The Maritime Aquarium is a longtime Carver partner, providing STEM education programs to our after-school and summer students. This year, they are also hosting our high school Earn & Learn paid interns.

Norberta Nerette is working at the stingray tank where she sells the fish that visitors feed to the rays. She assists the visiting families with directions on how to properly pet and feed the rays. Stingrays are not aggressive, but in the wild, if you follow one too closely, you run the risk of catching the business end of the stingray's sharp, painful stinger. The rays in the Maritime Aquarium’s exhibit have their barbs clipped, allowing humans to touch them without fear of coming in contact with the animal's sharp and potentially venomous tail spine, or stinger.

Emanuel Martinez works closely with The Maritime Aquarium’s five female harbor seals - Rasal, Ariel, Leila, Polly, and Tillie - as they explore the aquarium’s largest display. He is responsible for the safety of the visitors and the seals. He walks along the tank area and makes sure visitors don’t drop anything into the tank. He also makes sure they do not lean over the glass barriers, walk onto the rocks or go into the water. Opened in June 2021, "Pinniped Cove” lets visitors follow the seals from three sides and two levels: underwater at floor-to-ceiling windows on the first floor; and above the surface on the second floor. This 22-foot-deep exhibit is more than eight times larger than the original seal exhibit. "Pinniped Cove” celebrates seals – members of the pinniped group along with sea lions and walruses – as a conservation success story, through graphic displays that explain how their populations have rebounded greatly in New England.  A “Seal-Training Demonstration” helps visitors learn more about seals and lets visitors watch them being fed at 11:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 3:30 p.m. daily. 

The Maritime Aquarium inspires people of all ages to appreciate and protect the Long Island Sound ecosystem and the global environment through living exhibits, marine science, and environmental education. The aquarium features harbor seals, river otters, sharks, jellyfish, loggerhead turtles, and hundreds of other animals living in re-creations of their natural Long Island Sound habitats. Three touch tanks feature stingrays, nurse sharks, crabs, sea stars, moon jellies, and other coastal creatures.

In addition to its exhibits, as our 5th grade students recently experienced, The Maritime Aquarium offers educational programs and year-round educational cruises on its 64-foot research vessel R/V Spirit of the Sound.