Creating the exhibits - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 193

significant size. We talked to people who knew kelp the best, having
worked with it in either the field or the laboratory—experts such as
Wheeler North of the California Institute of Technology and Mike
Neushal of the University of California at Santa Barbara. They gladly
gave us all the information they had on the nutrient requirements, water
flow velocities, and light intensities that make for happy kelp. They
also wished us a lot of luck.
Relying on their information and our own educated guesses, we pro-
ceeded with the design of the tank. There was really no point in test-
ing anything on a small scale; that had already been done. The acid
test would be when everything was finished and full-sized kelp plants
were brought in and tried out. We had fallback plans, of course. If the
kelp didn't do well, we could continually replace it, or, as an absolute
last resort, we could use the realistic-looking plastic kelp that Carl Gage
of Biomodels had developed. None of us relished this last thought. Our
goal was to bring the natural world to the visitor, and we wanted every
part of it to be real.
Some other exhibit ideas, however, could be tested and would give
me the information I needed to design the best exhibit for a particu-
lar animal or subject matter. One such experiment was to find out
whether sand dollars ( Dendraster excentricus ) would behave in an
aquarium the same way they do in the ocean.
Just outside the breakers along certain sandy beaches live vast
colonies of sand dollars. Most of these spiny, flat animals stand on edge,
looking as if someone had come along and stuck them in the sand like
rows of silver dollars. It almost looks artificial, but that's how they feed,
trapping particles of organic debris that wash by them in the back-and-
forth motion of the wave surge. Their upright position in the sand is
entirely functional.
I tested their behavior in a circular fiberglass tank, using water cur-
rents of varying velocities and directions. Eventually I found a com-
bination that resulted in many of the sand dollars standing up on edge
just as they do in the real world.
Exhibit designer Jim Peterson and I then tackled the challenge of
creating an interesting display with an animal that has no color, doesn't
move, and lives on a featureless sandy bottom. Potentially, this exhibit