Pelagic fishes - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 279

crete, the solution they came up with was to pour the structural con-
crete in straight sections and then fit a curved fiberglass liner in front
of the concrete. Water would be on both sides of this liner, so the pres-
sure would be equal on both sides of the fiberglass. The liner only needed
to be strong enough to support itself and to withstand any seismic forces
generated during an earthquake.
Over the years I've had considerable experience with aquarium tank
coatings of various types, and I have yet to come across one that holds
up for any length of time. Sooner or later—usually sooner—the coat-
ings all fail. The blue urethane on the inside of the Steinhart Aquar-
ium's Fish Roundabout started to peel o¤ the wall after just two years.
The back wall of Sea World's Shark Encounter was painted with black
epoxy that quite e¤ectively made the back wall disappear from view
when the tank was brand new. However, stress cracks soon developed
in the concrete, and these needed to be patched and repainted. The
paint over the patches changed color when wet, causing vertical light-
colored stripes that were quite visible.
I knew that the exhibit we were building in Monterey would be home
to fish so large and so fragile that they could never be safely moved.
Draining and repainting the tank was therefore out of the question.
We needed a blue finish that would remain in perfect condition for
the lifetime of the tank itself.
The solution, it seemed, was colored glass tile, such as that used in
Greek and Roman times to make mosaics, some of which are still in
existence today after thousands of years. Glass tile never fades, and it
is totally impervious to seawater. If applied with epoxy and sealed with
an epoxy grout, it would likely stay in place for many, many years. Even
if individual tiles should come loose, they could easily be glued back
into place with a nontoxic epoxy that would cure underwater. With
this coating, barring a catastrophic failure of some kind, like a major
crack in the concrete tank itself, there should never be a need to move
any of the animals to work on the tank.
A second and vitally important benefit of the tile surface was that
although the individual tiles couldn't be seen by visitors thirty to fifty
feet away, the fish would see them when they swam close. Living in a
world of blue, tuna and probably most open ocean fishes are believed