I went home to visit my family for spring break, and naturally I went to the California Academy of Sciences to visit the Steinhart Aquarium. I was curious if the way I looked at the displays had changed after a few semesters of serious science. I watched myself for reflections my new knowledge as I wandered among the exhibits, but gradually I realized nothing was coming to me that I hadn’t thought about many times before. I used to be concerned I would be a bad scientist because I never noticed anything new or exciting about the fish, a feeling that came back to me on this visit.

I wandered to a marquee exhibit, a glass tunnel beneath an Amazon display, and sat on the benches lining the tunnel, leaning back against the curved glass walls, and let myself drift into a reverie. It always puts me in a trance when I watch fish swimming, they are so beautiful. Perhaps my appreciation of fish, instead of giving me direct scientific insight, merely gave me the ability to think about them for long periods of time. After a while zoning out, I realized that as a youngster I had the viewpoint of a nature documentary. In documentaries, animals, thanks to editors, constantly perform spectacular behaviors, but fish in aquariums display the normal behavior (more or less) of living organisms. They spend most of their time doing nothing special.

As I reflected further I made a connection to my current work. As I sort through the contents of fish stomach samples, the main task of my master’s thesis, I’ve frequently felt a sense of amazement that a particular fish chose this particular prey item (and not because I find sticks and rocks in more than a few of the diet samples). Through these prey items I am getting a fish-eye view of nature, specifically those bits of nature that look good to eat.

There’s a strange continuity between these cases. I was bored when visiting an aquarium, even though aquariums are meant to entertain, but interested in a very tedious activity, identifying and measuring diet components. I have to believe if I hadn’t allowed my simple appreciation for fish-watching to draw me back to the aquarium again and again, exhausting my ability to see anything novel, I wouldn’t have the capacity now to perform a tedious activity that is leading to some exciting and novel ideas.

Sometimes, it’s worth it to take a pause in our activities to assess what we’ve accomplished. As opposed to the cash donations, all of the valuable in-kind contributions to the Institute since its founding in 2000 have been challenging to quantify. For example, how much is a 5-year old, gently-used 700 gallon acrylic reef aquarium (pictured) really worth? Does an attorney’s pro bono work drafting a contract for our nonprofit have a dollar value based on how many hours he spent and what his normal hourly rate would be to a paying customer? What if a vendor never sends a bill? You get the idea.

Aletha, my wife and our board chair, and I took a recent afternoon and reviewed all that the Institute has now received from our community (and beyond) through March 2013 and came up with just over $5 million in cash and in-kind value. That is truly astounding!

Where has all this money and value gone?

• In has been leveraged to create, refine and deliver important educational outreach programs in our central San Joaquin Valley schools and in our community focused on aquatic habitats and our watershed.
• It’s been invested in our 10 acre property adjacent to State Highway 99 overlooking the San Joaquin River, donated to the Fresno Aquarium project in 2006 by the Roy and Betty Jura family in the form of paying for governmental fees and studies required to be able to build in the future.
• It is in the 12 major aquarium exhibits and numerous life support systems, quarantine tanks and other equipment donated to the Institute by the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, a part of the California Academy of Sciences, all of which are now being stored here in Fresno and Madera.
• It is in  the plans created in 2009 – 2010 by Arthur Dyson, A.I.A., our marvelous architect, for our 20,000 square foot Phase One Fresno Aquarium designed to incorporate all 12 of the Steinhart exhibits in addition to two more we will build ourselves. Art’s original 100,000 square foot design has now become our Phase Two Aquarium, which will be constructed next to our Phase One facility after it is completed.
• It is in the value engineering work we undertook during 2010 – 2011 to separate the Phase One Aquarium itself into manageable sub-phases.
• It is in the 2012 completed engineered drawings, created by our structural engineer, Bob Parrish, P.E., for the Fresno Aquarium’s basement, which will contain the life support systems to serve the entire Aquarium, lab and quarantine tanks.

With this milestone, it’s natural for people to ask, “How much more do we need to raise?” In order to construct the life support basement, based on estimates we have received from several local contractors, we now estimate the Institute needs to raise $730,000 more to build this stand-alone Aquarium facility. The expansion areas above it will, of course, require more fundraising in the future.

Considering the Institute’s reaching of the $5 million raised milestone this month, we believe $730,000 more is achievable. To that end, we have launched a new campaign called From the Ground Up, where we are selling concrete blocks for $100 (regular) and $200 (large). Please donate to this campaign now by putting your name on a block (or several blocks!)

How long it will take to raise enough to begin construction on the Fresno Aquarium is totally dependent on the rate at which these blocks are sold. But in the meantime, we’re celebrating raising $5 million and we think that milestone is an accomplishment our entire community can be very proud of!

]]> http://aquariusaquarium.org/fresnoaquarium/institute-reaches-5-million-milestone/feed/ 1 http://aquariusaquarium.org/ecology/what-does-science-feel-like/ http://aquariusaquarium.org/ecology/what-does-science-feel-like/#comments Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:41:43 +0000 Kyle Griffiths http://aquariusaquarium.org/?p=1299

So I was sitting in ichthyology class today learning about fish growth. Growth is complicated – I don’t want to bore the reader with excessive details, but temperatures, diet, activity all play a role. These factors are links to other parts of the environment, living and not, and they all work in concert to produce an organism.

This was familiar material to me, but today it hit me in a different way. It was as if I could imagine each factor as a part of the fish, contributing more or less to the overall picture. Their dynamics appeared to me as colors, changing intensity in proportion to their importance. As I imagined a fish eating a meal of energy-rich fish, the tissue began to glow a more vivid red.

It was a remarkable moment, and it connects to my idea about the what of learning biology versus the why, the rewards of the long hours of study. Studying, believe it or not, can be tedious, and it’s worse when you don’t understand a topic – in fact, it can be maddening. Many times I stagger out of the library long after sunset with my head reeling, feeling like I can barely understand the simplest things, like how to talk or drive. Despite this, scientists persevere. The ability to sit with confusion is one of the hallmarks of scientists, but when it mysteriously comes together in an intuitive picture, it feels magical. That feeling is why I continue to study science, instead of enjoying nature the way some others do, like birdwatching, for example. I obviously enjoy watching animals, but I’m also after this rare integrative payoff.

It also connects to an idea I’ve been mulling over since I began to think about grad school. A person like me who has a longstanding interest in a particular kind of organism has a library of memories to draw on when confronting a new biological idea. If I read a paper on population dynamics, I can summon up a river with fish swimming in it for an imaginary model, and this helps me not only to understand the paper more easily, but also to enjoy it more. This feeds my desire to learn more and closes a self-reinforcing loop of fish-based thinking. Scientists baffle people who can’t understand why someone would want to know that much about any particular topic, but I think this loop explains it – scientists like their topic because it helps them understand their topic, and the world, in a deeper, more satisfying way.

When we founded the Institute in 2000, from the very start we felt it was integral to our mission that our supporters understand the natural aquatic world – how it looks, how it functions and what its inhabitants require in order to survive within this dynamic realm.

It is with this thought in mind that we have now led two cruises to places where our guests have had the experience (some for the very first time) of donning a dive mask and fins and witnessing the complexities of the tropical coral reef ecosystem right before their eyes. The first, in 2009, brought our group to tip of Baja California at Cabo San Lucas, and the second, in January/February of this year (2013), sailed to Roatan, Belize and Cozumel from the south to the north through the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System – the second longest barrier reef in the world.

The photos below may show elegance and relaxation aboard our wonderful ship, Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas, but it was truly the connection with the reef that made this voyage so special for our Institute supporters. Enjoy the photos (click on one to see the slideshow) and be sure not to miss our next cruise where we will share even more of the aquatic world with you!

After you view the photos below, be sure to check out additional photos of our group’s pre-cruise VIP tour of the Aquarium at Moody Gardens by clicking here.

So, evidently the world didn’t end on the 21st. I’m not surprised, because end-of-the-world scares are nothing new. Remember the Y2K bug? I had friends that went to the desert for a week in late 1999 to get away from our soon-to-be-destroyed civilization, although I think that was just an excuse for a good party. These scenarios are not unique to our time either – I’ve heard there were people who believed the world was going to end a thousand years ago, at the end of the first millennium.

There are apocalyptic traditions in religion too, for example the death of the Norse gods in Ragnarok, but the scenario we are most familiar with is the flood. There is the biblical flood (the one with Noah’s Ark), and one of the oldest recorded stories, the Epic of Gilgamesh, has a flood, so some have guessed that both stories relate to the same event or periodic occurrences in the ancient civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, where much our own civilization originated.

Floods are on my mind, not just because of the heavy rain lately, but because of Hurricane Sandy, the major storm of last October that did so much damage to the East Coast. The damage included the New York Aquarium, on Coney Island, which was flooded with storm surge. The aquarium’s systems were damaged, according to the aquarium website, and images of ankle-deep water, illuminated by the soft glow of the tanks, quickly appeared on the internet. They reminded me of dreams that I had as a young man when I worked in the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco.

So the world didn’t end in a flood or from an asteroid hitting or the sun exploding, but that doesn’t change the reality we are only here on earth for a short time. What are we supposed to do with the short time we have? What is the spiritual purpose of a human life? I wasn’t put on earth for a particular role, like scientist or artist, but there are people who couldn’t be anything else. These are the people who have found a purpose for their life, earned through hard, devoted work. That work is a kind of spiritual practice, in the sense of meditation, a means to get beyond the self. I get beyond myself, and achieve a sense of purpose to my life, by studying science.

A science museum, a place for musing, can be seen as a temple, which is why the flooding of the New York Aquarium is haunting, and why I support the mission for a public aquarium in Fresno wholeheartedly

Trevally Jack (public domain because of copyright expiration)

“And we know that some words, like hill, plow, mother, window, bird, and fish, are so drenched in human association, they sometimes can make even bad poems evocative.” – Theodore Roethke

So, keeping the artistic theme from my plants post going, I’ve collected sources that illustrate the rich history of fish-based art and poetry. People have been inspired by fish for a long time, if you take the quote above the same way I do. I believe that a lot of the appeal of an aquarium is the the beauty of the organisms and the aquascaping, and even though I’m a science-focused person, I appreciate the beauty of fish as much as anyone.

Fish in poems can represent the unknowable, the other, elemental forces, as in Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish. The speaker describes catching a fish and holding him beside the boat: “He hung a grunting weight, /battered and venerable /and homely…” Much of the text of the poem is a description of this organism, and the respect the speaker feels when she sees five hooks broken off in the fishes mouth, “Like medals with their ribbons /frayed and wavering, /a five-haired beard of wisdom /trailing from his aching jaw.” A cascade of sensation leads to the speaker’s release of this grizzled veteran, who has already enriched the speaker beyond compare.

Rilke also treats fish as an unquantifiable in his Sonnets to Orpheus. In sonnet 20, part 2 (translated by David Young, 1987 Wesleyan Press), Rilke’s speaker describes a feeling of distance looking at a plate of fishes. “Fish are dumb … so we thought. Who knows? /Is there a place where, even in their absence, /we can speak the language of fish?” he wonders.  This is a very curious thought, something a kid might think, but the Sonnets are directed toward Orpheus, the son of Apollo, the Greek god of music, and therefore towards the elements of poetry, form and symbol, communication itself, so my interpretation is that this is a more subtle question. Wondering if there is a place where the language of fishes is spoken in their absence could be an expression of how we will never truly inhabit the semantic world of another, no matter how well known, that everyone else might just as well be speaking the language of fish all the time.

On the visual side there is a very interesting connection of art with science.  In zoological texts, to show their colors in life (something distinctly lacking from a preserved specimen) fish were often documented through drawings and paintings. These scientific works are also incredibly lovely.

Ironically, illustrations of fish can be used for science even when they are not intended for that purpose. Recently, I read a story about contemporary researchers using information from ancient Roman mosaics to put together trends in the abundance of a type of grouper that was formerly common in the Mediterranean. So here’s to the longstanding relationship of fish to human expression, whatever the nature of that relationship in the long run.

Link to grouper article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=roman-mosaics-help-scientists-track-endangered-fish

Both Sue and Jeanie were members of a club that worked to support a local hospital, but when the hospital discontinued that club, they approached the Institute about volunteering their talents for our cause!

We hope you will come to Barnes & Noble when our volunteers are working next:

• Monday, December 10th from 2 – 6 pm
• Tuesday, December 11th from 9 am to 2 pm and 6 – 10 pm
• Tuesdsay, December 18th from 9 am to 2 pm
• Friday, December 21st from 9 am to 2 pm

And please be a generous tipper!

The Rockies, rearing up millions of years ago, cut California and the arid West off from the centers of fish diversity in the East. East of the great divide there are dozens of sunfish: bluegill, pumpkinseed, longear sunfish, green sunfish, warmouth, largemouth bass and smallmouth bass, and the spotted bass, just off the top of my head. In California we have one native sunfish, called the Sacramento perch (which is endangered). But, I can see some of these non-native sunfish here in Fresno, because some thoughtful soul decided to meet me halfway, in fact more than halfway, since I only travelled a hundred or so miles east, to bring the fish of the East to California. I can see bass in the river a short drive from my house, and what’s more, I can see bluegill in the canal a short walk from my front door. In fact, I can see more types of fish here in Fresno than my home waters. Not that I’m complaining about seeing a local fisherman hook a thresher shark or running into an ocean sunfish on a surfboard, like my brother did a few weeks ago.

Pacifica Pier on the day after Thanksgiving

There are downsides to introducing fish outside of their range. Introduced fish compete with natives for the resources, seldom in a pristine state, that are available. I’m not trying to minimize their effect, but if I hadn’t had early experiences with both native and nonnative fish I doubt I would have been interested in pursuing aquatic biology. Biologists think on global scales, of evolutionary lineages hundreds of millions of years long, researching whatever corner of the earth holds the particular set of circumstances they are interested in, and this global perspective has accompanied a sentiment that the earth is not just to study, but to reshape. Stocking fish outside their native range was a practice of scientifically literate people to improve fishing in new territories. We wouldn’t do that today, but the way we’ve altered the landscape, or fishscape, of our country is part of our heritage.

Welcome to Aquarius Aquarium Institute’s new website! If you have visited us before, you may recall that our old website was, well, in need of updating to say the least. That design, which I had to recreate into HTML from individual graphic pieces, was originally donated to us by a Seattle, Washington company . It worked for many years – introducing many people to the Institute and also to our plans for the educational Fresno Aquarium.

Uhuru Network, the team behind our new web incarnation, has taken the content from our old site and created a far more powerful and effective tool with which we may communicate with you, our website visitor. Even this blog, which was a separate section on the old Institute site, is now incorporated into this website.

Uhuru (which is the Swahili word for freedom) truly excels in empowering organizations to take charge of their own web content, eliminating the need to wait for an outside entity to perform updates. Their beautiful and easy-to-navigate custom design will allow our visitors to more thoroughly understand what we’re about and where we are going into the future.

The Institute is very excited about all our new website has to offer and hope you agree by visiting often as we continue to grow and update the information here. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Uhuru Network for their professionalism and incredible creativity. We couldn’t have done it without them!

The katniss root, which gives its name to the main character, is another example of a changed name. The edible tuber called Arrowhead, Sagittaria latifolia, fits the description of the katniss root in many particulars, such as the leaf shape and number of flower petals. The arrowhead-shaped, or hastate, leaves have obviously given this plant its common name, and clearly appropriate to the bow-wielding heroine. She could indeed have come across it in Appalachia, where District 12, her homeland, is located, since the Arrowhead is widely distributed throughout North America. I couldn’t find it in the wild when I first learned about it for a pond I was building, but I found it growing recently in the constructed spillway at the north border of the Jensen Ranch area near Woodward Park.

Arrowhead (Sagittaria latifolia)

Incidentally, I have noticed another edible root with arrow-shaped leaves around town lately. I am a casual observer of plants but I have noticed a lot of landscaping with taro. Taro is the archetypal South Pacific staple, a plant that’s been subject to an upriver migration from the sea to the mountains.

Taro (Colocasia esculenta)

There is another immigrant water plant; you can see it growing in dense bunches with many leaflets coming directly off the long flexible stems trailing in the current of our roadside canals. The fish there use it for shelter and pick at it for food, but it also has a decorative purpose. Aquarists use it in fish tanks and know it by the trade name of anacharis. College students call it elodea and use it as a subject in wide variety of experiments. It is excellent for some demonstrations because it photosynthesizes so rapidly that you can see bubbles trickling out of a cut stem if you hold it upside down. It’s so fast growing that it’s earned the nickname “water weed,” and the three species of elodea grow in various parts of North and South America and have been introduced abroad.

Maybe you are wondering why I’m writing about plants for an aquarium blog; after all, aquariums are places you go to see animals, not plants. However, I became aware of many lovely aquatic plants through my interest in fish-keeping and aquariums and I’ve continued to be interested in them as a vital part of natural aquatic systems, where fish use them for food and shelter and even lay their eggs on them.