Monterey Bay Aquarium Celebrates 25 Years

The Monterey Bay Aquarium celebrates its 25th anniversary on October 17 and 18, 2009 with a big party — and you're invited! The Monterey Bay Aquarium's 25th Anniversary Celebration features family activities including crafts and a scavenger hunt, live music, sustainable seafood cooking demonstrations and tastings, displays on the history of the aquarium and even prizes! On October 20, the Aquarium will commemorate the day of its opening with a cake cutting ceremony at 11am.

In honor of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's 25th anniversary, here's a look back at the history of the Aquarium, from its conception until today.

The Idea

Many of Stanford University's graduate students in marine biology do graduate work at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. During a Monterey Bay diving trip in 1976, four marine biologists who had done work at Hopkins Marine Station began to brainstorm ideas for what to do with the old Hovden Cannery, located next to Hopkins Marine Station and also owned by Stanford University. As Steve Webster, Robin Burnett, Nancy Burnett and Charles Baxter talked, the idea of an aquarium began to take shape.

Nancy Burnett was the daughter of Hewlett Packard founder David Packard. Dr. Webster, then a professor at San Jose State University, says that David and Lucille Packard had asked their children to write up a proposal for a family project. The aquarium project seemed ideal for such a proposal. Soon Nancy's sister Julie Packard, who had studied marine algae at U.C. Santa Cruz, joined the team.

Dr. Webster says they knew from the start that they wanted the aquarium to have a regional focus, highlighting the particular ecosystem of the Monterey Bay. However, many naysayers doubted such an aquarium could ever attract visitors.

The first proposal from the team that would form the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation was conservative in its attendance estimates. It said the aquarium would attract 350,000 visitors in its first year. The aquarium was popular far beyond anyone's expectations, and proved the naysayers wrong. By October 20, 1985, over 2 million visitors had stepped through the doors of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Paradigm-Changing Exhibits

At a time when many aquariums exhibited fish from around the world with little thought to context or surrounding environment, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation's exhibit proposals were a radical departure. Most experts in the field doubted that a kelp forest could be grown in captivity, Dr. Webster says, and even if it could, naysayers "scoffed at the idea" that anyone would want to see such a thing. In fact, the kelp forest flourished, and it's one of the most popular exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It's still unique among aquariums, and Dr. Webster says it's the exhibit he's most proud of.

The minds behind the Monterey Bay Aquarium had ideas for even more game-changing exhibits. Over the past 25 years, Dr. Webster has seen them all come to life.

Vibrant Volunteers

From the beginning, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's success has been aided by its committed and enthusiastic volunteers. Over 900 people from throughout the Monterey area volunteer at the aquarium. One of those people is Dr. Webster, who retired in 2004 as Senior Marine Biologists, but still leads programs every Monday.

Education Programs

In 1985, the Aquarium began its community outreach in the form of education programs for students. These programs were wildly popular; in the first year 82,000 children participated. These programs have been free since 1986 and reach over 100,000 school children per year.

Diving Into the Deep

Monterey Bay holds a deep submarine canyon, and even before the Monterey Bay Aquarium opened, its founders knew they wanted to show visitors the wonders that lay in its depths. "95% of the living space on Earth is in the deep sea," says Dr. Webster. "These are the typical Earthlings, and we don't know anything about them!" The Monterey Bay Aquarium is working to change that. In 1987, the aquarium founded the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, or MBARI, and began developing technology that would allow them to share their discoveries.

In September 1991, the aquarium began showing live feeds from a research submersible — the first time any aquarium or zoo had shown such broadcasts. "It's new every day," says Dr. Webster, who hosts the programs in the auditorium every Monday. "You never know what you're going to be seeing out there."

MBARI's research allowed the Monterey Bay Aquarium to create a special exhibit in 1999, Mysteries of the Deep. This exhibit displayed fish often never seen before in an aquarium, including the primitive, jawless hagfish and the half-shark, half-bonefish chimeaera known as a rattail.

Outer Bay and White Sharks

Other exhibits that founders had wanted from the Monterey Bay Aquarium's conception included the Cannery Row museum, the Drifters gallery (opened in 1996) and the landmark Outer Bay exhibit (also opened in 1996).

The expanse of the Outer Bay exhibit allowed the Monterey Bay Aquarium to accomplish something no other aquarium has done — putting a white shark on display. For several months in 2009, the aquarium exhibited its fifth white shark since 2004. Dr. Webster calls it "the most unlikely of all" creatures to reside at the aquarium.

It may have taken decades for the many ideas spawned in that 1976 brainstorming session to come to fruition, but the founders have accomplished all they set out to and more. "If you have a little patience, what you want to do, amazingly, winds up happening," Dr. Webster says.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Best-Kept Secrets

As an invertebrate zoologist, "any pieces of our exhibits that have little invertebrate tapestries on the rocks are my favorites," says Dr. Webster. He's pointed out a few of his favorites that may go unnoticed by visitors.

The Coral Reef

One of Dr. Webster's favorites is the Coral Reef exhibit at the Splash Zone. "It's just spectacular," he says. "It's one of the best living coral exhibits I've come across." While children and their parents at the exhibit are busy spotting Nemo, Marlin and Dory from the Pixar film Finding Nemo, Webster is focused on the living sea coral that provides a home for those fish.  Webster is a frequent visitor to the South Pacific, but when he's in Monterey, "I visit that exhibit every time I'm at the aquarium to get my Fiji fix."

The Kelp Forest

While most people are focused on the spectacular giant tank in the Kelp Forest exhibit, Dr. Webster's favorite exhibits are two tanks in the corner on the second floor. "If I could just take a person by the hand and show them one thing I find fantastic," Webster says, it would be the sponges, gorgonians, pink hydrocoral, tunicates and other invertebrates in those tanks. Seawater brought in daily from Monterey Bay allows these invertebrates to flourish. In fact, some of these invertebrates began as larvae that came in as part of the sea water intake.

Liverwort

Though the white shark may grab all the attention, Dr. Webster says, there's another living exhbit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that is unique among all aquariums, and it's located at the Coastal Stream exhibit, near the touch pools on the first floor. Look at the rocks to the right of the waterfall, and you'll see what looks like a green, mossy mat. That greenery is called liverwort. "Every time I take people on a tour," Dr. Webster says with a chuckle, "I show them the best liverwort exhibit in the world."

• Accommodations
• Activities
• Food and Wine
• Golf
• Home
• Shopping
• Weddings