Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, NV

Shark Reef Aquarium was the first closed-system aquarium in North America to exhibit a great hammerhead shark. The female juvenile was less than four feet long when she was accidentally caught off the coast of Florida. The shark was successfully flown into Mandalay Bay in August 2001 on a record 16-hour flight in a special transportation tank designed specifically for it. It remained in a private quarantine tank for 2.5 years until the in-house aquarium husbandry team decided it had grown large enough where it would not fall prey to the other sharks in the exhibit tank. It measured six feet long when it was finally introduced among big public fanfare into the 1,300,000 US gal (4,900,000 L) tank on November 3, 2003, for public exhibition.