The steinhart aquarium - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 52

Ricketts was not one to adapt to the structured way of think-
ing in the academic world. After all, his keen observations of the
way animals and plants have adapted to life in the harsh and com-
petitive world of the intertidal gave him new insights into the way
things worked.
The physical environments along the shores of the West Coast,
he noted, di¤er widely in types of bottom and exposure to waves
and to air during low tides. These di¤erences have led to the evo-
lution of invertebrates that are adapted to particular habitats and
physical conditions. Eventually Ricketts was talked into writing
the now classic topic Between Pacific Tides, which clearly laid out
the zonation of life in the intertidal.
Ricketts had a fascination with all life. His charismatic Bo-
hemian nature attracted a number of friends of both sexes, among
them writer John Steinbeck. Ricketts and Steinbeck formed a close
friendship that culminated in 1940 with a scientific expedition to
Baja California and the Gulf of California. The success of Stein-
beck's topic The Grapes of Wrath enabled him to charter a boat,
the Western Flyer, and fund the expedition.
The narrative part of the jointly authored topic The Sea of
Cortez, written by Steinbeck, is filled with the philosophy of Ed
Ricketts. In addition, although Steinbeck took certain literary lib-
erties, the character of Doc in the topics Cannery Row and Sweet
Thursday is clearly patterned after his friend Ed Ricketts.
Cannery Row as Ricketts knew it and the way it now exists as
a major tourist area on the California coast represents two di¤er-
ent worlds. However, his laboratory is still there, almost un-
touched. To many people, that lab is a memorial to those rough-
and-tumble days; you can almost imagine Ricketts preparing to
catch the early-morning low tide to make a collection and to won-
der at the diversity of life along the shore.