The Orange County Register, May 2nd, 2007
Fifty feet down, Julianne Steers is in another world. And she is very much at home.
Steers, the chief aquarist at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, in a sense spends more time immersed in the ocean than she does on dry land. At work, she tends a menagerie of scaly, tentacled, shelled and finned creatures – many that she captured herself – doing her best to re-create their underwater habitats with displays that can approach works of art.
And her obsession with ocean life fills her off hours as well.
“If I’m not at work, I’m diving,” says Steers, 29. “It’s what I enjoy most out of life. I can swim through, I’m weightless, and I can observe and enjoy the behavior of animals most people only read about in books.”
Her mission: to flip a switch in the hearts of the hundreds of schoolchildren who troop through the institute each day, to get them hooked on the stunning and colorful diversity of life forms in the sea and to pull them like a rip tide toward an interest in science.
The creatures she captures in her weightless world peer out from their many tanks at the constant traffic of visitors. Before this day is out, Steers will press a few of the animals into service as living illustrations of the effects of ocean pollution.
Her day starts early, as she tends the pumps and filters that roar in an outdoor enclosure – exactly like the keeper of a living room aquarium might do, but on a mammoth scale. Salt, temperature, purity: Everything must be regulated precisely. And when she isn’t there, her system keeps tabs on itself, dialing employees at an alarm company who call Steers in an emergency.
“There is an alarm system if something goes haywire,” she says. “Sometimes it ends up being 3 o’clock in the morning.”
After tending the filters and pumps, Steers feeds the animals. On the menu are brine shrimp, sardines, mackerel, squid and krill, among other things, distributed to about 1,500 creatures in 64 tanks roughly every two days.
On this day, Steers and staff member Melissa Panfili also must capture pipefish, snails and top smelt waiting in a “quarantine” tank. Steers is working on a new exhibit she hopes will capture the attention of children on overnight stays at the institute – also a new initiative.
She’s prepared their new tanks ahead of time, but the water must meet the animals’ temperature requirements within one-tenth of a degree. And the tanks must be ultraclean. Ironically, they are part of an exhibit that simulates a trashed, deserted ocean floor, complete with a Coke bottle and golf balls. All had to be sterilized and sealed in animal-safe epoxy before being placed in the first tank.
The second tank represents a middling environment – some trash, but cleaner – and the third is “pristine.”
“The kids will break into three groups,” Steers says, seeming to calculate as she speaks how to rivet the attention of the expected troops of fifth-graders. “They document what the animals see, how they deal with a watershed that’s unhealthy.”
There will be no pipefish – squiggly, threadlike creatures related to sea horses – in the first tank with the vintage bottle, and almost no eel grass, used by pipefish for shelter. The second tank has two pipefish, a bit more eel grass and a bit less trash; the third, a forest of waving green strands.
The kids will check out the tanks, take notes – “data” – on their appearance and condition, and, Steers hopes, draw their own conclusions about the health of Orange County’s near-shore ocean.
That is, if she and Panfili can ever get the pipefish out of the quarantine tank.
“Slippery little critters,” Steers says as they wriggle away from the biologists’ nets – at least for a short time. Soon all are scooped up and placed in a bucket, along with bubble snails, top smelt and sculpin, and carried off to their new homes.
Steers and Panfili carry them through an exhibit room with tanks full of jellyfish, huge calico bass and prickly scorpion fish, through a courtyard where youngsters stare at them a moment and into the room with the new tanks.
“On Thursday we have our first overnight,” she says. “We’ll see how effective it is.”
Steers collected the animals on a seining trip in Long Beach, carefully scooping up a variety of organisms in shallow water with nets. Whether seining or diving to gather organisms, she says she weighs a variety of factors: how rare the animals are, how she can convincingly simulate their environment back at the institute and what kind of stress she might create by collecting them – either to their ecosystems or to the animals themselves.
“We try to minimize the amount of animals we’re taking from the wild,” she says. “When I go and I only see one, I don’t necessarily like to take just the one I’ve seen. I like to take them from an area where I see more of an abundance. But that’s just my personal preference.”
She’s able to coax many of her animals to breed to reduce the need for collecting them in the wild.
Steers, raised in Santa Monica, seems almost to have been born with an aquatic bent. She got her first mask and snorkel at age 6. Her father worked as a lifeguard when she was young, so she was constantly at the beach.
“I was always in the water,” she says. “My parents couldn’t get me out. I always knew I would do something with science – marine biology, something where I was in and out of the water.”
As Steers walks among the exhibit rooms, sometimes dodging wide-eyed children, she speaks of the creatures she checks on as individual personalities. Suddenly, the spiny lump at the corner of one tank is not just a big lobster. It’s Boris.
“He’s very popular,” she says.
The institute doesn’t give most of the animals names to remind visitors that they are wild. Nearby, a nameless two-spot octopus moves forward and raises two of its endlessly curling arms as Steers approaches its tank – exactly as if it recognizes her.
“I’ve been working on enrichment with her,” Steers explains. “I give her a jar with a food item in it.”
The octopus has become quite adept at prying open the lid of the jar to get what’s inside. But, giving a strange glimpse into an animal’s mind, Steers says she noticed the octopus opens the jar only if it has a solid lid. If there are holes cut in the lid, she simply squeezes her boneless appendages through them and removes the item that way.
Steers also serves on the institute’s two tall ships, helps give classroom-type instruction to visiting tour groups and works on her research projects, some of which she hopes to publish in science journals.
A few days more, and it’s the moment of truth. After a night of testing with real, live fifth-graders, instructors from the institute declare the new exhibit a hit – unlike most new exhibits, no tweaking needed.
“The kids kept getting excited,” Steers says. “They kept finding more and more animals in the tanks.”
Tank creatures: Julianne Steers sits among moon jellies, which use their tentacles to catch food and fend off predators.
