Cannery Row Is Back on the Cutting Edge

Ed Ricketts would hardly recognize the Cannery Row where more than half a century ago he studied sea creatures in his laboratory and drank cheap wine with author John Steinbeck.

Practically next door to the aging shell of the late Ricketts’ lab on Cannery Row is a formidable new wing of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, home to a spectacular exhibit of marine animals from Monterey’s outer bay.

Inside, large orange jellyfish float in water as blue as the deep ocean. Fast-swimming yellowfin tuna mingle in a million-gallon tank with a barracuda and sunfish--all in the same spot where billions of sardines were once ingloriously put into cans.

Monterey, which thrived half a century ago on the smelly, noisy fish processing plants of Cannery Row, has left its industrial past to become a leading international center of ocean research and education.

Today, the aquarium is one of 18 institutes and agencies on Monterey Bay devoted to studying and teaching the public about the marine environment. Some say the 23-mile-wide bay--protected by its recent designation as a national ocean sanctuary--surpasses every other region in the country as a place for studying the marine environment.

“The research being done out in the bay here is cutting-edge,” said Scott Kathey, a Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary spokesman. “Much of it is research that is being done nowhere else in the world. They are finding new species in the deep ocean canyon almost every day.”

With its window on the undersea world, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has become the showpiece of the bay’s scientific community. As the first aquarium in the nation to focus entirely on local communities of marine life, it continues the pioneering work of Ricketts--a Depression-era marine biologist who was Steinbeck’s model for the hard-drinking Doc in his novel “Cannery Row.”

And just as Steinbeck’s writings popularized Monterey for countless tourists from all over the world, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has drawn millions for a firsthand look at the wonders of the bay.

“This has become one of the nation’s premier aquariums,” said Gary B. Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at nearby UC Santa Cruz. “The aquarium showed the public for the first time what marine scientists knew was out there.”

While the original wing of the 12-year-old aquarium displays Monterey Bay’s near-shore habitats and animals, the new wing and Outer Bay exhibit that open Saturday will take visitors farther offshore, exhibiting species from the deep.

With the expansion, the aquarium will also begin actively promoting marine conservation. Visitors will be invited to pledge to help protect the ocean and will be given postcards to dispatch environmental messages to their senators. The aquarium will pay the postage and mail the cards.

“Our mission is to create future stewards of this bay,” said Executive Director Julie Packard, whose father, Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard, financed the aquarium. “We have tried to raise public awareness about the ocean environment. We need to get people focused on what covers most of the planet: the ocean.”

In the Outer Bay exhibit, the aquarium designers have attempted to create the illusion of a water world without walls or floors. Shifting, dappled light illuminates the exhibit areas. Most of the tanks are designed so visitors cannot see the sides or bottom, and the color is the blue of the deep outer bay.

The exhibit’s centerpiece is the million-gallon tank with what is advertised as the world’s biggest window: a 13-inch-thick, 39-ton piece of acrylic, 54 feet wide and 14 1/2 feet tall. In itself a technological achievement, the window was made in Japan in five segments and seamlessly joined together in Monterey.

The huge tank holds a variety of species on permanent display for the first time in the United States--the schooling bonito, the fierce California barracuda, the ungainly sunfish and the speedy yellowfin tuna, one of the world’s few species of warm-blooded fish. Altogether, about 250 animals will be in the tank, including a green sea turtle.

Nearby, smaller tanks are the home of striking varieties of jellyfish. In one enclosure, small comb jellies refract light like prisms as they propel themselves through the water by waving tiny hairs. Perhaps most stunning are the sea nettles, large orange and brown jellyfish that hover gently in a sea of blue.

Even without the new wing, the aquarium has been a boon to the Monterey economy. Each year, it has drawn 1.6 million visitors and brought in more than $110 million from tourists who otherwise would not come to the area, said aquarium spokesman Ken Peterson.

Until the 1950s, Monterey’s main link to the bay was the flourishing sardine fishery that fed the huge processing factories lining Cannery Row.

In his novel, Steinbeck described the scene this way: “The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty.”

So lucrative was the trade that the fishing fleet pursued its quarry without limit. The unrestrained fishing took a heavy toll. By the early 1950s, the region’s sardine fishery had collapsed.

Sardines that once numbered in the billions were virtually gone. The loss devastated the local economy, putting fishermen and cannery employees out of work, and was one of the state’s early lessons on the consequences of the uncontrolled use of resources.

“Cannery Row, the largest sardine port in the world, went bust,” said Rep. Sam Farr (D-Monterey), who was a boy at the time. “It affected the lives and economy of Monterey Bay like few communities in the country have experienced. We learned long before it was politically popular the need for sustainable resources.”

As the canning companies abandoned the coast during the 1950s, the Row fell into even greater disrepair. It only slowly made a comeback as restaurants and gift shops opened up to take advantage of tourism generated by Steinbeck’s books.

It was during the heyday of the sardine fishery that Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends, drinking buddies and intellectual companions. The author joined Ricketts on field trips to collect marine animals and drew inspiration from him in his writing.

As a scientist, Ricketts is celebrated today as one of the first to study the ecology of marine creatures and understand them in the context of their habitat.

“He was ahead of his time,” said aquarium education director Steve Webster, who will give Monterey’s 10th annual Ed Ricketts lecture at a symposium next month. This year’s title: “Ed Ricketts, Where Are You When We Need You?”

The marine biologists who created the aquarium, including Julie Packard, studied Ricketts’ work in college and, in designing the aquarium, followed his philosophy of seeing creatures in their natural habitat.

“We are all aware of Ricketts and his work,” Packard said. “His approach influenced our view of the world.”

Recently, Ricketts’ brown, two-story building--with no sign or plaque denoting its past--was acquired by the city to be restored as a historic landmark.

Seeking to maintain as much history of the era as possible, the city last month also bid $31,000 for a first edition copy of “Cannery Row” bearing a handwritten inscription from Steinbeck to Ricketts. But it lost out to a private collector who bid $1,000 more.

Like other early marine biologists, Ricketts was attracted to Monterey Bay by its clean water and abundant marine life.

The earliest ocean research center, Hopkins Marine Station, dates to 1891. After the demise of the sardine industry, facilities such as the University of California’s Long Marine Laboratory and Cal State’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories were established.

Over the past decade--with the involvement of the Packard family and the federal sanctuary designation--marine science has flourished. Now, ocean research institutes ring Monterey Bay, from the city of Monterey north to Santa Cruz.

UC’s Griggs estimates that the bay’s 18 marine institutes and agencies have a combined annual budget of $110 million and employ about 1,600 scientists, graduate students and staff.

One of the newest research centers is the aquarium’s sister facility, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which was founded by the Packard family in 1987. The interdisciplinary institute focuses on technological advances in ocean science, developing such thing as fish tags that can transmit data via satellite and submersible research vessels that can collect samples from the ocean depths.

With the deep-diving vessels, scientists are able to explore the bay’s unique 7,000-foot-deep canyon--so big it could contain the Grand Canyon with room to spare.

Unlike any other place on either coast, the offshore canyon provides researchers with a deep-water habitat within two miles of land, making it possible to conduct research trips in a single day.

“We know less about the deep ocean than we do about outer space,” said the sanctuary’s Kathey. “We are tremendously fortunate to have this wealth of research right here.”