Always something new - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 249

for a toast, and the five of them went home for a well-earned sleep in
real beds.
There's no doubt that all of us in the husbandry department took
special care of our new charges. We knew firsthand what it had taken
to get those fish from underwater at the tip of Baja all the way back to
the exhibits in Monterey, and we remembered each fish that we'd per-
sonally caught as if it were a longtime friend.
“Mexico's Secret Sea” was a great success. We knew that the animals,
from the beautiful to the bizarre, would be popular in and of them-
selves, but Don Hughes and his team of designers did an excellent job
of creating an exhibit that captured the atmosphere of Baja California.
In keeping with the Steinbeck-Ricketts theme, “Doc's lab” was re-
produced, complete with authentic furniture, old topics and specimen
jars, and funky wooden aquariums containing live animals. Great at-
tention to detail added that human touch, such as the pair of earrings
in the ashtray by the bed. Throughout the exhibit were scenes of Baja
California and of the collecting trip we'd just completed, contrasted
with pictures of the 1940 trip that Steinbeck and Ricketts made on the
Western Flyer.
“Mexico's Secret Sea,” the first special exhibit that presented nonlo-
cal marine animals to our visitors, proved a successful complement to
our permanent exhibits. As it turned out, the expedition to Baja Cali-
fornia was the last major exotic collecting trip the husbandry depart-
ment would take, at least for a while. It was an unforgettable trip,
definitely on a par with the one Steinbeck and Ricketts had made
decades earlier.
I believe the significance of “Mexico's Secret Sea” was twofold: We
learned that even though we were a regional aquarium, it was all right
to have special exhibits that focused on animals from beyond Mon-
terey Bay. We also learned that living exhibits are much more e¤ec-
tive than nonliving ones at capturing the visitor's interest and getting
our messages across. Beyond that, “Mexico's Secret Sea” literally opened
the aquarium's doors to new approaches in the inspiring area of
exhibition—approaches that would culminate over the next few years
in a major aquarium expansion.