Among the thousands of salty residents to be found at the aquarium are exotic tropical fish, jellyfish, living coral, sea dragons and the giant Pacific octopus, complete with its eight-foot-long tentacles. You'll also meet the Japanese spider crab; with a leg spread of up to ten feet, this crustacean is the largest such species in the world. The Amazon River Basin exhibits will house giant catfish and Piranha from the Amazon River in South America.The centerpiece of Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies is an underwater acrylic tunnel in which visitors pass through 1,000,000 gallons of water on a 340-foot moving glidepath. The journey is designed to offer panoramic undersea views and bring you within inches of all kinds of undersea tough guys, like moray eels, not to mention some of the ocean's poisonous predators.

Occupying 115,000 square feet in the heart of downtown Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies is a giant lens into the beautiful and often mysterious world of the deep sea. The $42 million attraction is home to hundreds of species of creatures from around the globe, and what you'll see ranges from the familiar to the strange, from the beautiful to the ferocious.