The open ocean - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 265

San Francisco Bay. To inform visitors of this ecological problem, one
that exists worldwide as transportation becomes easier and farther-reach-
ing, we set up a special display of these Russian jellies and gave it the
eye-catching title of “Alien Invaders!”
“Planet of the Jellies” was an overwhelming success—the most in-
novative and also the most popular of the several special exhibits the
aquarium has done, up to then or since. Even marketing the idea of
jellyfish was successful as people told friends that they just had to go
see this fascinating exhibit. John Racanelli, the aquarium's marketing
director, summed it up when he said, “I thought we were crazy to put
jellyfish on a highway billboard, but it turns out our visitors tell us that
jellyfish are on their list of top three most popular animals.”
The special exhibits we created, all featuring live animals, have clearly
been the secret to the continued success of the Monterey Bay Aquar-
ium. The repeat attendance that these exhibits generated kept the an-
nual attendance at 1.6 million visitors or higher. I believe that without
those special exhibits our attendance would have gradually declined,
just as it has at other aquariums that lack new attractions to bring vis-
itors back.
A LOOK INTO THE DEEP
At the same time we began work on the husbandry of open sea animals,
we started considering the feasibility of keeping deep-sea animals. The
oceans occupy 70 percent of the earth's surface, but the deep sea, un-
like the two-dimensional surface of the land, is a three-dimensional
space. If the deep sea is considered to begin below the photic zone—
the level penetrated by usable sunlight—then the deep sea makes up
over 90 percent of the earth's biosphere or inhabitable space. Very lit-
tle of this vast volume has been explored. The deep sea is truly the last
frontier on earth, and the strange animals that live there are far more
of a mystery than those of the upper sunlit waters of the oceans. Yet if
we approached this challenge methodically, we felt, we should have some
success.
Acknowledging our ignorance about this undertaking, we began by
inviting a group of deep-sea research scientists to participate in a work-