Staff Photo by Shane McMillan -- Four-year-old Lilly Ritz gets up close with a gentoo penguin at the Tennessee Aquarium on Friday. The penguin exhibit is part of the Ocean Journey at the aquarium, which opened in 2005. The aquarium was ranked second best in the country by TripAdvisor.com in a list released on Thursday.

The Tennessee Aquarium is the second-best fish tank in the nation, and the Volunteer State is home to the country’s most popular zoo and aquarium, according to an Internet site.

TripAdvisor.com, which bills itself as the world’s largest travel community, released two top 10 lists Thursday, ranking the best zoos and aquariums in the United States based on ratings from its millions of users.

“Millions of travelers have spoken, and these are the most popular,” said Brooke Ferencsik, a TripAdvisor spokesman.

The top-ranked aquarium was Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies in Gatlinburg, Tenn., while the Memphis Zoo topped the site’s list in its division.

Mr. Ferencsik said the attractions were ranked on quantity and quality of their reviews on the site, with more weight given to more recent comments.

“If you go through the reviews, people just say they love it,” Mr. Ferencsik said of the Tennessee Aquarium. “Travelers on TripAdvisor really have great things to say about it.

“Based on those photos (uploaded by users), I'd love to go myself,” he added.

The site ranks the aquarium as the top attraction in Chattanooga, followed by the Jukebox Junction Theater at the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, Rock City, the Hunter Museum of American Art, Raft One Whitewater on the Ocoee River and 59 other attractions.

“Clearly we’re really excited about this,” said Thom Benson, communications manager for the aquarium. “But it also lets people around here know that this is a world-class facility.”

On the list, Chattanooga’s aquarium topped several heavyweights in major cities, including Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, ranked eighth; the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California at third; and the Florida Aquarium at 10th. The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta was not in the top 10 and is rated on the site as a 3.5 out of five, compared to the Tennessee Aquarium’s 4.5 on the same scale.

“People might expect the Georgia Aquarium and the New England Aquarium to be up there one and two,” said Mr. Ferencsik, who lives in Boston. “But this is based on the opinions of what real travelers from around the world say.”

Some of the TripAdvisor reviews for the Chattanooga attraction are glowing, like one from a user who identified himself as a Washington, D.C., resident: “It is possibly the best aquarium, or certainly among the best with Baltimore, Monterey and Myrtle Beach.”

Others are not so complimentary, such as one from a user who said to be from North Carolina: “If you like to look at the back of a kid’s head, then this is the place for you!”

TripAdvisor.com gets 24 million monthly unique viewers, according to Mr. Ferencsik, and its pages have gathered more than 15 million reviews and opinions since it launched in 2000.

The release Thursday was the first time the site had ranked zoos and aquariums.

The aquarium has averaged about 1 million guests per year since it opened in 1992, Mr. Benson said. Last year, attendance dipped slightly to about 800,000, he said.

“On any given day you can walk through our parking lot and find tags from almost every state in the union,” he said.

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