crocodiles , tortoises , turtles , iguanas , basilisks , anoles , bridge lizards , agamas , crusty lizards , geckos , belt tails , skinks , monitor lizards , giant snakes , otters , adders , pit vipers .
Amphibians: salamanders and newts , frogs and Surinam toads , long-nosed horned frog , toads , poison dart frog , tree frogs , frogs .
Arthropods: millipedes , assassin bugs , grasshoppers , stick insects , beetles , leaf-cutting ants , butterflies , scorpions , tarantulas , web spiders .
The natural habitats of many amphibians, freshwater fish and marine animals are at risk. With a view to protecting nature and species, attempts are therefore made to breed the animals kept in the Berlin Aquarium as well as possible. One focus is the difficult breeding of jellyfish, corals and coral fish. Keeping corals requires an extremely high level of technical effort just for the composition and constant movement of the water as well as for the light intensity and color. With the tiny juvenile jellyfish and the rearing of the also very small coral fish, the right food is a central problem.
Different species of jellyfish can be seen in aquariums on the ground floor; A special attraction is a large, free-standing cylindrical basin with dotted root-mouth jellyfish . The most valuable animals in the Zoo-Aquarium Berlin were the Komodo dragons , with a length of up to three meters and a weight of 250 kilograms, they are the largest lizards in the world. They live strictly protected only on Komodo and three other Indonesian islands and are only allowed to leave the country as a state gift. A special feature of the aquarium is the group of the rare New Zealand bridge lizards, which are often referred to as living fossils . They lived already 225 million years ago, at that time widespread on earth. Today they can only be found on a few islands belonging to New Zealand. In consideration of their home in a temperate climate, your terrarium has a cooling system - a very unusual facility for keeping reptiles.
Facilities in the background
→ For general technical details see also main article Aquarium .
Most of the animals living in the aquarium are much more sensitive to environmental changes than mammals and birds. Their natural living conditions must therefore be mimicked with particular care. In a large aquarium like the Zoo-Aquarium Berlin, the technical facilities are more extensive than in any other animal house. According to the animal care experience of the last decades and with the use of current technical means, highly sensitive animal species can be kept and even bred here for long periods of time. Thanks to newly developed systems in filter, flow and lighting technology, it is now possible to show marine animals such as sharks, jellyfish and corals. As a result, the focus of animal husbandry in the Berlin Aquarium is now stronger than it was previously for seawater aquaristics .
The water quality is of paramount importance. The considerable burden of excrement, leftover feed and dead organisms must be constantly balanced. In the Berlin Aquarium, the water in each tank is treated separately, also to prevent the spread of diseases. The contents of any basin, regardless of size, are filtered in about an hour. Four types of water are available: cold and warm water, salt water and completely salt-free water, the latter for watering the plants, for "tropical fog" and for correcting the water hardness in the aquariums. A computer-controlled alarm system monitors all important technical installations around the clock. In the event of temporary irregularities, a diesel generator can take over the power supply.
A sufficiently large number of quarantine and reserve tanks are available for newly arriving or sick animals as well as for offspring . Large parts of the feed requirements are bred or cultivated in-house. A feed station in the cellar ensures that rats (approx. 13,000 annually), mice (approx. 20,000) and marine plankton are supplied as required . In Insectarium are bred as food animals fruit flies and house flies and locusts (about 12,000), crickets and crickets (together about 520,000); In hydroponics , seed wheat grows, which is used as animal feed. Plants for aquariums and terrariums that are definitely free from harmful insecticides come from our own greenhouses on the roof of the house .
planting
A total of around 250 different plant species are kept in the aquarium. For the care of particularly sensitive plants, the zoo aquarium employs an ornamental plant gardener , who is also called in when, for example, a special terrarium needs to be replanted to suit the biotope .
The vegetation in the showrooms should correspond as closely as possible to the native habitats of the animals shown. For example, plants from the tropical rainforest such as banana trees, dragon trees and papayas are in the crocodile hall ; in the large terrarium of the rhinoceros iguanas there are cacti and agaves from the vegetation of the arid regions of Central America; For the small, poisonous poison dart frogs of the Central and South American rainforests, large numbers of pineapples ( bromeliads ) are vital in addition to high humidity : the remaining water in which the tadpoles hatch collects in the funnels of their leaves .
However, when it comes to authentic planting, compromises are inevitable. Many fish like to eat soft and finely structured plants, lizards destroy large, fleshy leaves with their claws, thin twigs break under the weight of reptiles - normal processes in the wild, only limitedly practicable in aquariums and terrariums. On the other hand, damaged plants often recover enough in the in-house greenhouse that they can be used repeatedly in the showrooms. There are no such problems in the crocodile hall. At best, damage to the vegetation is caused by aphids and similar harmful insects; since they cannot be combated with chemicals, natural enemies such as spectacled birds and geckos are successfully exposed.
Offers for children and young people
As part of the zoo school, the aquarium offers free guided tours for Berlin school classes. They are designed either as teaching units, suitable for the project area or for school trips. The topics are year-related and geared towards the framework curricula . However, it is also possible to address other grades and groups with disabled children in terms of method and content. Most of the tours can also be conducted in English. A special feature is the Junior Zoo University Berlin for 50 pupils in the 5th and 6th grades. In lectures and seminars, each participant deals with issues of zoology on the five continents and in the polar regions .
Corporate form
The Berlin Aquarium is run together with the Zoological Garden as a listed company. 3,000 of the 4,000 registered shares in Zoologischer Garten Berlin Aktiengesellschaft are labeled Aquarium and have a nominal value of 1,000 marks each ( securities identification number WKN 503 180). The articles of association dated May 14, 1869 in the amended version of June 18, 2009 in § 2 (Purpose of the company) say about the stock corporation : “... The company has made it its particular task to track the animals kept in the zoological garden to keep up to date with animal horticultural knowledge, to increase it and to show a sensible selection of animal forms for educational purposes ", and in § 3 ( non-profit status ):" The company exclusively, directly and selflessly pursues charitable purposes (...) The shareholders receive no profit shares in your capacity as a shareholder, also no other contributions from the company's funds ... "
For more information, see the main article in the Berlin Zoo , section Company .
The Zoo-Aquarium is supported by the support group of Tierpark Berlin and Zoo Berlin e. V., she is the official contact for the funding of both institutions. The community was founded in 1956 with the aim of providing ideal and financial support for the zoo in Friedrichsfelde . The two capital zoos have had joint zoological management since 2007, which is why the promotion of the Berlin Zoological Garden was included in the statutes. 2010, the development association established the Foundation of Friends of the Capital Zoos , the background were the decreasing financial support by the State of Berlin.
More Berlin aquariums
Since 2003 there has been a second, but much smaller show aquarium in Berlin, the Sea Life with the AquaDom .
Others
At the end of 1962, scenes from the Edgar Wallace film The Curse of the Yellow Snake with Joachim Fuchsberger and Brigitte Grothum were filmed in front of and in the aquarium. a. there is a short fight with the crocodiles as "extras" on the bridge in the crocodile hall. In the film, the aquarium is visualized with neon advertising to identify the venue.
literature
- Heinz-Georg Klös , Hans Frädrich , Ursula Klös: Noah's Ark on the Spree. 150 years of the Berlin Zoological Garden. FAB Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-927551-29-5 , pp. 355-371.
- Jürgen Lange (Ed.): Dive in! Aquarium Zoological Garden Berlin, 2006, ISSN 0724-8989 .
Web links
- Website of the Berlin Aquarium
- The aquarium offers for children and young people
- Articles of Association of Zoologischer Garten Berlin Aktiengesellschaft ( Memento from December 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 64 kB)
- Association of the sponsors Tierpark Berlin and Zoo Berlin e. V.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Heinz-Georg Klös, Hans Frädrich, Ursula Klös: Noah's Ark on the Spree. 150 years of the Berlin Zoological Garden. FAB Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-927551-29-5 , p. 353. (A history of the Berlin Zoological Garden)
- ^ Website of the aquarium on the history of the house
- ^ Website of the aquarium about the historical facades
- ↑ About us: The Zoo-Aquarium Berlin
- ↑ Jürgen Lange (Ed.): Dive in! Aquarium Zoologischer Garten Berlin AG, 2006, ISSN 0724-8989 , pp. 10-129
- ↑ Dive in! , P. 147.
- ↑ Offers of the aquarium for children and adolescents ( Memento of the original from March 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ The statutes of the Zoological Garden Berlin AG ( Memento of December 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 64 kB)
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 21 ″ N , 13 ° 20 ′ 26 ″ E