16 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JANUARY 8-14, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com reuse of an old cannery purchased by Stanford and then the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation. Webster, one of the Aquarium’s founding members who still leads tours today, points to a piece of literature that became a guiding force for both him and the group during the Aquarium’s early days: Between Pacific Tides by marine biologist Ed Ricketts and naturalist Jack Calvin. “That book is owned and digested by anybody who studies marine biology in this area, and the book is arranged by habitat,” Webster says, explaining that it inspired the idea of permanent exhibits showcasing the habitats of Monterey Bay—places many of them had spent years diving and conducting research in. “From day one, the aquarium was going to be about the habitats of Monterey Bay, and I think that concept was kind of part of our constitution for all four of us, and it came from Ed Ricketts’ book.” At that time, aquariums were typically smaller, organized around individual species. The Monterey Bay Aquarium would go on to flip that model, recreating entire marine ecosystems and radically immersing visitors within them. It was a bold and technically challenging approach, but it was a move that would set the tone for the Aquarium’s influence in the years to come. Most experts believed kelp couldn’t be kept alive indoors for long periods of time, let alone sustained in a tank nearly three stories tall, alongside invertebrates and other local species. “There wasn’t much known about that. It was one of my assignments to talk to the scientists who had been studying and/or working on growing giant kelp,” Packard says. “It was a very rarefied topic; the only people working on it were working on commercial use for the foam in your beer or your toothpaste.” So the team got creative. To replicate the water movement necessary for kelp to grow and thrive, a team of engineers—including David Packard— designed a giant plunger to simulate a standing wave in the tank. The water, unfiltered seawater from the Monterey Bay, had to match the temperature of the local waters. The angle of the tank had to maximize sunlight for the kelp, yet minimize glare for the visitors. And they had to overcome initial skepticism, convincing focus groups that a kelp forest was a habitat rich enough in life, and interesting enough to look at, to warrant an exhibit. “I remember when we ran this plan by John McCosker who, at the time, was the director at Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco,” Webster recalls, “and we mentioned the kelp forest exhibit. His reaction was, who wants to come see a bunch of brown seaweeds?” All the while, they faced a persistent technical challenge: preventing marine organisms from colonizing in the aquarium’s pipes—their biggest problem at the time, says Packard, that applied to their entire seawater system. “We honestly didn’t know if it would survive,” she says. The gamble paid off. The tank’s massive acrylic windows and unprecedented scale enveloped visitors in an experience previously reserved for scuba divers. The exhibit quickly landed on the cover of Sunset Magazine, then a force in the travel and tourism space. The emphasis on grandiose and immersive setting aesthetics became the throughline for how they’d pursue future projects, many of which broke ground in aquarium design and animal husbandry. And the use of unfiltered local seawater was something that enabled them to craft ecosystems truly reflective of the local environments. “Most aquariums around the world can’t do that because they’re on heavily polluted harbors,” Webster says. “We’re in this unique position of being able to pump raw seawater when we want it, and that helps support the kelp forest and all of the smaller exhibits that aren’t just fishes, but have invertebrates and seaweeds in them and look a whole lot like they do out there in the real world.” The jellyfish exhibit was another risk, presenting an animal that was rarely exhibited due to how fragile they are to keep in captivity. Focused on fluid dynamics, the aquarium adapted and installed kreisel tanks, circular systems which rotated the water with such precision that kept delicate animals suspended without pulling them into filtration systems. The exhibits were then turned into works of art, lighting was creatively calibrated to illuminate the translucent jellies as they drifted. In 2004, the Aquarium made headlines by keeping a great white shark in an exhibit for 198 days—the only aquarium to ever keep young white sharks on exhibit, get them to feed, and return them to the wild. The idea to bring a great white shark had been floated for some time, but the goal was always to have a legitimate science outcome. Aquarium staff began working with gillnet fishers down in Southern California who had been catching juvenile white sharks as bycatch. Researchers began tagging the sharks, ultimately introducing one juvenile into the Open Sea exhibit, a tank holding more than a million gallons of water—nearly two Olympic swimming pools—designed to evoke the seemingly infinite abyss of the open ocean. “The message was that sharks have more to fear from humans than the other way around,” Packard says. “We wanted to show that it’s not a giant, terrifying behemoth—it’s just another fish trying to make its way in the ocean.” Public attention surged. Additional revenue generated by the exhibit was reinvested into the research, and visitors were brought along through transparent storytelling about the science underway. The tagging program identified a distinct population of white sharks in the eastern Pacific, data that later contributed to proposals for increased protections. Advocacy tied to this research eventually helped spur legislation banning the sale and possession of shark fins in California—then one of the largest importers of shark fins outside of Asia. “It had this full-circle effect,” Packard says. “Which was really great.” Science, public awareness and policy change. It was a model that was trialed and tested. And it worked. In the 1990s, a global fisheries crisis was emerging. Fishing fleets were growing and key fisheries, such as the Atlantic northwest cod and the West Coast groundfish fisheries, were collapsing. The Packard Foundation was expanding its environmental grant program’s focus to centering the ocean, or, the 70 percent of the planet “no one was paying attention to,” says Packard. The idea that fish stocks could be “The questioning of science at the level that’s happening is new.” Packard walks behind the scenes of the aquarium, where various species and animal food are kept. Many of the tanks use unfiltered seawater pumped directly from Monterey Bay, an unusual feature for an aquarium. A portrait of Julie Packard hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, a part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The gallery portrays the people who have shaped the nation’s history; hers was added in 2019 and painted by Hope Gangloff. SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY DANIEL DREIFUSS
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