Mankind has long enjoyed the ocean's many gifts, from the novella-length missives found in drifting jeroboams to the civic-minded pirate vessels that harbor runaway parrots. Discover the surprises of the sea with today's Groupon to the Ocean Explorium in New Bedford. Choose between the following options:
• For $18, you get a one-year dual membership (a $35 value).
• For $25, you get a one-year family membership (a $50 value).
The Ocean Explorium packs its exhibits with wildlife and its visitors with environmental awareness. Membership allays water lovers with free admission for a year, a 10% discount at the gift shop, and early access to upcoming exhibits such as the ray touch tank, where members slip pass a velvet rope to commingle with the season's hottest vertebrates. A variety of habitats in the Living Ocean show off gilled and shelled undersea denizens, with a coral reef broaching subjects such as climate change, biodiversity, and coral bleaching, the most popular hair treatment among rebellious teenage seahorses. The Explorium's futuristic Science on a Sphere exhibit employs myriad projectors and computerized witchcraft to create a 3-D image of the Earth capable of illustrating dramatic climate change, and the Discovery Bay Activity Center unveils oceanic secrets to young learners through arts and crafts, puzzles, and games.
Ocean Explorium
It would take months of sea travel, extensive scuba certifications, and fluency in several crustacean dialects to find—let alone interact with—all the creatures found in Ocean Explorium's interactive exhibits. The science center emphasizes environmental stewardship and scientific literacy through several educational habitats such as touch tanks of local aquatic wildlife—including New Bedford's world-famous scallops and schools of rays and sharks. The Living Laboratory exhibit brings visitors face to face with sea creatures such as baby sharks, shark egg cases, coral farm, and moon jellies. Beyond the up-close encounters with denizens of the deep, Ocean Explorium also enlightens patrons with a variety of non-living displays. The Explorer's Zone presents scientific experiments that reveal the workings of the natural world through hands-on exhibits themed around different weekly topics, and Discovery Bay enthralls children aged eight or younger with games, puzzles, and a sand and water table. Advanced computers construct a three-dimensional image of our home planet as it appears from outer space in the Science on a Sphere exhibit, displaying global weather patterns in real time or replaying natural phenomena from history, such as the time it rained men.