Monterey Aquarium to Unveil Mysteries of the Deep

From the dark and claustrophobic control room of the research vessel Point Lobos, pilot Stuart Stratton is having trouble locating a 5-inch invertebrate 1,200 feet below the ocean’s surface.

As the ship pitches and rolls in heavy seas, Stratton is “flying”--steering an unmanned submarine by remote control through North America’s largest underwater canyon. Furious rock music blasting over the cabin’s sound system provides an unlikely soundtrack to the images of deep-sea fish swimming sluggishly across a bank of television monitors.

A pair of marine biologists peer at the screens, directing the pilots to maneuver the submarine toward their prey. Far below, the 7,000-pound camera-and-claw machine skims gracefully over rocks and coral.

Today’s catch will bring the team close to putting the finishing touches on the nation’s first-ever large-scale public display of creatures living so far below the ocean’s waves that sunlight cannot reach them. It is due to open at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in March.

Until now, aquariums have almost always restricted their displays to easy-to-reach and easy-to-nurture animals that live in tide pools or a few hundred feet below sea level.

But if all goes as planned, Monterey’s visitors will be able to see 40 to 50 species harvested from the floor, walls and deep waters of Monterey Canyon, 1,000 to 3,000 feet down. It is an effort that has cost the aquarium about $5 million and nearly a decade of research.

Across the nation, aquariums have watched the Monterey facility struggle with the myriad technical difficulties of mounting the display. They wait now to see how the public will respond.

“For research purposes and public education, it would be a tremendous breakthrough,” says Michael Hutchin, director of conservation and science for the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn. in Silver Spring, Md.

In the last eight years, Gil Van Dykhuizen has led more than 40 expeditions to Monterey Canyon to chase deep-sea creatures through its inky black waters. The tiny animals almost never have been seen alive by anyone on dry land.

All other deep-sea exhibits are built around preserved specimens, videotapes and photographs, but there is “no living deep-sea exhibit,” says Van Dykhuizen. “There’s nothing in an aquarium that has been collected at 1,000 to 2,000 feet. That’s beyond the realm of anybody.”

Learning how to gather the animals, to keep them healthy and to display them has been an often frustrating process of trial and error, says project director Randy Kochevar, a research scientist.

“We had to write the book on this. Nobody had done this before,” he says.

Because they are so inaccessible, no one knew much about the animals that have adapted to the extreme conditions in the deep sea. Just a century ago, scientists assumed life was impossible so far down. No sunlight penetrated, food was scarce, water pressure was enormous and temperatures hovered at 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

When animals were collected from great depths, it usually was by accident, when they were entangled in bottom-dragging fish nets. By the time they reached the surface, they were often dead or dying, killed by the changes in pressure and water temperature or just by being dragged.

Sustaining Life at Sea Level

On this most recent sea hunt eight miles off the coast, one of dozens, the team finds tunicates--a sort of deep-sea animal version of a Venus flytrap that is basically a mouth on a stem--but often can’t pry their rocky perches free from the ocean floor. Each time a specimen is found, the pilots use one of the submarine’s arms to bash the rock it is affixed to. They use the other arm, a steel claw padded with kitchen sponges--to carefully grasp the specimen and float it gently into a collection drawer.

One broken hydraulic line, a repair job and several hours later, just 14 animals, none bigger than a person’s hand, are hauled to the surface. Van Dykhuizen stores them in picnic coolers filled with frigid seawater and seawater ice cubes. He is delighted.

“We got good diversity today,” he says, picking through a collection that includes a pompom anemone, a basket starfish, sea cucumbers, mushroom corals and several tunicates. The voyage has cost $8,000.

When the aquarium and its sister facility, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, first started looking into the possibility of mounting a living deep-sea exhibit, the obstacles seemed nearly insurmountable.

The aquarium uses the research center’s remote-controlled submarine to carefully harvest the creatures. Once able to collect living animals, the aquarium could experiment with how to prevent them from dying at sea level.

“The techniques that they have developed to keep these things alive are going to be very useful for biologists,” says Richard Rosenblatt, a marine biologist with the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla.

“This is the sort of thing that scientists could not get money for. So we will benefit from the spillover of this exhibit,” he says. Scientists will finally get a chance to study the behavior of deep-sea animals, he says.

But the difficulty the aquarium has had in finding species that can be kept alive outside their native habitat is sobering. All told, its marine biologists brought up and experimented with about 150 species, of which fewer than 50 were hardy enough to survive a year or longer. The most troublesome were the fish and other creatures that live in mid-water, not on the sea floor or canyon walls. These also happen to be some of the more dramatic-looking deep-sea animals.

“Some melted down almost immediately,” says researcher Kochevar. “Others just failed days or weeks after we put them in tanks.”

As a result, the aquarium will have relatively few live displays of fish that produce their own luminescence or of the small fish with huge mouths and fangs that some members of the public might expect from such an exhibit. Kochevar anticipates that the star of the display will be the modest eelpout, a small, eel-like mid-water fish that curls into hoop shapes when alarmed. It can live in water as deep as 4,300 feet.

His greatest disappointment, Kochevar says, was the flapjack octopus, “the most adorable, charming creature you’ve ever seen.” The small animal lives on the ocean floor. To hunt, it shoots up as much as 20 feet, then spreads its tentacles and parachutes back down, sealing itself to the bottom over its prey. But the animals could not adjust to tank life and bashed themselves to death.

Fish with gas bladders could not withstand the enormous pressure change that occurs when they are brought from the deep to sea level. The bladders--which give them equilibrium in the water--explode, killing them.

The scientists experimented with oxygen mixtures, food, light and temperatures to keep alive the species that could withstand the transition to sea-level tanks.

Even after scientists at the aquarium figured out how to keep more than four dozen species alive for six months to a year, the museum’s board of directors feared that the generally small, dull-colored and fragile creatures just weren’t sexy enough to capture the public’s imagination.

Two years ago, to the dismay of some of the project’s biologists, the board voted to scale down “Mysteries of the Deep.” Originally intended to be a permanent exhibit, it now is slated to run for just three years.

Kochevar says he understands the board’s caution. But he’s convinced that the public reaction will persuade the aquarium that the exhibit should stay.

“I just think people are going to be blown away by this,” he says.

Scarity of Species Limits Exhibit

From its 1985 opening, the aquarium intended to show all the habitats of Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary, Kochevar says. The aquarium started with the plants and animals that inhabit the inner bay, then added a wing on the outer bay. The deep sea, he says, was a natural next step, because Monterey Canyon--a chasm plunging as much as two miles and covering hundreds of square miles--lies just off the coast.

“The theme of the exhibit will be that understanding deep-sea life--in the open ocean, on the walls of the Monterey Canyon and on the floor of the ocean--is like putting together a giant puzzle,” Kochevar says. “The three habitats are all interconnected. And we will show the ways in which humanity interacts with the deep sea.”

Only the Monterey Bay Aquarium and research institute--backed by the Packard Foundation--has the financial resources to mount such an effort, says John McCosker, a biologist at the California Academy of Sciences and former director of the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco.

McCosker mounted a small-scale living deep-sea exhibit for a year at the Steinhart in 1975. But he was able to display just four living specimens, harvested by net.

“We had a chance to see if we could convince the public how interesting deep-sea creatures are,” he says. “I think we failed miserably.” The public was unimpressed.

“The problem is that the deep sea is a Lilliputian world where there are few bright colors,” he says.

But since then, the public’s interest in the deep sea has been stimulated by movies such as “Titanic” and documentaries on deep-sea exploration.

And aquariums are getting more interested in deep-sea exhibits, McCosker says, “because we’ve run out of cool things to look at in shallow waters.”

Monterey’s exhibit is limited, McCosker says, by the relative paucity of species in Monterey Canyon. Far greater varieties of animals live in the depths of tropical seas, where the much warmer surface temperatures keep alive a greater variety of species that in turn feed the animals scavenging below.

The relatively low year-round temperature of the surface water in Monterey Bay has helped the aquarium, however, because it has made it easier to keep the animals pulled from the deep alive. After experiments, the aquarium has opted for refrigerated tanks that will keep water temperatures at about 40 degrees.

Tramping through the exhibit hall, where workers are just starting to install tanks, Kochevar talks about what he hopes visitors will take away from the display.

“I want people to begin to realize that this is life on the biggest part of our planet,” he says. “I want them to connect with it emotionally, to be really awed.”