A million-gallon fishbowl - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 294

twenty-seven yellowfin tuna and brought them on the Shogun up to
Moss Landing. We were a little concerned about how the warm
water-loving yellowfin would do when the boat was in the cooler water
in northern California above Point Conception, but they made it.
The fish were unloaded and transferred one by one into the newly
restriped tank. Unlike the albacore, the first yellowfin started to feed
in just a few days, and by the end of the week they were all eating.
This was exciting to see after the albacore's discouraging lack of re-
sponse. The behavior of the yellowfin made the decision for us: we would
focus our energies on yellowfin and put o¤ albacore until after the new
wing had opened.
The following year two more trips were made and we moved some
fish into the twenty-foot-diameter holding tank we had in our quar-
antine area at the aquarium.
Having our primary tuna tank located twenty miles from the aquar-
ium meant we spent a lot of unproductive time driving back and forth.
Not only that, but it soon became clear to us that collecting tuna o¤
San Diego and running the boat three hundred miles at fifteen knots
all the way up to Monterey to unload the fish was not only time-con-
suming but unnecessarily expensive. A more practical and economical
solution, we decided, was to build a large transport unit that could be
loaded on a tractor-trailer rig and driven from San Diego to Monterey
in ten hours instead of two days.
The concept of transporting fishes long distances over land wasn't
new; many years earlier, Marineland of the Pacific had such a tank that
they used to haul fishes from Mexico to Los Angeles and also to trans-
port threadfin shad ( Dorosoma petenense ) from California to Hawaii by
ship. While I was curator at Sea World I had chartered that Marineland
tank to drive Sea of Cortez fishes from Loreto, Baja California, to San
Diego. More recently, Sea World had built a similar tank to transport
sharks across the country. From the 1930s up until the 1960s, too, the
Shedd Aquarium had used a specially constructed railroad car to trans-
port fishes from Florida and California to their aquarium in Chicago.
John O'Sullivan, Chuck Farwell, and I designed a three-thousand-
gallon tank equipped with its own pumping, aeration, and filtration
system. For both strength and temperature insulation, it would be con-