“Instant Ocean”! Just add water! 
I am picturing transplanted tardigrades. A new SyFy movie: Water Bear. It’s about a pretty blonde woman who has a fear of bears so she moves to the desert. Then a freak genetic experiment creates giant waterbears and she has to face her fears and fight them with the help of the 80s finest B actors. The sequel will take place after she becomes an astronaut, thinking she is safe in the vacuum of space.
Also, isn’t Monterey’s sea otter enclosure literally part of the bay, closed off?
Permits might be needed as otherwise there could be a critical shortage of seawater.
*The Tardigraveyard
Oncopodnado
Moss Pig
Tun Death: The Slow Stepping Dehydrated, Irradiated, Pressurized, Molecularly Still Cryptobiots From Hell*
how do Aquariums fill their huge tanks?
Starting at the bottom.
Or organisms that are adaptable enough to tolerate different salinity levels.
Or inland bodies of water with some salinity.
Do they ever empty the tanks? Or just “top off?” And if the do empty, can a normal type city drain handle the deluge? They must hold thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of gallons of water.
No, they’ll take what they can get. But your post was saying you can’t get invasives going from one ocean to another by whatever means, and so you don’t need to check, which is wrong.
I’d guess the same way you would do if you had a salt water aquarium at home. Take ordinary tap water. De-chlorinate it, then add chemicals to give the correct salinity and ph level for your fish. And then add the fish. Use your filters to clean the water and add chemicals as needed.
Or dump a portion of the water, less than half, and replace with similarly treated water. Repeat frequently enough and it will be all replaced eventually, unless you are a homeopathic aquarist. Dangerous fishes can be moved into a side tank, while divers scrape the sides. Moving the animals themselves can stress them, which is why you put goldfishes in a bag first and slowly acclimate them to the new tank.
No, my post was expressing skepticism that checking seawater at state lines is done, or needed. I’ll speculate that no such inspection has ever happened, and the number of invasive species propagated by this method is very close to zero.
A saltwater spill is not too good for vegetation. Oil and gas companies get fined pretty steeply for spills of produced saltwater.
Bad for glass.
:: I’ve posted that joke before, but this time it works … ::
Done, likely not. Needed, definitely yes.
How would you even know? And any non-zero number can be too high. Look at zebra mussels, or the sea walnut - one ship’s bilge water could do it, so could one seawater tank.
Zebra mussels I had heard about it. Sea walnut: “blind and no brain” [Wiki]. Seems rather mean-spirited. Neither do jellyfish, for one, but that’s never needed to be pointed out.
I live in a northern Dallas suburb–our area got some of it’s water piped from Lake Texoma on the TX/OK border. When that lake got infested with zebra mussels, that pipeline had to shut down because the pumping station was on the OK side of the border, and transporting invasive species across state lines was a violation of Federal Law. (quick Google search indicates it’s the Lacey Act). Congress had to pass a specific exemption to allow pumping to resume.
Now, would anyone actually inspect a tanker of water taken from the ocean? Perhaps not. But it does leave you some liability if you do somehow take something other than just the water with you.
Just a reminder for those on the tangent of marine invasive species, we’re talking about tanker trucks (which are approved to carry things like gasoline, raw sewage, industrial chemicals, milk) carrying seawater to a professional aquarium.
That aquarium will almost certainly have at least one marine biologist on staff, extensive water treatment facilities (compared to drinking or waste water, at least), and, fairly strict policies about how to handle potentially contaminated (i.e. not known to be free of unwanted organisms) materials.
What??? You don’t own a boat do you? The transportation of invasive species is a very real problem.
If you transport a boat or even a large canoe across state lines in the western US you most certainly do have to take it to an inspection site and pay for an invasive species permit that certifies that your craft has been inspected before you can legally put it in the water.
Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and several other states including Minnesota.
http://www.dfw.state.or.us/conservationstrategy/invasive_species/quagga_zebra_mussel.asp
This hypothetical tanker truck of raw seawater would almost certainly be stopped by the weighmaster at the first set of scales it crosses and be flagged for inspection.
Yeah, I was going to answer the question from personal experience but it looks like I was beat to it. I worked at the John G. Shedd Aquarium and Oceanarium in 1991-1992(right after they added the whale and dolphin exhibits with the 6-million gallon tanks or whatever). At that time, they had their own ocean water recipe that they would mix themselves. I see from the linked article that they now purchased dehydrated water.
To answer another question up thread, they didn’t replace water in the tanks very often. All the water went through huge filters and was recirculated. The would pretty frequently have to add additional fresh water to account for evaporation.