Monterey Bay Aquarium 2024 Season is Open

Monterey aquarium reveals exotic creatures of the deep

2023.04.07 – New $15 million exhibition highlights ‘beautiful and delicate and luminous’ sea life.

Armor-plated pill bugs the size of dinner plates. Pulsating red jellyfish that look like beating hearts. Bone-eating worms that consume whale carcasses. Loopy coral seemingly drawn by Dr. Seuss.

The menagerie seems more fitting for a science fiction movie in outer space than something that lives nearby. Yet the bizarre creatures swim in Monterey Bay and other parts of the world’s oceans — often thousands of feet below the surface in pitch-black, cold waters under immense pressure.

After spending years trying to figure out how to collect deep-sea creatures with unmanned robots and keep them alive in captivity, the Monterey Bay Aquarium is preparing to open a new exhibition revealing what lives below the mysterious depths of the world’s oceans down to 10,000 feet below the surface.

The new $15 million attraction, called “Into the Deep: Exploring Our Undiscovered Ocean,” opens April 9 at the aquarium on Cannery Row, which was funded by Silicon Valley tech pioneer David Packard 40 years ago. As much an ode to the technology of marine exploration as to the poetic magnificence of some of the planet’s most unusual life, the exhibition features animals that scientists have only recently discovered, and many which have never been shown before in aquariums anywhere in North America.

“The deep sea is the world’s biggest habitat, but one of the least familiar,” said Stephen Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University unaffiliated with the exhibition. “It’s dark and cold and deep, and there is very little food. Yet the animals there are beautiful and delicate and luminous with their own light. Bringing them to the surface is like us sending astronauts to space.”

Monterey Bay Aquarium

When Packard, an electrical engineer who co-founded Hewlett Packard, and his wife, Lucile, donated $55 million to construct the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the 1980s, the goal was to showcase Central California’s rich marine life, from sea otters to kelp forests, a longtime interest of the Packard family.

“A lot of people think of these animals as scary, creepy or alien. But they aren’t. They are beautiful and elegant and really mysterious. It’s exciting to be able to show all of this to visitors and get them engaged with this whole other world.”

— Beth Redmond-Jones, the aquarium’s vice president of exhibitions and facilities.

keenly interested in advancing the science of marine exploration. With a $13 million donation in 1987 he founded MBARI — the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute — 20 miles north in Moss Landing. Since then, MBARI’s scientists have discovered more than 200 ocean species using research ships, robotic subs, underwater chemistry labs and other cutting-edge gear.

Few other major ocean research centers in the world, including Woods Hole in Massachusetts and Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, have a world-class aquarium on their doorstep as a partner. Most of the animals in the Monterey aquarium’s new deep-sea exhibition were collected by MBARI scientists, who now marvel at the ability of aquarium curators to keep them alive in captivity.

George Matsumoto, a marine biologist at MBARI, discovered a new species of jellyfish in 2003, the bloody belly comb jelly. Magenta red and pulsating, it looks like a floating jewel in its new tank at the aquarium. But it is remarkably fragile.

“If the aquarium had asked me if that was a good candidate to put in a tank in an exhibition, I would have said don’t even try,” Matsumoto said. “When I was doing research, we would collect it, and I would be looking at it on the ship in the collection container, and it would melt and turn the water red. I described it using frame grabs from a video. I never had an intact specimen. I never saw it under a microscope. It was so sensitive to temperature change, I thought it couldn’t be displayed.

“But luckily, they went ahead and did it,” he said. “They have it on display here, and it’s gorgeous. It’s something people have never seen. The number of people in the world who have seen one alive in a container on a ship is probably less than two dozen, until this exhibition opens.”

The exhibition takes seawater from Monterey Bay, filters it and refreshes it in the tanks roughly every hour. The water for the deep-sea creatures is chilled to 39 degrees Fahrenheit. A maze of tubes, membranes and pumps uses nitrogen to reduce the oxygen level to 3% of the surface water, to mimic the conditions more than a mile below the sea.

Matsumoto said understanding more about the the world’s oceans is important not just in inspiring the next generation of scientists but also in helping to protect the undersea world from climate change, plastic pollution and other environmental changes.

“We are trying to learn how the ocean works,” he said, “hopefully before our tinkering gets out of control.”

Some things researchers cannot yet do. The more than 50 species exhibited are able to live at deep pressures and at surface pressure. Although MBARI and a few other scientific institutions in Japan and France have been able to bring up deep-sea fish and other species that live only under immense pressure, exhibiting them to the public in an aquarium is not yet possible. Tanks have to be cleaned, animals have to be fed.

Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Top 10 Deep-Sea Animals | Into The Deep

Watch this video on YouTube

Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Top 10 Deep-Sea Animals | Into The Deep

Among the marquee attractions at “Into the Deep” are the pink corals that live on deep-sea underwater mountains, and sea angels, tiny day-glo critters that are a type of swimming snail with wings. Giant spider crabs from Japan, which look like the face-hugging monster from the movie “Alien,” complete with legs 10 feet across, fill another tank.

The exhibition will be around for eight years and will change as MBARI researchers bring up new species.

See them now: A red paper lantern jellyfish swims in its tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s new “Into the Deep: Exploring Our Undiscovered Ocean” exhibit in Monterey.

A Japanese spider crab crawls past a replica of a whale skull in its tank. The exhibit, opening April 9, is the largest in North America focusing on deep-sea life.

Career Opportunities… They’re hiring!

There is new career opportunities at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Please explore this website, to view opportunities to join their mission of inspiring ocean conservation.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium have hundreds of employees with different skills and jobs, but all support their mission to inspire conservation of the ocean.

Departments:
- Animal Care
  (Applied Water Science, Dive & Collections, Husbandry, Veterinary Services)
- Business Operations
  (Finance & Accounting, Planning & Construction, Technology & Innovation)
- Conservation & Science
  (Policy & Advocacy, Seafood Watch, Research)
- Development & Fundraising
- Education Programs
- Exhibitions
  (Production & Maintenance, Content & Design, Film, Video, Multimedia)
- Guest Experience
- Human Resources
- Marketing

See all open positions

Related See Below: More disposable masks in the ocean than jellyfish?

The Aquarium welcomes back the public with open arms

2021.05.15 – Monterey, CA – The Monterey Bay Aquarium is welcoming back the general public, giving the most popular attraction on the Monterey Peninsula a run-through of health and safety protocols developed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are ecstatic. It’s been a very, very long 14 months,” said Cynthia Vernon, Monterey Bay Aquarium COO.

Vernon was on hand to give a tour of what the aquarium has to offer and what the public can expect as the aquarium opens with some COVID-19 restrictions lifted while others remain in place.

The aquarium had already opened to members only.

“One of the silver linings of the pandemic is we’ve been able to do a lot of maintenance,” Vernon said. “We’ve been sprucing things up, and I think some of the exhibits have never looked better.” Tickets are available online only at https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/ for the general public. The aquarium is open from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays through the end of May. By June 1, the aquarium will be open every day.

Related: Tour the Amazing Monterey Bay Aquarium in California

Watch this video on YouTube

Related: Tour the Amazing Monterey Bay Aquarium in California

Due to the ongoing pandemic, the Monterey Bay Aquarium plans to provide the greatest experience it can to visitors while keeping its employees and the public as safe and healthy as possible, where COVID-19 is concerned, starting with how tickets are obtained.

Tickets will not be available at the main entrance, so interested parties must reserve them online in advance for specific entry dates and times while providing contact-less and staggered access to the aquarium to avoid lines and congregating at ticket counters.

Visitors should be prepared for the aquarium experience that will include health questions but will not include asking about vaccination status.

Everyone ages 3 and older are required to wear face coverings that extend over the nose and mouth and go under the chin. Masks with vents, valves, or significant gaps around the face, as well as neck gaiters, scarves, bandanas or face shields will not be allowed.

Guests will be informed of the importance of keeping a social distance from other parties, touring the exhibits in a one-way flow around the facility, taking advantage of hand sanitizer stations and realizing not all areas are accessible yet, such as the auditoriums and other exhibits that tend to attract people closer together.

Aquarium access will be limited to 125 to 175 visitors every half hour to maintain its capacity limits while providing guests with a less crowded experience.

Personnel will be cleaning throughout the day, giving specific attention to high-touch areas. Fresh air circulation has been increased using a positive air pressure system throughout the facility.

The cafe is open and offers contact-less ordering, seating has been reconfigured to allow for physical distance between groups, and volunteers will be available on the open-air, ocean view decks to limit crowding and to highlight ocean wildlife on Monterey Bay.

Vernon said that the aquarium had laid off about 40% of its staff and is slowly rehiring.

It will be seeking to hire 40 to 60 seasonal staff members to take the facility through Labor Day and so far, after conducting two job fairs, finding interested workers has not been a problem.

“We want people to know we are absolutely back,” Vernon said.

Event Website : https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/

Additional Information –

The Monterey Bay Aquarium can’t wait to sea you again! They have made some changes to help keep everyone safe and healthy while you enjoy an awesome day at the Aquarium. { Here’s what to expect }

Related See Below: More disposable masks in the ocean than jellyfish?

More disposable masks in the ocean than jellyfish?

Did you know there could soon be more masks in the ocean than jellyfish? Disposable masks, when not properly disposed, are doing irreparable harm to our oceans and the organisms that live in them.

Learn more by visiting sleep.com/jellyfish

https://www.sleep.com/jellyfish