Aquarists at work - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 209

evolved from millions of years of encounters with grizzly bears fishing
for salmon as they returned to the streams to spawn. In time our fish
became comfortable with people and eventually would swim over to
greet us when we brought food.
DEAD AND DYING SQUID
Although most of the exhibits were based on the habitats of the Bay
and the animals and plants found in them, there was one small sec-
tion that focused on a group of especially interesting animals. The gallery
of cephalopod mollusks would feature the giant Pacific octopus, two
species of smaller octopus, the chambered nautilus from the South
Pacific, and the local species of squid ( Loligo opalescens ). At least, that
was the plan. Our local squid, however, had never been kept for any
length of time in aquariums, and I wasn't at all sure we could do it
either.
Squid come into the Bay by the millions at the end of their second
year to reproduce. Aggregating in huge schools, they mate, lay their
finger-shaped white egg capsules—which come to look like a vast shaggy
carpet on the sandy mud bottom just beyond the kelp beds o¤ Can-
nery Row—and die. It's an orgy of sex, egg laying, and death.
Although easy enough to collect when they come in to spawn, the
squid, male and female alike, are close to the end of their life. If we
could collect the juveniles, they would have a longer life, but it's still
a mystery where they go after they hatch from the millions of eggs that
are laid every year in Monterey Bay.
Faced with this dilemma of the squid's natural life cycle, we collected
some adult squid just before the opening of the aquarium. They made
for a fascinating but somewhat shocking (and short-lived) exhibit as
the squid mated, laid their egg capsules, and went through their death
throes. A major drawback was that the bottom of the tank was littered
with dead and dying squid. This wasn't easy for visitors to understand,
and I'm sure a lot of them left thinking that a catastrophe had occurred.
Another drawback was that after three weeks we had no more live
squid. So we wouldn't be stuck with an empty tank, we temporarily
switched the exhibit to a school of anchovies, and a year later we in-