Roundabout to steinhart aquarium - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 158

and the hundred-foot-plus visibility was utterly enticing—so much so,
in fact, that we really had to watch ourselves. It was very tempting to
keep going just a little bit deeper, to see what wonderful new animal
we might find. The usual clues of getting colder or darker with increasing
depth simply weren't obvious, so it was important to keep an eye on
our depth gauges. The nearest decompression chamber was two thou-
sand miles away in Hawaii, and with only one flight a week, a case of
the bends would be big trouble.
In addition to collecting sharks, we made several night dives to col-
lect a variety of coral reef fishes, including some of the beautiful South
Pacific parrotfish, which were destined for Sea World and the Scripps
Aquarium. We kept them in one of the concrete pools similar to the
one we used for the blacktips. At one point Bob commented that the
parrotfish sure were hard to see in that pool. I told him not to worry;
they must just be hiding under the rocks.
However, when the time came to pack up our sharks and fish for the
flight to Hawaii, we couldn't find a single parrotfish. We were ba›ed.
We knew we'd put them in there. We knew they couldn't get out; yet
we found no dead ones. Where'd they go? One of the island crew finally
took pity on us and explained. It seems that the night operator of the
nearby desalination plant was Samoan, and one of the delicacies in
Samoa is raw parrotfish liver. Every evening after we went to bed he
would catch one of our beautiful parrotfish, eat the liver for his din-
ner, and toss the rest in the ocean. A little lesson in cultural di¤erences.
The week drew to an end and it was time for us and our precious
little sharks to catch the weekly flight to Hawaii and on to the main-
land. The trip back was a far cry from the flight two years earlier on
the Pan Am freighter. This time the sharks were in the cargo hold, and
to our fellow passengers we just looked like well-tanned tourists re-
turning from a Hawaiian holiday. The blacktips did well, and again,
after two years at Steinhart, they grew too large for their exhibit tank
and ended up at Sea World, along with the ones that Ray Keyes— or
rather Blackie—had collected.
There was a rewarding sequel to this second trip to Canton. At Sea
World in 1996, an adult blacktip reef shark gave birth to a litter of pups.
They were the same size as those we collected in 1976. It was really