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Corals begin arriving at Academy of Sciences
Biologist Seth Wolters adjusts newly transplanted coral as Jack Chavez paints and Jimmy Carlton, 10, keeps an eye on things. Chronicle photo by Mike Kepka
(Story) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/22/MNV0V6QB0.DTL&hw=fish&sn=001&sc=537
cool video and more pics here
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/02/22/MNV0V6QB0.DTL&o=0
Corals begin arriving at Academy of Sciences
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Friday, February 22, 2008
More...
Marine biologists settled 15 species of precious coral into the world's largest reef tank at the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park on Thursday, handling them so delicately that they might have been diamonds.
The great migration of thousands of plant and animal species - both living and dead - that have been on public view and in temporary storage for the past three years at the Academy's temporary Howard Street home has begun. No one was more pleased with the first coral venture than Bart Shepherd, curator of the Academy's Steinhart Aquarium.
"All the corals settled in happily right away," he said, "and now we're ready to ramp up the pace to bring in more corals as quickly and carefully as we can."
Shepherd and a colleague pulled themselves into wetsuits and scuba gear before plunging into the tank and placing the corals, paying close attention to how close together they were spaced.
"We have to be really careful not to put the different coral species too close to each other, because corals can be very aggressive, and there'd be a lot of biological warfare going on among the different species if we weren't," Shepherd said.
There is obviously plenty of room for all in the new tank, with its 200,000 gallons of seawater, its rocky walls 15 feet deep and its infinite variety of crevices where the living corals can settle and reproduce. With time, the animals will spread to become broad beds of either soft or stony corals.
When the corals were first loaded into their Styrofoam traveling boxes, the coral polyps shrank into their hard shells. But once settled into niches of rock in the tanks, the polyps expanded out of their shells and swelled to normal size, Shepherd said.
Only 45 tropical fish greeted the first 15 coral species that Shepherd and his colleagues, aquatic biologists Seth Wolters and Matt Wandell , trucked to the huge new building. The waiting fish feasted on the fresh algae affixed to the rocks that held the corals.
Over the next seven months, with each move as delicate as the first, the team of biologists will bring 2,000 more coral colonies and more than 4,000 fish to their new home, Shepherd said.
And during all those months, the Academy's other scientists will be bringing their vast collections of 20 million stuffed, pinned and mounted creatures, both large and small, to fill the building's halls before the public opening - now scheduled for Sept. 27.
The first coral that Shepherd placed into the tank Thursday was a colony of reef-builders named Galaxea fascicularis - commonly called star corals - that came from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and have been growing happily on a 40-pound rock in the Academy's coral nursery on Howard Street, where 1,000-watt metal halide lights encourage growth and keep all the tanks as bright as a tropical day.
Shepherd and Wolters made dive after dive to separately carry each coral to special niches in the tank's rocky walls. Wandell supplied them from the surface, one tiny colony at a time.
Besides the corals, the divers planted samples of curious and less-well-known sea animals, including tiny zoanthids that gather sand to build their base structures, and corallimorpharians, a kind of sea anemone.
It was a hard morning's work for all - and a wet one.
Many of the corals in the tank, Shepherd explained, are highly sexual creatures, and in the open waters of their natural habitat, moonlight sends them into a spasm of reproductive activity. Each coral polyp - the tiny organism itself - releases a cloud of sperm or eggs that find each other in the cloudy water to generate new polyp larvae.
"And there are plenty of skylights above the tank here," Shepherd said, "so on moonlit nights there should be plenty of activity."
More often, he said, the corals in the Academy's tender care will fertilize themselves internally to release larvae later, and just as frequently the fragile bits of rock to which corals attach themselves will fragment and fall apart so new colonies can form without any sex at all.
The biological warfare that concerned Shepherd comes about when some particularly aggressive species of coral with forests of tiny stinging tentacles called nematocysts release toxins that repel other corals if they venture too close - which is why Shepherd and his team were careful to plant the tank's new inhabitants well away from each other.
"They're like enemy inhabitants of a city that won't let neighbors come into their streets," Shepherd said.
All the corals that will eventually thrive in the new Academy building's huge tank have been donated by other aquaria and private coral fanciers, or come from samples confiscated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from collectors without proper permits. To preserve the world's aquatic biodiversity, he said, the Academy collects no wild corals at all for its new reef tank. The water for the tank is pumped in through an ocean pipeline anchored four miles out at sea that comes ashore near Ocean Beach.
The tank itself has five huge acrylic viewing windows where the public can watch as the thousands of brilliant tropical fish and colorful corals live their lives together.
Shepherd will direct more moves for the varied parts of the Steinhart Aquarium in coming months, he said. Still to come are 20 African penguins, four American alligators, 20 alligator gars weighing up to 200 pounds each, a 165-pound giant sea bass, a dozen or so electric eels, and 38,000 fish of almost every known variety - some big, some small, and all endlessly fascinating.
Almost open
The California Academy of Sciences is expected to reopen at its new Golden Gate Park location on Sept. 27. For more information, go to www.calacademy.org.
E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/22/MNV0V6QB0.DTL
Biologist Seth Wolters adjusts newly transplanted coral as Jack Chavez paints and Jimmy Carlton, 10, keeps an eye on things. Chronicle photo by Mike Kepka
(Story) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/22/MNV0V6QB0.DTL&hw=fish&sn=001&sc=537
cool video and more pics here
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/02/22/MNV0V6QB0.DTL&o=0
Corals begin arriving at Academy of Sciences
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Friday, February 22, 2008
More...
Marine biologists settled 15 species of precious coral into the world's largest reef tank at the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park on Thursday, handling them so delicately that they might have been diamonds.
The great migration of thousands of plant and animal species - both living and dead - that have been on public view and in temporary storage for the past three years at the Academy's temporary Howard Street home has begun. No one was more pleased with the first coral venture than Bart Shepherd, curator of the Academy's Steinhart Aquarium.
"All the corals settled in happily right away," he said, "and now we're ready to ramp up the pace to bring in more corals as quickly and carefully as we can."
Shepherd and a colleague pulled themselves into wetsuits and scuba gear before plunging into the tank and placing the corals, paying close attention to how close together they were spaced.
"We have to be really careful not to put the different coral species too close to each other, because corals can be very aggressive, and there'd be a lot of biological warfare going on among the different species if we weren't," Shepherd said.
There is obviously plenty of room for all in the new tank, with its 200,000 gallons of seawater, its rocky walls 15 feet deep and its infinite variety of crevices where the living corals can settle and reproduce. With time, the animals will spread to become broad beds of either soft or stony corals.
When the corals were first loaded into their Styrofoam traveling boxes, the coral polyps shrank into their hard shells. But once settled into niches of rock in the tanks, the polyps expanded out of their shells and swelled to normal size, Shepherd said.
Only 45 tropical fish greeted the first 15 coral species that Shepherd and his colleagues, aquatic biologists Seth Wolters and Matt Wandell , trucked to the huge new building. The waiting fish feasted on the fresh algae affixed to the rocks that held the corals.
Over the next seven months, with each move as delicate as the first, the team of biologists will bring 2,000 more coral colonies and more than 4,000 fish to their new home, Shepherd said.
And during all those months, the Academy's other scientists will be bringing their vast collections of 20 million stuffed, pinned and mounted creatures, both large and small, to fill the building's halls before the public opening - now scheduled for Sept. 27.
The first coral that Shepherd placed into the tank Thursday was a colony of reef-builders named Galaxea fascicularis - commonly called star corals - that came from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and have been growing happily on a 40-pound rock in the Academy's coral nursery on Howard Street, where 1,000-watt metal halide lights encourage growth and keep all the tanks as bright as a tropical day.
Shepherd and Wolters made dive after dive to separately carry each coral to special niches in the tank's rocky walls. Wandell supplied them from the surface, one tiny colony at a time.
Besides the corals, the divers planted samples of curious and less-well-known sea animals, including tiny zoanthids that gather sand to build their base structures, and corallimorpharians, a kind of sea anemone.
It was a hard morning's work for all - and a wet one.
Many of the corals in the tank, Shepherd explained, are highly sexual creatures, and in the open waters of their natural habitat, moonlight sends them into a spasm of reproductive activity. Each coral polyp - the tiny organism itself - releases a cloud of sperm or eggs that find each other in the cloudy water to generate new polyp larvae.
"And there are plenty of skylights above the tank here," Shepherd said, "so on moonlit nights there should be plenty of activity."
More often, he said, the corals in the Academy's tender care will fertilize themselves internally to release larvae later, and just as frequently the fragile bits of rock to which corals attach themselves will fragment and fall apart so new colonies can form without any sex at all.
The biological warfare that concerned Shepherd comes about when some particularly aggressive species of coral with forests of tiny stinging tentacles called nematocysts release toxins that repel other corals if they venture too close - which is why Shepherd and his team were careful to plant the tank's new inhabitants well away from each other.
"They're like enemy inhabitants of a city that won't let neighbors come into their streets," Shepherd said.
All the corals that will eventually thrive in the new Academy building's huge tank have been donated by other aquaria and private coral fanciers, or come from samples confiscated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from collectors without proper permits. To preserve the world's aquatic biodiversity, he said, the Academy collects no wild corals at all for its new reef tank. The water for the tank is pumped in through an ocean pipeline anchored four miles out at sea that comes ashore near Ocean Beach.
The tank itself has five huge acrylic viewing windows where the public can watch as the thousands of brilliant tropical fish and colorful corals live their lives together.
Shepherd will direct more moves for the varied parts of the Steinhart Aquarium in coming months, he said. Still to come are 20 African penguins, four American alligators, 20 alligator gars weighing up to 200 pounds each, a 165-pound giant sea bass, a dozen or so electric eels, and 38,000 fish of almost every known variety - some big, some small, and all endlessly fascinating.
Almost open
The California Academy of Sciences is expected to reopen at its new Golden Gate Park location on Sept. 27. For more information, go to www.calacademy.org.
E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/22/MNV0V6QB0.DTL
