Biology Reference
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transparent acrylic window, with fatal results. Two scuba divers were
in the exhibit tank just in case a fish sank to the bottom and needed
help getting up and going.
The entire tuna operation, from the initial capture in southern Japan,
to the year spent feeding and raising them in net pens, to the ship and
truck transport to Tokyo Sea Life Park, impressed on me the human
e¤ort and money that went into each tuna on display. I don't know
how much each live tuna costs the aquarium, but it must be very ex-
pensive. We are most grateful to the generous and hospitable sta¤ of
Tokyo Sea Life Park for openly sharing the hard-earned knowledge they
gained in working with tuna.
ELUSIVE ALBACORE
It was scary to think that in the course of planning the new wing, we
had committed the Monterey Bay Aquarium to a million-gallon ex-
hibit of which the key species would be tuna. We knew our aquarium
couldn't a¤ord anything like the investment Tokyo Sea Life Park made
to get their tuna. It was imperative we come up with a way to do our
collecting at considerably less cost.
The situation in California is quite di¤erent from that of Japan. On
the positive side, the tuna found o¤ the coast of California are much
larger, so we wouldn't have to spend a year growing the fish up to an
exhibitable size. On the unknown side was the question of whether
we could catch these wild tuna and then transport them safely, so that
they remained healthy and active. I felt confident, though. The trip
to Japan had been a great education for us, especially seeing Tokyo
Sea Life Park's success in transporting bluefin weighing as much as
twenty pounds.
In a way, the Japanese were fortunate to have an abundance of very
small tuna that are easy to handle without causing injury to the fish.
O¤ the California coast, we see much larger albacore, yellowfin, and
bluefin tuna, weighing five pounds to forty pounds or more. Even a
ten-pound tuna, which is mostly solid muscle, can potentially injure
itself during its powerful struggles. To survive the trauma of capture,
a fish that size must be handled correctly—and at this point we didn't
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