Aquarists at work - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 210

troduced another cephalopod, the cuttlefish ( Sepia o‹cinalis ), from Eu-
rope. At least it fit with the cephalopod theme of the gallery, even though
this species, like the adjacent chambered nautilus, doesn't occur in Mon-
terey Bay.
The chambered nautilus still needed to be collected. Senior aquar-
ist Mike Weekley asked if he could take part of his vacation time plus
some work time to assist Dr. Peter Ward of the University of California
at Davis with an ongoing research project investigating the biology of
the chambered nautilus o¤ the coast of New Caledonia. While he was
there he would collect some nice large adult specimens for our exhibit.
It sounded like a good opportunity for him, for us, and for science.
But then tragedy struck. Two weeks after his departure I received a
phone call informing me that Mike had died in a diving accident. I
was stunned. The woman on the phone could provide no details, but
we found out later that Mike and Peter Ward had been diving quite
deep and Mike had fallen unconscious well below the hundred-foot
depth. He never regained consciousness.
The first suspicion was that the air in their scuba tanks had been
bad, but that was later ruled out by French o‹cials in New Caledo-
nia. No autopsy was done, and even if it had been I'm not sure it would
have pinpointed the cause of death. We do know that in order to work
with the chambered nautilus they were making many deep dives, and
the cumulative physiological e¤ects of repetitive deep dives can be dan-
gerous. What made it all so upsetting was that Mike was young, strong,
and at the beginning of a promising career.
One of the hardest things I've ever had to do was go to Mike's house
and tell his wife, Jamie, what had happened. His body and personal
belongings were shipped back to Hawaii for burial. Mike's death oc-
curred in 1984, and I still find myself thinking about him and how things
might have been if he were still with us. It was a tremendous loss to all
who knew him.
At the Waikiki Aquarium, where Mike had his first job as an aquar-
ist, and at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the exhibits of nautilus each
bear a plaque: “In honor and memory of Michael Weekley.” I know
Mike would be proud that people can now see living nautilus, a species
whose exhibition he helped pioneer.