The Ecosystems wing
2010
Ecosystems is the wing where the Science Center keeps its living things. Across two floors and about forty five thousand square feet it walks you through eleven environments, each one built around real animals and plants and a single scientific idea: how living things and their surroundings shape each other. You pass from a desert with a flash flood to a river bank, from a rocky shore where you can touch sea stars to the kelp forest, and on to the Extreme Zone with its polar ice and deep sea vents, where the animals live on chemicals rather than sunlight.
Some moments to look for. Moon jellies pulse in a cylindrical tank lit from below, drifting like slow parachutes; they have no brain and no heart, and the exhibit explains how they nonetheless catch food and find their way. In the desert zone a flash flood roars through a dry wash every few minutes to show how water shapes a place that hardly ever sees it. The rocky shore tank is fed by a wave machine, and a touch pool lets children feel a sea urchin. Upstairs, the island zone looks at how isolated places evolve their own species, with live animals from the Channel Islands and Madagascar.
The wing opened in 2010 and cost more than a hundred million dollars, and it changed the character of the museum from a hall of push-button exhibits to something closer to a zoo and aquarium with a point to make. The animal care team looks after hundreds of species behind the scenes, and the LA Zone at the end brings the idea home, showing how a city of ten million people is itself an ecosystem, with coyotes, gulls and the concrete Los Angeles River. It is the gallery to give the most time to, especially with children.
Did You Know? The desert zone stages a flash flood on a timer, and the crash of water in a room full of sand and cactus startles a good many first-time visitors.
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