Last week’s
“Amusing Monday” entry was indeed shot at the Seattle Aquarium
— and there’s more to the story than meets the eye.
The announcer in the video doesn’t say where the scene was shot,
so I put out a request for information. Thanks go to Susan Berta of
Orca Network for putting me in touch with folks at
Seattle Aquarium, which ultimately led to an interview with
biologist and lead diver Jeff Christiansen, who was involved in
shooting the video.
Photo courtesy of Seattle
Aquarium
|
Before 1987, the dome exhibit often included three octopuses —
the number required to almost guarantee that people would see one,
Christiansen told me. The octopuses would hang out in a recessed
area under the lower windows inside the tank, he said. That was
before the rocky reefs were installed.
Also in the tank were a number of dogfish sharks, another native
of the Puget Sound region. But not all the dogfish survived.
“If you were lucky enough, you could see it happen,” he said.
“They would wait for fish to swim by, then you’d see the arms flash
out and a bit of a struggle. Whatever the octopus didn’t eat was
chucked out.”
Frequently, aquarium workers would arrive in the morning to see
the remains right in front of the viewing windows. The middle of
the dogfish carcasses were completely eaten down to the bones, but
the head and tail were intact.
“It was considered bad to have dead animals sitting down there
in the tank when you opened up (the exhibit) in the morning,”
Christiansen said.
Divers, who normally went into the tanks in the afternoon, had
to put on their gear and make a special trip into the tank, he
said. Today, divers are in the tank several times a day.
Although the sharks were easy to replace, especially in those
days, aquarium managers were worried about losing rare and valuable
fish, he said. In fact, once an octopus was able to eat a sizable
salmon before the decision was made to take the octopus out.
Anyway, about 10 years ago, Mike DuGruy of National Geographic
Films was doing a feature on octopuses when he heard the story
about the shark-eating creatures.
“He came to us and asked if we could recreate the situation,”
Christiansen said. “Being the film-whores we are, we said
‘sure.’”
The details of the recreation are somewhat proprietary,
Christiansen said. But that’s how the dramatic battle of the shark
and the octopus came to be a National Geographic story.
Today, with the recent remodel of the aquarium, octopuses have
their own space. With divers in the tanks several times a day, they
could feed the octopuses enough so the animals wouldn’t go after
fish, Christiansen said. Still no decisions have been made to put
octopuses back in the big tank.
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