Very “tank”ful! Driftless Area Education and Visitors Center welcomes new 1,260-gallon fish aquarium in Lansing
New director with new aquarium ... Naturalist Ross Geerdes, who becomes the next director of the Allamakee County Conservation Board upon the retirement of long-time director Jim Janett this month, stands next to the new aquarium at the Driftless Area Education and Visitors Center in Lansing. The tank will be stocked with fish from the Mississippi River and open to the public later this spring. Photo by Ellen Modersohn.
Special delivery ... Staff from Under the Sea and the Driftless Area Education and Visitors Center in Lansing prepare to move the 650-pound aquarium base into the lower level of the Driftless Center. The new 1,260-gallon fish aquarium arrived in Lansing Wednesday, March 29 from Tulsa, OK. Photo by Ellen Modersohn.
New display will be open to the public later this spring
by Ellen Modersohn
The frigid, windy morning of March 29, a truck and trailer from Tulsa, OK pulled up to the Driftless Area Education and Visitors Center south of Lansing with the makings of a 1,260-gallon aquarium. Throughout the day, workers from custom aquarium builder Under the Sea and the Driftless Center unloaded and assembled the tank along the back wall of the center’s lower-level meeting room.
The crew carefully maneuvered each component through the center’s lower doors using a dolly and plenty of muscle. The acrylic tank measures 16.5 feet long, 40 inches tall and three feet wide, and weighs 2,500 pounds, according to Under the Sea.
“They told me the metal stand that holds the tank weighs 650 pounds, but it felt like it weighed more,” said Ross Geerdes, the Center’s naturalist and next director of the Allamakee County Conservation Board.
The Oklahoma company builds and maintains aquariums across the United States for Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s stores. Eventually, this tank will house some of the 125 species of fish found in the Mississippi River. The new tank will replace a 110-gallon aquarium that the Driftless Center acquired when the Luster Heights Prison Farm closed in 2017, the year that the Center opened. The smaller vessel will become a quarantine tank, used to ensure that fish being added to the larger tank over time are healthy.
Installation of the new aquarium marks a milestone for the Center. “We’re always looking to improve,” Geerdes said. “At our five-year anniversary celebration, we had a few people ask us if there were some projects we were looking for, and we said we’d like to do a fish tank someday. We never anticipated that it would be this soon.”
The project’s $85,000 cost was raised entirely through donations, with the donors to be announced later this spring.
After the tank was constructed within the Center, it was filled with tap water, which is being filtered for approximately two weeks before wildlife can be added. Habitat in the tank includes a faux rock background, plants and artificial logs.
When the water is ready, county conservation staff will go out on the river with Department of Natural Resources (DNR) employees to electroshock fish to stock the tank, Geerdes said. The exact varieties that will come to live in the aquarium remain to be seen, but the Under the Sea staff cautioned against large catfish, saying they would eat the other fish. Installation of the tank and cabinetry was complete by the end of the day. The Driftless Center staff hopes to have the aquarium ready for viewing later this spring.
