Some of my earliest memories are from the California Academy of Sciences. It used to be in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, but is undergoing rennovation, and until 2008, is located in temporary quarters downtown near Powell Street BART. Johanna and I went to visit on Sunday while a winter rainstorm was pummeling the Bay Area. There's a really neat temporary exhibit on California biodiversity, called Hotspots, with displays on threatened unique ecosystems in the state. My favorites were these beetles that live on glaciers in the high Sierra, which are kept in a terrarium filled with ice and rocks. In addition they have a lot of live fish, reptiles, and amphibians, some of which I remember from the old building in Golden Gate Park (such as the alligator snapping turtles, almost a meter long with jaws that snap bone, which apparently had to be transferred out of the old exhibit by hand).

The animated flythroughs of the future facility in Golden Gate Park are amazing, but Johanna and I couldn't help but be a little sad to think that the old building we had been to so many times as children has now been torn down, along with the exhibits that captivated us when we were little: the tanks where the octopus and Butterball the manatee used to live at the Steinhart Aquarium (we're talking about the mid-eighties here), the touch pool, the alligator pit, the vast courtyard where I remember getting lost and running up to someone who turned out not to be mommy, the blown-up diorama of things that live in dead kelp in Wild California, and the Carboniferous forests and Mesozoic seas in Life Through Time. Good to see that the alligator snapping turtles are still going to be around.

I went to buy goldfish to feed the giant water bug at East Bay Vivarium today, and went to meet Johanna in Half Price Books. While I was there, a mother came up with her year-old daughter, who stared wide-eyed at the things swimming around in my plastic bag. I didn't quite feel it was appropriate to tell her what was about to happen to the "cute little" goldfish ten minutes later...