New exhibit plans to go deep
The $15 million exhibit is slated to open in 2022
MONTeReY » Creatures that live in cold, dark ocean depths, coming only to the surface to feed, mingling with an unknown number of yet-to-be- discovered species living their lives in the deep canyon of the Monterey Bay are the subjects of an ambitious exhibition now in the planning stages at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The $15 million “Into the Deep: Exploring our Undiscovered Ocean” won’t be ready to open until 2022, but crews and aquarium staff are busy with engineering work and collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to bring these deep ocean animals to the public, many of which have never been seen in an aquarium before.
It will be the world’s first largescale exhibition of deep-sea life.
Beth Redmond- Jones, vice president of exhibitions and facilities for the aquarium, said the $15 million project — funding of which was acquired before the onset of COVID-19 — is dependent upon the aquarium working together with MBARI, an internationally recognized sister organization.
“The aquarium and MBARI are both internationally respected institutions and this exhibit will be unique because of that collaboration,” Redmond-Jones said. “A lot of people look at MBARI as a lens on the ocean.”
The scope of the work is enormous. The aquarium began the early planning several years ago and will be working right up to the planned opening of the exhibit in March 2022.
As a measure of its size, the exhibit is expected to encompass more than 10,000 square feet, big enough to house two NBA basketball courts. It will fill 21 live tanks, provide hands- on interactive displays, videos, and several other features, including introducing visitors to MBARI.
“These will be multisensory experiences,” Redmond-Jones said.
But it’s what’s inside those tanks that can be considered truly amazing. Animals that are not on the tips of anyone’s tongues — tiny sea squirts that live inside giant mucus houses or things called bloodybelly comb jellies — will be gently, ever-so-gently, coaxed into custom-engineered containers to bring back to the exhibit.
“Some of these animals are so fragile, far more fragile than a Faberge egg,” she said.
These are creatures of the deep. For some of the animals, Redmond-Jones described their home turf as mid- depth,
somewhere between the ocean floor and the surface, but others, like g iant isopods (in the crustacean family), live on the floor of the deep.
Considering the depths of the Monterey Canyon — that epic depression that rivals the Grand Canyon — can measure more than 11,000 feet, these critters definitely hail from alien environments.
Things like temperature, pressure, acid- alkaline levels and light all have to be set, controlled and maintained in the tanks. Some of the species that will appear in the exhibition have not been described or given a scientific name yet.
“These are just a handful of what’s been discovered ,” Redmond- Jone s said. “We don’t even know what is down there because it’s so unexplored. There could be a species that could hold the cure for cancer.”
One of the important missions of the aquarium is education and through research and exhibitions, visitors are taught what effects climate change, deepsea drilling and overfishing can have on marine life.
Research is still uncovering how intricate the food web is, and how the extinction of a single species could have unknown and even catastrophic consequences for the planet and all its inhabitants.
“We’re studying the longterm survival of these species,” Redmond-Jones said. “Seeing how they thrive in an aquarium will help us understand how they will survive in the wild.”