Adventure Aquarium

This guide to Adventure Aquarium in Camden, across the river from Philadelphia, centers on the free divers who perform as Mermaids inside the Shark Realm tank, gliding for the better part of an hour among sand tiger, sandbar and nurse sharks while wearing a silicone tail that can weigh twenty or thirty pounds. It traces the aquarium's own transformation, from a plain 1992 civic project meant to draw Camden families, to its purchase by Herschend Family Entertainment in 2007. Watch closely by the shark tunnel and you can catch her surfacing behind a rock or prop for a breath the rest of the crowd never notices.