Underwater thoughts - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 13

in particular, a little octopus, fascinated my friends. One day in 1954,
Betty Mumby, a fellow UCLA student, asked if she could come up
and see my octopus. That was probably one of the more unusual lines
to lead to a relationship, but it certainly worked. We started seeing more
and more of each other, and pretty soon we married.
Betty worked full-time in the UCLA Admissions O‹ce while I
finished my master's degree. A couple of years after we married I finally
got my degree and started to look seriously for a job. By then Betty
was seven months pregnant. Unfortunately, the world wasn't crying
out for marine biologists, and I couldn't find a thing. I even applied
for work in the aircraft industry—twisting the truth about my educa-
tion just a bit—in an e¤ort to get any kind of paying job. Betty, now
very close to term, finally quit her job on a Friday, I found a job on
Monday, and our daughter Eve was born on Thursday. That was cut-
ting it pretty close.
In desperation I'd walked in the front door of the Hyperion Sewage
Tr eatment Plant and asked if they had any job openings. I could barely
believe it when they told me they had a temporary job in the lab. That
huge plant treated and discharged all the sewage from the City of Los
Angeles. My job was to test for coliform bacteria on the seawater sam-
ples taken daily in Santa Monica Bay from Malibu to Palos Verdes. Once
I got used to the odor, it was a pretty good job. We sewage workers had
a saying: “It may be just shit to you, but to us it's our bread and butter.”
The job had an interesting fringe benefit that was right up my alley:
once a month they would collect fishes and invertebrates from the bay
to determine if the sewage and the sludge discharging were having any
e¤ect on marine life. A series of stations at di¤erent depths from fifty
to six hundred feet were sampled with a trawl net dragged across the
bottom. I got to go out on the boat every month to help catch, count,
and identify the creatures that came up in the net.
I was fascinated with some of the invertebrates that lived in the depths
of the bay—grotesque, long-legged crabs covered with spines ( Par-
alithodes spp.), delicate branching corals, and sometimes a whole net-
ful of fragile pink sea urchins ( Allocentrotus fragilis )—and I would take
some of the animals from the shallower samples to keep in my home