Aquarium

Eighteen miles south of St. Augustine, Fla. is a brand new town, Marineland, where last week Marine Studios, Inc. opened a mammoth, $500,000 aquarium. Surrounded by palmetto trees and tropical shrubbery, the aquarium, world's largest, consists of two adjacent, open-air, steel and concrete tanks. The larger one is rectangular--100 by 40 ft. and 18 ft. deep; the other, an 11-ft.-deep, circular tank, is 75 ft. in diameter. Along the walls of both tanks are some 200 portholes.

Inside are coral gardens, reefs and jutting shelves to protect smaller fish from their predatory neighbors. Already Marine Studios boasts the only porpoises and manta rays in captivity, sawfish, penguins, barracuda, devil fish, turtles, etc. Eventually it hopes to have virtually everything from jellyfish to man-eating sharks.

To build up its collection the company plans to spend $100,000 a year, most of which will doubtless be put up by Board Chairman Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. President of Marine Studios, Inc. is W. Douglas Burden, trustee of the American Museum of Natural History; vice president, Count Ilia Tolstoy, grandson of the famed Russian novelist.

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