Divers in Costume Carve Pumpkins to Open ODDtober

Carving a pumpkin needs a pumpkin and a serrated knife. Carving one at the Tennessee Aquarium needs a pumpkin, a serrated knife, a wetsuit, a mask, gloves and a set of SCUBA gear. Two costumed divers dropped into the Tennessee River exhibit on Wednesday, September 30 and did exactly that, which is how ODDtober starts in Chattanooga.

ODDtober runs the whole month and is the aquarium’s annual celebration of the weird end of the natural world. The underwater carving is the signature of it, and it repeats every Saturday at 2 p.m. The divers alternate sites: the Tennessee River exhibit on odd-numbered days, River Giants on even-numbered ones. Both are in the River Journey building.

What else is running all month

Scuttlebutt Reef, the gallery that opened in March in the Ocean Journey building, is the natural home of a festival about oddities. It holds glow-in-the-dark chain catsharks, lumpsuckers, which hold position on rock using a suction disc on the underside of the body, and double-jawed moray eels. The gallery’s ODDtober program, Rumors of the Reef, spends its time knocking down the myths people arrive with about marine animals.

Over in Delta Country, Bones in the Bayou is a daily hands-on program with the skulls of American alligators and alligator snapping turtles. That is a better teaching object than it sounds. An alligator snapping turtle skull is mostly hooked beak, and the animal behind it is in trouble: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service keeps a species page on it, and on the IUCN Red List Macrochelys temminckii is assessed as Endangered. A child who has held the skull has a reason to care which way that goes.

The animals get the season too. The aquarium’s alligators are offered pumpkins as enrichment in Delta Country, which is the sort of thing that looks like a gag and is in fact a keeper giving an ambush predator a novel object to investigate.

The dated things to plan around

Undersea Explorer, from Friday, October 9. A virtual reality experience from IMMOTION Entertainment, installed at the end of the Tennessee River gallery in River Journey. The debut lineup is four short films shot on location, running from a tropical reef to a marine conservation project in Mozambique and on to the whale grounds off Tonga. It is an add-on: $8 for general admission guests, $6 for members.

Octo-berfest, Friday, October 9. A 21 and over after-hours event with Oktoberfest-style beers, German pretzels and seasonal decoration. Advance tickets only.

Aquascarium, Friday, October 30, 4 to 8 p.m. The family Halloween night, spooky but not too spooky. It regularly sells out and tickets have to be bought in advance.

There are also ODDtober episodes of the aquarium’s podcast on animals that trick and treat, and on why the Southeast is suddenly full of long-legged Joro spiders. And a glow-in-the-dark sticker in the gift shop, while supplies last.

Is ODDtober worth a trip?

If you have a child who likes the gross and the strange, yes, and the reason is structural rather than seasonal. An aquarium that spends a month leaning into suction-disc fish, double-jawed eels and turtles built like bear traps is teaching the part of natural history that actually holds a seven-year-old’s attention. Chattanooga is also a short drive from a lot of the Southeast, and the aquarium has a habit of making its odder residents the headline, and it announced a first birth of its kind at the aquarium only last month.