The proposed Ellesmere Port aquarium will be twice as large as Fife's and Chester

The proposed Ellesmere Port aquarium will be twice as large as Fife's and Chester Zoo warns that it will dramatically cut its own visitor numbers, threatening breeding programmes such as Karha's and leaving the zoo itself to face extinction.For its part, Ellesmere Port and Neston Council insists that the entire future of the struggling town - always regarded as Chester's poorer, grubbier cousin - utterly depends upon the proposed giant pounds 11m fish tank.In his spacious office, heaving with learned books on wildlife, Dr Gordon McGregor Reid, director of Chester Zoo, talks scathingly of the aquarium. The setting is a world away from the girls in wetsuits who recently gathered signatures for a pro-aquarium petition outside Ellesmere Port's local supermarket. Strategies may differ, but politeness on all sides has all but broken down. Even the insults are aquatic: dealing with the smooth Mr Crane, who made a fortune in video rental before turning his entrepreneurial sights to the deep, is, says Mr Reid, "like trying to nail a jellyfish to a rock".Mr Reid insists Mr Crane is deliberately setting up shop next door to his zoo so that he can poach its 800,000 annual visitors. What incenses him most is the pounds 3.1m European Commission grant for which Mr Crane has applied, with council backing, to help him do it.

Chester and its zoo do not qualify for the development funds available to its more needy neighbour and Mr Reid complains it is "unfair" that such a large sum of "public money" could be used by a private company to put a charitable trust out of business.Since the zoo registered its opposition with the local EC funding office six months ago, plans for the aquarium - then tipped to be within days of grant approval - have been on hold. There have been a flurry of independent assessments and reports. A decision on the grant will finally be made next month.Suggestions from Ellesmere council, Mr Crane and local businessmen that the zoo "get into bed" with the private aquarium to create a tourist "dream ticket" adds insult to prophesied fatal injury. "The aquarium shows no interest in conservation," insists Mr Reid, coincidentally one of the world's leading aquarists, who insists he cannot ignore the ideological gulf between a highly respected, non-profit-making organisation dedicated to worldwide conservation and a fledgling private company primarily focused on profit and public entertainment. But he is clearly feeling the squeeze.Meanwhile, Phil Crane, the zoo's bete noire, waits with impatience for next month's decision.

A self-made Yorkshire man with forthright views, he argues the zoo has only itself to blame for its predicament. "I think the zoo wants to build its own aquarium and tropical rainforest, but they have been caught napping," he says According to Mr Crane, the alleged lethargy is widespread. "Every tourist attraction in the area, including the zoo, is declining. I've told them, you can either sit there and watch or get off your backsides and market the hell out of Cheshire."He argues the zoo has failed to develop as a showpiece for visitors and to capitalise on one of the country's greatest tourist areas, which also boasts one of the highest levels of local consumer spending. He puts the zoo's opposition down to "sour grapes" that someone should presume to do what it has failed to - and snobbishness that anyone from outside its cosy academic world should encroach on its territory.He says that while he has no marine expertise, he has bought it in and denies that his aquariums are research- and conservation-free zones.

"Yes, I make aquariums entertaining, but that doesn't preclude research or education," he argues. Like museums and academic institutions, Chester Zoo, he says menacingly, has been too long on a pedestal.Mr Reid is aggrieved. "It's a bit like the boy in the playground saying join my gang or I'll punch your nose. Why should the zoo lend its reputation to an organisation with no track record and fewer visitors? If we operated like the aquarium, we would have three, not nine, elephants and only four chimpanzees, not 37. The public would be satisfied, but the zoo could not run a breeding programme. Our proud boast is that the animals are our only shareholders."At Labour-controlled Ellesmere council, however, they are primarily concerned with the survival and well-being of the human population. And it has been a tough 10 years for Ellesmere Port's Homo sapiens.The town has always had an identity problem, being an outpost of industrialism more suited to Merseyside than the posher, rural Cheshire to which it is so oddly attached.