CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — The Tennessee Aquarium is putting $5 million into an on-site animal hospital at its downtown Chattanooga campus, a project leaders announced Tuesday along with a new program to train veterinarians and vet techs.
Construction will fill the whole mezzanine level of the River Journey building, and the hospital is set to open in June 2027. Aquarium leaders described a space of about 3,000 square feet built around a large central treatment room, with imaging, surgery and recovery suites connected to it so an animal can move from diagnosis to recuperation without leaving the floor.
New equipment will include an updated X-ray, a CT scanner, several endoscopes and dental tools made for animal patients. Because some residents are too large to move, many of the tools are designed to be mobile, letting staff examine and treat animals right beside their exhibits.
The hospital will serve a collection of roughly 13,000 animals. Andy Wood, the aquarium’s president and CEO, said the growth and variety of that collection, along with advances in aquatic animal medicine, pushed the organization to rethink how it handles animal health.
The training side ties the aquarium to UT’s veterinary college in Knoxville and the Veterinary Technology Program at Chattanooga State Community College. Fourth-year UT veterinary students will get half of the aquarium’s future externship slots, and the partnership adds internships, fellowships and residencies after graduation.
Chattanooga State students will work as externs concentrating on aquatic and exotic animals, and the aquarium plans to hire one of the first group full time after that student finishes an associate degree. That hire would become the sixth member of a veterinary team led by Dr. Chris Keller, the aquarium’s director of animal health.
Keller said that over the next decade the program could put 50 to 100 veterinarians through the aquarium, carrying what they learn about freshwater species into practices well beyond Chattanooga.
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