Monterey Bay Aquarium

In the early twentieth century Monterey was the sardine capital of the world, and Cannery Row roared with canneries processing the silvery fish by the ton. The writer John Steinbeck immortalized the row and its characters in his novels, and his close friend Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist behind the character Doc, ran a small biological lab here, studying the tidepools with a care that was decades ahead of his time.

Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, the sardines vanished, overfished into collapse, and the canneries fell silent and derelict. The aquarium was built in the shell of the old Hovden Cannery, keeping some of its industrial bones, a deliberate reminder of what happens when a fishery is taken for granted. Ricketts's tidepool ethic runs straight through the place.

Giant kelp is one of the fastest-growing organisms on earth, rising toward the light in a real forest of the sea, and it forms the backbone of Monterey Bay's marine life. Recreating it indoors meant giving the kelp what it needs, moving water and clean sunlight, so the aquarium built a tall tank open to the sky and added a surge machine to keep the water rocking the way the ocean does.

The result is a three-story wall of living kelp, fish weaving through the fronds, that visitors can watch from top to bottom. It was a first, and it made the case that the animals of the bay were far more compelling in their own working ecosystem than isolated in a box.

Southern sea otters were hunted almost to extinction in the fur trade and clung on in a tiny population off the Big Sur coast. The aquarium runs a long-standing program to rescue stranded and orphaned otter pups, and in a clever twist, it uses resident female otters as surrogate mothers to raise orphans, teaching them to be wild so they can be released back to the bay.

Sea otters are a keystone species: by eating sea urchins, they keep the urchins from mowing down the kelp forest, so protecting otters protects the whole ecosystem. The otters on view here are the charismatic face of that science, and many have their own rescue stories.

Monterey Bay is unusually rich because a deep submarine canyon, one of the largest on the continent, comes almost to shore, funneling cold, nutrient-heavy water up from the depths. That upwelling feeds everything from tiny plankton to blue whales, and the whole bay is now protected as the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

The aquarium's open-sea gallery, with its enormous window onto schooling tuna, sea turtles, and hypnotic drifting jellies, is a glimpse of that deep offshore world. Step outside afterward and the same water is right there, otters rafting in the kelp and sea lions barking from the rocks, the exhibit and the real thing separated by a pane of glass.

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