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person was tossed into the pool. Some of us had planned ahead and
brought swimwear, but others weren't so fortunate: they went in
clothes and all.
That summer we again chartered the
Shogun
and went after albacore.
This trip was more successful and fifteen albacore were brought in.
We were optimistic that we could keep them alive this time. We sus-
pected that, in addition to the tank being too shallow, the two alba-
core might have failed to feed because there were simply too few fish
to form a school. Two fish do not make a school. Ken Norris, my for-
mer boss at Marineland and later a respected professor of marine bi-
ology at UC Santa Cruz, theorized that schooling fish require a min-
imum number to school, feel secure, and survive. The number varies
somewhat with the size and species of fish, but the critical number is
believed to be about six to ten individuals. We had fifteen—more than
enough to form a healthy school.
As it turned out, we found we had more lessons to learn as a num-
ber of unexpected things went wrong. First, we realized we'd made a
big mistake by failing to replace the black stripes. For some reason we'd
thought that because the first two albacore showed no inclination to
run into the tank wall, perhaps we didn't need them. That was
definitely wrong. The new fish had a hard time seeing the uniformly
colored wall when they were startled and took o¤ at high speed. We
lost several fish from hitting the wall. Another problem was with the
electrical power. A split-second delay in the emergency lights coming
on was enough to panic a fish, causing it to hit the tank wall. And finally,
once again, we weren't able to encourage the fish to take any type of
food, living or dead. We lost all the fish within a few weeks.
Y ELLOWFIN TUNA
Although albacore are the primary species of migrating tuna that come
by Monterey, we decided that yellowfin tuna might be a more practi-
cal species to work with. Not only are they easier to find o¤ San Diego,
but we knew from Tokyo Sea Life Park's experiences that they do well
in an aquarium. In the summer of 1993, then, Chuck Farwell and John
O'Sullivan went on a collecting trip o¤ San Diego; they caught
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