Monterey Bay Aquarium

Before you look at anything, just listen. Somewhere behind the glass, water moves in a slow surge, rising and falling like a breath. The air carries a trace of salt and a faint coolness. Outside the windows, waves break on dark rocks only a few steps away. This is the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The ocean you hear is not a recording. Much of the water in these tanks comes from the bay itself, pumped in from just beyond the shoreline you can see.

To understand this place, start with the street outside. The aquarium sits at one end of Cannery Row, a strip of waterfront once lined with sardine canneries. In the first half of the twentieth century, this shore smelled of fish, steam and diesel. Boats unloaded enormous silver catches. When the fish were running, workers packed them into tins through the night. Then, around the middle of the century, the sardines largely vanished from the bay. The canneries closed one after another, and the waterfront went quiet.

The building around you stands on the site of one of those canneries, the Hovden Cannery. Its designers chose to keep pieces of the industrial past rather than erase them. Look for the old boilers and heavy iron pipework near the entrance. They are real cannery machinery, left in place. The outside of the building also follows the plain, warehouse-like shapes of the old row. When the aquarium opened in 1984, the idea was unusual. It would focus on one local body of water, not on the oceans of the whole world.

The project grew from a small group of marine biologists who wanted to show people what lived in their own bay. One of them was Julie Packard, who went on to lead the aquarium for decades. Her parents, David and Lucile Packard, provided major funding. David Packard was a co-founder of the technology company Hewlett-Packard. So a fortune made in the early computer industry helped turn a ruined fish cannery into a window on the sea. It is a very Californian kind of story.

There is a literary layer here too. In 1945, the writer John Steinbeck published a novel called Cannery Row, set on this very street. Its central character, a gentle scientist known as Doc, was based on Steinbeck's real friend Ed Ricketts. Ricketts was a marine biologist who ran a small laboratory a short walk from where you stand. He spent years collecting creatures from local tide pools. He was interested in how every animal on the shore depended on the others. That way of thinking runs through the whole aquarium.

Now turn toward the Kelp Forest. This tall exhibit was one of the first in the world to grow living giant kelp. The tank rises roughly three stories, and the golden-brown fronds reach toward a skylight open to the sun. A machine pushes the water back and forth, copying the swell of the open bay, so the kelp sways the way it does in the wild. Giant kelp is a kind of large seaweed, and in good conditions it grows remarkably fast, sometimes many centimetres in a single day.

Stand still for a minute in front of that glass. Watch the light come down in shifting bands through the fronds. Rockfish hang almost motionless in the shadows. Leopard sharks, spotted along their backs, glide slowly near the sandy bottom. Schools of small silver fish turn together, all at once, as if on one signal. Divers sometimes enter the tank to feed the animals, and they can talk to the crowd through underwater microphones. Children press their hands flat against the glass to wave.

Then there are the sea otters, often the busiest animals in the building. Here is something many visitors miss. Sea otters have no thick layer of fat to keep them warm. Instead, they rely on the densest fur of any animal on Earth. To heat their bodies in cold water, they eat a huge amount, roughly a quarter of their body weight each day. That is why you see them constantly diving, cracking shells and grooming. Every roll and scrub keeps air trapped in that fur.

The aquarium also runs a long-standing program to rescue stranded otter pups along this coast. In one part of the program, female otters living at the aquarium act as foster mothers. They teach orphaned pups how to dive, find food and groom, with as little human contact as possible. Many of these pups are later released into Elkhorn Slough, a coastal wetland north of here. Scientists have followed how those raised otters help local wild populations. It is quiet work, mostly done out of sight.

Next, find the Open Sea galleries, which opened in the 1990s. The light changes here. Everything turns a deep, even blue, and the walls seem to fall away. Behind one very large window, tuna, sharks and sea turtles move through open water. In the 2000s, the aquarium did something few aquariums had managed. It kept young great white sharks on display for months at a time, then released them back into the ocean. Researchers tracked where they swam afterwards, and learned a great deal.

Nearby, in darker rooms, the jellies drift against glowing backgrounds. Moon jellies look like pale, soft discs. Sea nettles trail long orange-brown tentacles. A jelly has no brain and almost no way to steer. Keeping them alive in an aquarium is surprisingly difficult. In ordinary square tanks, they get stuck in corners and damage themselves. So many of these exhibits use rounded tanks with a gentle circular current. The water carries each jelly in a slow loop, so it never touches the walls.

Why does this bay hold so much life? Part of the answer lies just offshore. Monterey Canyon, a vast underwater canyon, drops away into deep water very close to the coast. Cold water from the depths rises up and brings nutrients toward the surface. Those nutrients feed tiny plankton, and the plankton feed almost everything else. The bay became part of a national marine sanctuary in the early 1990s. A research institute founded by David Packard now explores the deep canyon with underwater robots.

The aquarium's influence also reaches dinner tables far from here. Its Seafood Watch program gives advice on which seafood is caught or farmed in ways that do less harm to the ocean. Before you leave, step out onto the back decks. Look past the rocks and into the kelp beds of the real bay. Wild sea otters often float on their backs out there, and harbour seals rest on the rocks. With a little patience, you may spot more life outside than in some tanks.

Take one last look at the water beyond the railing. A few generations ago, this shore was all noise and smoke and fish oil. The sardines were caught until they were nearly gone. Now people come to watch the same bay, not to empty it. As you walk back along Cannery Row, notice the old cannery buildings, the pipes and the rusted rails. Listen for the gulls, and for the surge of the waves under the decks... the same sound you heard when you first came in.