The Jakarta Aquarium blends education and entertainment through modern and interactive exhibits.

Stepping into the Jakarta Aquarium transports visitors into an environment totally different from the shopping mall in which it is located.

After buying a ticket and passing through the entrance, visitors are soon immersed in a mangrove forest. Trees flank either side of a projector walkway that shows fish swimming below one’s feet.

Off to the right, a large brown python is curled in a ball behind glass looking ready to strike. The sounds of birds squawking and running water can be heard in the background.

For just a moment, the aquarium has become a passable imitation of the mangrove forests that can be found throughout the archipelago.

The engaging atmosphere thrusts the aquarium ahead of other conservation and wildlife education efforts in Jakarta and even the country as a whole.

“We used to call our aquarium some sort of a fish boutique because we present it in aesthetic ways,” education supervisor Shabrina Andrawini said. “People say our aquarium is very instagrammable.”

Where are you?:Visitors to the aquarium observe clown fish, which gained popularity through the movie Finding Nemo. (JP/Tirta Utama Umbas)

The aquarium, located in the Neo Soho shopping mall in North Jakarta, opened in 2016 in partnership with Taman Safari Indonesia and Malaysian aquarium operator Aquaria KLCC.

Since its inception, the aquarium has set out to provide visitors with “edutainment”. This blending of education and entertainment is achieved through modern and interactive exhibits.

LCD touchscreens provide guests with information in Indonesian and English about the more than 600 species and over 14,000 individual animals in the aquarium.

TV screens play informational videos about binturongs while colorful drawings on the wall educate visitors about the fact that phytoplankton produce the vast majority of the world’s oxygen supply.

Little details — which a guest might miss if they are not looking hard enough — can be spotted throughout a number of exhibits. For example, the piranha exhibit features a fake skeleton of an animal that met its unfortunate end in the fish tank. These details that other zoos and aquariums might decide to leave out create an immersive “edutaining” environment.

Bizarre creatures are around every corner, including the isopods and nautilus. These strange animals look like they would be more at home millions of years ago than they do now.

Picture perfect: Visitors take photographs in the Ocean Walkway exhibit at the Jakarta Aquarium that showcases a variety of small and large marine animals. (JP/Tirta Utama Umbas)

One of their newest additions, a giant pacific octopus received from Japan, can be seen gliding through its tank and contorting its suction cup-covered body into various shapes and sizes.

This all culminates in an environment where adults and children alike are able to both have fun and learn.

Pinor Siregar, the aquarium’s education manager, has worked with both Ragunan Zoo and Sea World Ancol in the past but said nothing in Indonesia compared to the aquarium.

“I have never seen an aquarium concept like this unless you go to Singapore or Malaysia,” Pinor said.

The modern concept of conservation and education about nature makes it a great learning environment for people of all ages. For adult visitors, there are digestible explanations of complicated scientific occurrences such as the phytoplankton.

There are also activities such as aqua trekking, where people do not need a diving license to get up close and personal with stingrays, sharks and the aquarium’s enormous 300-kilogram giant grouper.

Plenty of activities are also designed for children, a demographic that Siregar said it was of utmost importance to teach about conservation and preservation. There are daily showings of Pearl of the South Sea, a performance that touches on Indonesian mythology produced by Australian theater director Peter Wilson.

Up close: Visitors get close to a stingray, one of the thousands of marine species that can be found in the aquarium. (Courtesy of the Jakarta Aquarium)

They also offer experiences such as aquacamp, where children sleepover in the aquarium right alongside the marine exhibits.

Experiential learning, like much of what the aquarium offers, leads to much higher retention rates of information.

According to various studies, when students learn passively in a classroom setting, their retention rates can be as low as 20 percent. However, that number can spike to 75 percent when they are learning in an engaged, hands-on environment like the aquarium. It not only creates a conducive learning environment for the children, but it makes the jobs of those teaching the kids much more rewarding.

“If I can even just get through to one kid, it is worth it,” Pinor said.

Thanks to the internet and its wide dissemination of information, Pinor and Andrawini noted that today’s children were also much more educated about environmental issues than they had ever seen before.

Pinor said the attendance at the aquarium topped out at around 1,000 per day on the weekends, and that every visitor had the chance to learn something new on each visit.

Whether it’s a staff member discussing the aquarium’s monitor lizard that they have taken out of its enclosure or its feeding time at the stingray tank, each visit to the Jakarta Aquarium provides a new experience. (ste)

— The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post.