Taking Care of the Fishes An Inside Look at the Monterey Bay Aquarium November 2006

by Richard Kier
Images by R. Byrne & MBAJ

I care for the exhibits at The Monterey Bay Aquarium where the fish live and th rive. The aquarium became the shining jewel of the 1980s redevelopment program that transformed the Cannery Row area following a period of decline. The area has been an American icon since Steinbeck’s classic tale put it on the map forever. But I would guess that more Americans know about the aquarium these days than have ever heard of John Steinbeck.

I’ve been at the Monterey Bay Aquarium longer than the fish have. I was appointed supervisor of the Exhibit Production Shop 25 years ago. I brought a curious résumé to the position. I had taught bilingual education in public schools. I also worked for Sam Prussin, the inventor of Right Guard. I built Sam’s home for him and then worked as research assistant on his New Improved Arid product. The Monterey Bay Aquarium project was different than teaching in public school or making a can of deodorant but my years spent teaching, designing, construction, and lab work taught me all kinds of skills and talents that really did help prepare me for the new challenges of designing, building, and installing the exhibits in the new aquarium.

A Great Man; Great Vision; Great Team
David Packard, of Hewlett-Packard fame, was the founder and, together with his daughter, Julie, was the main influence behind the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Many people know that, but what they don’t know is how hands-on the Packards were with the project. Julie might be found helping a work crew install a tank. Mr. Packard could often be seen on his back under a machine with a hammer or on a ladder screwdriver in hand with his head in a junction box. He would buy tools that we need and would paint a room in the colors that his wife, Lucile, had picked out.

I took over the entire second floor of the administration building for my exhibit production shop. Mr. Packard, himself, came to me and told me to outfit the shop with whatever equipment I needed to build my exhibits. Getting that kind of blank check was a heady experience for a person like me. I converted my wish list into order forms and the equipment soon came flowing through my doors.

Mr. Packard once asked me what I needed and I told him I needed a dozen pull handles for some cabinets I was making. Two days later he brought me some beautiful handles that he had cast himself in his personal forge at his home in Big Sur. They are still being used; they remain as testimonies to the humility of that man and to the intimate involvement he had with this place.

Of course, David Packard was one of the main entrepreneurial geniuses of the 20th Century and was always figuring out how to do things that nobody had done before. For example, he invented two separate wave machines for our exhibits that we are still using today.

The work was play for me. We made models of each of the display areas that were going to be in the aquarium, got the details exactly right on the models, and then used the models to create the actual exhibits.

The Closest You Can Get to the Sea Without Getting Wet
We designed and built the aquarium on a grand scale. The main features have always been the two main tanks, including the 28-foot high, 350,000-gallon tank enclosing our Kelp Forest. The windows into the tank create the effect of a picture window beneath the Bay. Thousands of ocean denizens from sardines to leopard sharks swim leisurely past the gaze of rapt onlookers. Ours was the first living kelp forest successfully grown in a tank of water. The enormous strands of the kelp are viewable from three levels. The water is continually agitated to resemble the wave actions that healthy kelp require, and the effect always fills first-time viewers with awe and delight.

The colossal Kelp Forest tank is dwarfed by the truly stunning million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit, which is home to the world’s largest display of open-ocean animals, including enormous bluefin tuna and the deadly looking hammerhead sharks circling inches away from the viewers. A 5-foot long white shark has recently joined the exhibit.

It required a lot of creative effort to achieve the natural look that marked our aquarium displays from the outset. For example I made latex copies of actual rocks I found on the beach right outside my office window to create molds that I then used to make fiberglass reinforced concrete replicas that were indistinguishable from the real things. Except they were a lot lighter

After we assembled the artificial boulders into seascapes in the tanks, we numbered them, removed them from the display, tethered them in the ocean, marked their location, and then retrieved them 1 1/2 years later. We carefully drew them up from the ocean, together with the plants and animal life that had grown on them during their long immersion. We returned the boulders to the tanks, reassembling them like an enormous jigsaw puzzle to create artificial ocean bottoms that, when the first visitor viewed them through the Plexiglas observation windows, looked as though they had been in place for years.

Those early days were heady times for all of us. It was magical to be around the creative energies that filled that place and those people. I was getting paid to have fun. I was the eleventh employee. After 26 years I now have 35 people working just under me, with a total of more than 1,000 of us working in the facility. Only three of us from that first team are still on the job, but Julie Packard is one of those three survivors and is Executive Director of the facility.

After all these years there is nothing emeritus about Julie’s role; at almost any time of any day I can stand up, look out the window of my office, and see her silver earth-friendly Prius sitting in her parking space. I can tell that she’s here someplace. And she’s working hard!

Beyond Amusement
From the beginning Julie and David’s vision was to create a world-class maritime research space, and we created a marine biologist’s dream. We intended this to be no landlocked aquarium; it would be built right on the water and would use water drawn from Monterey Bay itself. Research would be carried out with a wide variety of projects having to do with fish and the sea. The aquarium would also serve an educational purpose by permitting visitors to view the fish and other sea creatures in natural habitats. Efforts would be made to raise consciousness levels about conservation and marine preservation.

The most effective way to achieve realism is to use real things. When we set up the aquarium we salvaged some aged pilings from an old pier that was being refurbished and installed them in the tanks, being careful to preserve all the plants and animal life intact.

The recycling of pieces from that old pier proved to be a wonderful advantage to a marine biologist who had been conducting a study over time on the growth of limpets and barnacles on one of the very pilings that was now installed in a tank in our aquarium. Instead of having to don diving apparatus in order to record observations in the cold waters of the Bay, he could sit in a comfortable chair, wearing an Hawaiian flowery shirt and Bermudas if he wanted to, making his observations on a dry sheet of paper or, more likely, on a laptop computer.

So before the aquarium had even opened, the noble intention of conducting marine research began to be realized in ways that nobody had anticipated. Not only had the researcher’s task become immeasurably easier, but if the aquarium hadn’t recycled that piling, it would undoubtedly have been destroyed, bringing the researcher’s project to a premature conclusion. 

Everyone was surprised at the 1984 opening by the immediate popularity that the aquarium enjoyed. I guess we had captured the imagination of a lot of people and during the first three months more visitors came through our doors than we had anticipated for the entire first year. We didn’t know what Pandora’s Box we were opening, but a lot of good things have come out of our success.

Maintaining and Advancing Standards of Excellence
We have maintained a constant flow of change and improvement. People can come here every year and see an aquarium that is different than the one they had seen the year before. We have dedicated a number of people and resources to nothing other than figuring out how to impress even more people with the awesome richness of the sea and the need to preserve and conserve this astonishing and fragile heritage.

The quality of the Monterey Bay facility extends beyond the public areas. While we were still in the design phase we visited a number of aquariums throughout the world so we could copy and improve upon the things they did right. We also decided to fix the things that, it seemed to us, other aquariums were doing wrong. For one thing, a number of the large aquariums we visited seemed to have working areas that were characterized by shabby design and shoddy construction. That just seemed wrong! So now if you go behind the scenes in the Monterey Bay Aquarium you will see that our non-public areas are built to last. Instead of particleboard and whitewash, we used fiberglass and stainless steel construction even in the areas that the public doesn’t see. After almost three decades of use, our working and service areas remain clean of rust and decay.

The aquarium has changed behind the scenes as much as its public places have. For one thing, the entire facility is now controlled by an amazingly complex computer-based management system. Seven thousand data points including things like temperatures, flow rate, and filtering capabilities can be monitored and managed from a central room. For example, control is maintained over the 1.3 million gallons of water that is circulated through the Outer Sea tank alone, which includes 80 thousand gallons of Bay water that each day must be added to the system. Equally amazing to me, the whole system is on a network with Internet access so the central management location can now become virtual, permitting technicians to monitor and control the systems from home on their laptops.

The aquarium is an enormous collection of fragile ecosystems that are maintained by light, heat, and especially flowing water. All of which is maintained by elaborate systems of lights, heaters, and pumps. If we lost power to maintain these systems, fish would begin dying within an hour. So we have a powerful generator that will come online within ten seconds in the event of a failure by PG&E, so that we can keep the fish alive. Almost as importantly, the emergency backup system will keep the computers and servers that control everything online, as well.

Our caterpillar diesel will generate 1.5 Megawatts of uninterruptible power, which is enough to run the entire facility so that staff and visitors couldn’t tell there had been a power loss. The generator will consume its entire reservoir of 6,000 gallons of diesel fuel in less than two days, but a fleet of trucks remain ready to begin replenishing it in the event of an extended power-out situation. The system maintained the aquarium without problems for almost five days during the blackouts following the Loma Prieta earthquake. In fact, the aquarium was generating surplus energy and actually helped to load share with PG&E during that time.

The Good Life
I continue to get paid for having fun and still find each day to be unfailingly interesting. During a quarter century on the job I’ve never been bored, which is a remarkable record. The job itself is always changing. Every day seems to present new challenges and experiences that I never imagined before. Beyond all the interesting things associated with my position, each day is marked by the endlessly entertaining parade of visitors that constantly flows through the facility.

I remember that on opening day back in 1984 I hated to see the crowds touching the exhibits that I had worked so hard to create. The aquarium was my baby; I felt protective. But it’s all about the people, of course. It seems to me that young children and senior citizens have the greatest experiences here. They apparently lack the inhibitions and pretenses that diminish many people’s appreciation of this extraordinary place. I love to watch the faces of the kids as they come into the main hall and for the first time catch glimpses of the enormous tanks lining the walls and huge whales hanging from the ceiling. Their eyes are shining.

We’re not like theme parks. We don’t need animatronics; our creatures move by themselves. We don’t need a space theme; when you stand by one of our jellyfish displays, it’s like encountering alien life forms stranger and more mystifying than anything Lucas has come up with yet. Disney’s Magical Kingdom is a great place, I guess, but there are real magical places in the real world and many of them are under the sea. We make this real magic accessible so that people can look, and wonder, and in some cases, perhaps, even worship.

I really miss the formative times when we were scrambling towards opening day. We were like pioneers. We were doing things that had never been done before so we were experimenting all the time. It is easy to think outside the box when you’re inventing the box. There were no computers, radios, or beepers. Everything was hands-on and immediate. I miss the rawness of those days. I would love to get in a time machine somehow, go back, and do it all over again. I’m not complaining, however, because I enjoy my work and appreciate the culture we still have around this place. Even though it is now a large facility with more employees than I know personally, there is still a friendly, family-like feel here. We’re a community. It always feels good to come to work.

After we finished building the aquarium a lot of the temp workers were let go. So on opening day I walked up to David Packard, shook his hand, and told him, “I really enjoyed helping put this together. If I can’t work here any longer, I want you to know that I think this has been wonderful!”

Then that great man said to me, “Richard, you’re going to work here forever!”

Nothing lasts forever, of course. Mr. Packard himself has been gone for a decade and before long I’m going to leave this place myself. But I’ve got a great idea about that! My wife, Kelly, and I own a beautiful little villa in Varenna, Italy, right on the shores of lovely Lake Como. I’m looking forward to retiring there someday. I have a little boat and some of the people there have already contacted me about helping with local private aquariums.

Maybe I’m never going to be finished taking care of the fishes. °