Praise from the depths

My family and I did a very smart thing today. While nearly everyone else in Atlanta was out hitting the malls and while the few with no urge to shop were crowding the new Georgia Aquarium (world's largest!) in downtown Atlanta, we headed up the road to Chattanooga to visit the Tennessee Aquarium.

The Tennessee Aquarium is one of those touristy things that has been on our list for a while. But it was much more than a tourist stop for me. I genuinely relish places like this because I delight to see the things our great God has imagined and formed.

The aquarium is very well done, with a great variety of marine life, from otters to piranhas. But two critters particularly took my breath away.

The first were the seahorses. Even your common, ordinary seahorse is an exceedingly strange thing. But there were varieties of seahorses on display in Chattanooga that I have never heard of, never seen pictures of, and certainly never imagined. For instance:


This is not a plant. This is an animal known as a leafy seadragon, a member of the seahorse family. Have you ever seen such a thing? I hadn't, but it was a delight to behold it today.

And then there were the jellyfish. Now I know a thing or two about jellyfish. Growing up on the Chesapeake Bay, I got acquainted with jellyfish at an early age, as they insisted on swimming in the waters in which I wanted to frolick. But to see them up close with no possibility of being stung was a new experience. I kept asking myself, "How can this semitransparent glob of jelly be a living being?"

The most amazing jelly was a variety known by the misleading name "sea walnut." Here's a pic (courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association):

The remarkable thing about sea walnuts is that there are small, glowing particles moving along those "veins" that you see in the photo. I've probably seen sea walnuts lying dead on the beach many times, but to see one alive, in its element, and with its body processes functioning like a glorious light show, was a revelation.

I remember once hearing two colleagues discussing why God created fish that live in the darkness of caves or the ocean depths. One colleague offered this somewhat tongue-in-cheek assessment: "Because He likes to watch 'em." To my mind, that's a pretty good answer. I like to watch His creatures, too, because they reveal how great, mighty, and creative He is.

GtG