Despite being hundreds of kilometres inland, you won’t have to travel far, or even get your feet wet to get up close and personal with piranhas, jellyfish, endangered sea turtles, giant rays and more sharks than you’ll find in the Vegas casinos! The Shark Reef Aquarium at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino is home to more than 2000 animals, including land-dwellers, such as a rare golden crocodile and Komodo dragon. It’s a great place for families to explore, and all visitors can appreciate a little quiet time here, away from the neon-lit madness of the Las Vegas Strip.
The 8825 square metre aquarium contains 14 permanent exhibits. The touch pool is always a popular choice, especially for families, as visitors can interact with placid creatures like horseshoe crabs and sea slugs. For that deep-sea feeling, take a stroll through the huge acrylic tunnel and watch as marine life of all colours, shapes and sizes swimming around and above you. And it’s not just the exhibits and their inhabitants that are eye-catching—each area of the aquarium is themed, including a sunken temple design and a jungle zone.
Truly adventurous types can join Shark Reef’s “Dive with Sharks” programme, which allows you to take to the water with the 30-odd sharks that call the aquarium home, including sand tiger, sandbar and whitetip reef sharks. Visitors must be dive-certified to participate. Divers usually spend about 45 minutes in the water, travelling through the 4.9 million litre tank that houses the Shipwreck Exhibit and is inhabited by sharks, rays, green sea turtles and schools of fish. Non-divers can still have an amazing experience here—look out for the giant Pacific octopus, the exotic-looking but deadly lionfish and the jewels of the sea, including the rainbow-colored parrotfish, in the Caribbean Reef display.
All in all, a unique experience considering Vegas’s desert setting. But the aquarium is not just a great place to get closer to nature—Shark Reef has made a pledge to ocean conservation and preservation and all of the facilities here use recycled water and imitation coral so that real reefs aren’t disturbed.
Shark Reef Aquarium is located near the South Convention Center of the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino. Visit in the evenings to avoid the crowds, and you’ll be rewarded by seeing the animals behaving differently than during the day. Mandalay Bay is on the southern edge of The Strip. The monorail, public buses and shuttle buses between casino resorts all stop here.
