Aquariums Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
57 free Aquariums trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Aquariums are the aquatic zoos and living-room ecosystems that let people watch the sea without getting wet, and this quiz covers them from a Victorian greenhouse in Regent's Park to a Chinese theme park holding nearly 49 million litres. The easy questions ask which naturalist coined the word, which US aquarium is the biggest, what a kelp forest first grew in, and what happened to a hotel lobby in Berlin one December morning in 2022. From there it moves into the history: Jeanne Villepreux-Power's experimental tanks in Sicily, Robert Warington's balanced 13-gallon jar, P. T. Barnum's museum on Broadway, the seawater that reached Chicago by rail, and the sardine cannery that became Monterey Bay Aquarium. The harder end is for people who plan holidays around aquariums: the Kuroshio Sea tank and its 60-centimetre acrylic, Georgia's Honeymooners-named whale sharks, Granddad the 109-year-old lungfish, the aircraft-carrier oceanarium in Lisbon, Peter Chermayeff and Renzo Piano, Kelly Tarlton's sewage-tank tunnel, Moby Doll, and the aquarium that lets visitors touch rays. There is a strand on the home hobby too: kreisel tanks, nano reefs, silicone sealing, the nitrogen cycle and 'new tank syndrome'. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the institutions and the hobby, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our aquarium fish page covers the species themselves; try our sharks and oceans quizzes next.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city did the first public aquarium open, in May 1853?
London
London. The Fish House at the city's zoo in Regent's Park was built much like a greenhouse, and aquariums in Naples and Paris soon followed its lead.
Q 02Which showman opened the first American aquarium in 1856 as part of his Broadway museum?
P. T. Barnum
P. T. Barnum saw there was money in live sea creatures: the circus man showed them at his American Museum, beluga whales among them, until the building burned down.
Q 03In 1850 the chemist Robert Warington showed that a tank's water plants could supply its fish with enough of what?
Oxygen
Oxygen. Warington kept goldfish, eelgrass and water snails together in a glass vessel, and told the Chemical Society that only the evaporated water would ever need replacing.
Q 04Which French marine biologist created the first experimental aquaria in 1832?
Jeanne Villepreux-Power
Jeanne Villepreux-Power. Working in Sicily, she used her glass tanks to show that the argonaut, a relative of the octopus, grows its own shell instead of taking one from another animal.
Q 05Goldfish were first bred as ornamental pets, from drab wild carp, in which country?
China
China. Under the Song dynasty yellow goldfish were reserved for the imperial family, and commoners were forbidden to keep them.
Q 06Which undersea explorer ran Monaco's Oceanographic Museum and its aquarium from 1957 to 1988?
Jacques Cousteau
Jacques Cousteau. He had co-invented the Aqua-Lung in 1943, which let divers swim freely underwater for long spells, and he ran the museum for 31 years while filming what he found down there.
Q 07The New York Aquarium began in 1896 in a Manhattan fort and reopened in 1957 in which seaside neighborhood?
Coney Island
Coney Island. The fort, Castle Garden, had been America's first official immigrant processing center before Ellis Island, then spent 45 years as a fish house until the city closed it in 1941.
Q 08Which Indo-Pacific fish, now overrunning Caribbean reefs, is thought to have spread from dumped home aquarium pets?
Lionfish
Lionfish. Almost nothing in their new waters preys on them, so they have spread from the US southeast coast through the Caribbean and the Gulf, eating the young of native reef fish as they go.
Q 09What material finally allowed all-glass, frameless aquariums in the 1960s?
Silicone sealant
Silicone sealant. Earlier tanks held their glass in putty-sealed metal frames, and seawater corrodes metal; silicone bonds glass straight to glass, so a tank needs no supporting frame.
Q 10Which algae-eating crustacean, popularised by Japanese aquascaper Takashi Amano, is now sold under his name?
A shrimp
A shrimp. Amano kept armies of them grazing in his planted tanks, and the Amano shrimp cannot multiply in a home freshwater tank because its larvae need salty water to survive.
Q 11A kreisel tank's rounded walls and gentle circular current are designed for displaying which animals?
Jellyfish
Jellyfish. They drift rather than steer, so in a square tank they get trapped in corners or pulled onto filter intakes; a kreisel, named for a spinning top, keeps them circling gently in open water.
Q 12What is a 'Macquarium'?
A tank in a Macintosh computer shell
A tank in a Macintosh computer shell. Columnist Andy Ihnatko joked to a reader that the best upgrade for an old Mac 512K was to gut it for fish, then readers wrote in asking how, so he drew up plans.
Q 13Roughly what does one litre of aquarium water weigh?
1 kilogram
Q 21Which corporation donated the land on which the Georgia Aquarium stands?
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola gave the downtown site and then became the neighbour: its own museum, the World of Coca-Cola, moved in next door in 2007, on a campus named after the drink's inventor, John Pemberton.
Q 22What was Monterey Bay Aquarium the first to exhibit when it opened in 1984?
A living kelp forest
A living kelp forest. Nobody had grown giant kelp in an aquarium before; it works because a custom surge machine keeps the water constantly moving, and the kelp now grows about four inches a day.
Q 23Monterey Bay Aquarium was built on the site of what kind of former factory?
A sardine cannery
1 kilogram, by design: the kilogram was first defined in 1795 as the mass of a litre of water. A modest 200-litre tank therefore holds 200 kg of water before you add glass, gravel and a stand.
Q 14What toxic compound do fish excrete that nitrifying bacteria must convert in a tank?
Ammonia
Ammonia leaves a fish mostly through its gills, not in its urine. Filter bacteria turn it into nitrite, still toxic, and then into far milder nitrate.
Q 15What name do fishkeepers give the water-quality crisis that hits a freshly set-up aquarium before its bacteria establish?
New Tank Syndrome
New Tank Syndrome strikes in the first few weeks because the filter bacteria that clear fish waste need six to eight weeks to build up, which is why keepers add fish a few at a time.
Q 16Which popular aquarium fish is named after a man who sent specimens from Trinidad to the British Museum in 1866?
Guppy
Guppy. The fish was named in honour of its collector, Lechmere Guppy, but the species had already been described in 1859, so the scientific name was dropped and only the nickname stuck.
Q 17What usually provides the primary biological filtration in a reef aquarium?
Live rock
Live rock is not alive itself: it is dead coral skeleton, and the name comes from the bacteria, algae and tiny animals living on and inside it, which do the filtering.
Q 18In Finding Nemo, the captured young clownfish is dropped into an aquarium in what kind of place?
A dentist's office
A dentist's office. The tank's scarred leader Gill, himself taken from the ocean when young, hatches the escape plan: jam the filter so the dentist has to bag the fish while he cleans it.
Q 19Bernard Marcus, whose gift paid for most of the Georgia Aquarium, made his fortune co-founding which chain?
Home Depot
Home Depot. Marcus and Arthur Blank started it in 1978, just after both were pushed out of a Los Angeles home-improvement chain called Handy Dan; 27 years later the aquarium opened as his gift.
Q 20Georgia Aquarium's first whale sharks, Ralph, Norton, Alice and Trixie, were named after characters from which sitcom?
The Honeymooners
The Honeymooners. All four came from Taiwan, where they had been caught under the yearly fishing quota and would otherwise have been sold to be eaten.
A sardine cannery. The Hovden Cannery, once the biggest sardine packer in town, shut after the fishery collapsed; the aquarium was built on its footprint and kept the old plant's roof line.
Q 24Which tech co-founder's family funded Monterey Bay Aquarium?
David Packard
David Packard gave $55 million and his own engineering: the Hewlett-Packard co-founder personally designed the surge machine that keeps water moving in the aquarium's centrepiece tank.
Q 25What sustainable-fish advisory list has Monterey Bay Aquarium published since 1999?
Seafood Watch
Seafood Watch began by accident: during a 1997 exhibition the aquarium's restaurant set out table cards listing fish to choose or avoid, and diners pocketed so many that the list became a programme two years later.
Q 26How did Chicago's inland Shedd Aquarium get seawater for its 1930 opening?
Railroad tank cars from Key West
Railroad tank cars from Key West: twenty of them shuttled back and forth until a million gallons had arrived, and the aquarium's own rail car, the Nautilus, went on fetching live fish from the coasts for decades.
Q 27Granddad, who lived at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium from 1933 to 2017, was which kind of fish?
Lungfish
Lungfish. Granddad, an Australian lungfish, arrived from Sydney for Chicago's 1933 World's Fair already full-grown, so his age was a guess until DNA put it at about 109 and traced him to Queensland's Burnett River.
Q 28John G. Shedd, who gifted Chicago its aquarium, was a protégé of which retail magnate?
Marshall Field
Marshall Field hired the New Hampshire farm boy at $10 a week and later told a Senate committee that Shedd was the best merchant in the United States; Shedd went on to run the company after him.
Q 29Which popular aquarium fish was first domesticated in Thailand for staged contests between males?
Betta
Betta. Better known as the Siamese fighting fish, it was a dull-coloured fish in the wild; the flowing fins and jewel colours of pet-shop fish were bred in later by fanciers.
Q 30The 'umi' in Okinawa's Churaumi Aquarium means sea, so what does the Okinawan word 'chura' mean?
Beautiful
Beautiful. 'Chura' is the Okinawan cousin of an old Japanese word, kiyora, meaning pure or clear: Okinawan speech turned the k-sound into ch, so Churaumi is the beautiful, clear sea.