Pelagic fishes - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 276

BONITO AND BARRACUDA
Our next R&D project was to collect bonito and barracuda in south-
ern California to see if we could successfully transport them three hun-
dred miles north to Monterey. The marine science sta¤ of the Uni-
versity of California at Santa Barbara helped by allowing us to set up
a plastic swimming pool to hold our fish prior to transporting them.
The fish showed up o¤ Santa Barbara in the late summer of 1989.
Working from the Lucile, collector John O'Sullivan and his crew trolled
small, shiny lures with barbless hooks and caught a number of both
bonito and barracuda. Just as we'd done with salmon, the collectors
carefully lifted them over the side of the boat, taking care not to touch
them, and quickly released them into the onboard holding tank. Within
a few days enough fish had been caught.
After a few more days in the temporary holding pool, it was time to
transfer the fish to the truck and drive them to Monterey. John, at-
tempting to move the barracuda with the same method we'd used with
salmon—by lowering the water level, climbing into the tank, and guid-
ing the fish into plastic bags—soon realized that another method was
needed. Instead of swimming easily into the bag, the fish took o¤ like
pointy-nosed three-foot-long missiles right through the end of the bag,
as if it wasn't even there.
John and his crew also learned that transporting barracuda and bonito
together in the same tank is not a good idea. The problem lay in di¤er-
ences in behavior. Bonito, like all their tuna relatives, need to swim
constantly in order to get oxygen, but barracuda don't: they can just
hang motionless in the water. This meant they kept getting in the way,
throwing o¤ the steady swimming pattern of the bonito, which often
gave up and sank to the bottom of the tank.
We learned from those initial mistakes, however, and soon the cap-
ture and transport of these fish was successful. Both species settled into
their quarantine holding tank at Monterey, began feeding—the active
bonito almost immediately, followed a couple of weeks later by the more
cautious barracuda—and did well. Another hurdle was out of the way.
Having actually done it, we now knew that we would be able to col-
lect su‹cient numbers of both of these fish for the Outer Bay exhibit.