Visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


Monterey, California’s biggest tourist draw is its aquarium.  Lines queue up to get in, which is one of the reasons why I became a field trip chaperone when my daughter Florence’s Waldorf School went for a visit.  Going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a class of nine- and ten-year-olds allows you to fully appreciate the Aquarium I think.

We all started our trip to the Aquarium by walking from the Pacific Grove Gate to Pebble Beach where the school was located to walk downhill to Cannery Row in Monterey.  The kids were bouncing along and talking loudly all the way there.  By the time we arrived, they had all slowed down to adult speed and were quiet at the entrance to the sardine-canneries-turned-aquarium on breezy Monterey Bay.

The fifth graders split into two groups – the sea otters and the octopae.  I was in charge of the octopus group.  The octopus kids were not happy.

“We don’t want to be an octopus,” they said almost in unison as our Aquarium guide looked on in distress.

“An octopus is one of the smartest animals in the ocean,” I said.  “They squirt ink at their enemies and blind them, so they can away from them without getting hurt,” I continued.  That statement seemed to mollify them, but I noticed that the kids “lost” their badges during the course of our field trip.  I wanted to be in charge of the sharks on the next Aquarium visit.

A retired schoolteacher was our guide.  She was trying not to laugh as I dealt with the octopus issue.  She started our trip by describing an ecosystem and food webs – both relate how nature is related and interlocking in nature.  Disturbing one of the parts has an effect on the others. 

We received this introduction at the Inner Bay Exhibit, which has a towering and twirling kelp forest in its tank.  The kids swiveled as the guide spoke, helping them use more than one sense to retain the information being imparted to them.

I asked about an interesting fish there called a Sheep’s Head fish.  It was black on each end and orange in the middle.  That is what the male fish looks like.  If the male fish is taken out of the vicinity of the female fish, the orange-colored female fish will change into a male.  The Aquarium guide said the workers had discovered this when they took the male fish out of the tank and the female fish began to change into a male fish.

After this explanation, we then tramped up the metal stairs to the exhibits with star fish, which our guide said are also called sea stars.  Sea otters eat sea stars.  Sea stars  liquefy their food before eating it.  The guide gave us a sheet with images of the foods that are in the sea otter’s food web: abalone, crab, sea cucumber, pisaster star, sea urchin, and bat star.  I told the kids I would hold the handouts and give them back to them when we got back to school. 

Next we went into the Outer Bay Exhibit.  Bigger animals live out there as well as jellyfish.  The kids liked the orange jellyfish that bobbed up and down against a blue- lit background.  Our guide told us that sea turtles eat jellyfish.  She said that sea turtles sometimes mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and eat the bags, which “can be fatal.”

“What does ‘fatal’ mean?” one of the octopus kids asked.

“It means turtles die if they eat plastic bags,” I said, sparing the guide from shocking the innocent childhood of Waldorf students.

After that we went into the viewing room with the “tuna tank.”  All the kids lay down on the floor to watch the high stress, Type-A tuna dart about.  They all “oohed and aahed” when they hammerhead shark slowly swam amongst the tuna.

The guide said her tour was over.  I was left with the octopus kids for another two hours.  I suggested that we go see the sea otters being fed.  We went down the metal steps and across exhibit halls to see the sea otters being fed for half an hour until everyone got bored.  (I think they were all happy to be an octopus after that.)

My next suggestion was, “Would you like to pet the manta rays?”

“Yeah!”

“What are those?”

“Don’t manta rays sting”

“Where are they?”

“Follow me,” I said, feeling like the Pied Piper.

We tramped downstairs and back up and around the back of the Aquarium to the huge pool of whirling manta rays.  (My family had a family membership to the Aquarium, so I knew where everything was.)  We all put our hands in the water and let the manta rays flit and slither by them.  The manta rays are slimy, which necessitated hand washing before and after using the bathroom, our next tour stop.

After that I took the fifth-grader octopus group to the Splash Zone.  The Splash Zone was set up for preschoolers.  None were there, which made this a good stop.  The Splash Zone has slides, games, photo-op stands (everyone got photos taken as a penguin), and the penguin exhibit.  The penguins are the monkeys of the Aquarium.  I took the kids there to see the penguins.

I love penguins.  They thrash around when they swim, stand up and flap their flippers to dry off, and bite each other’s behinds when they are angry.

There was a little auditorium in front of the exhibit tank.   The Aquarium did a show to illustrate the differences between a rainforest parrot and a penguin.  My daughter Florence was dressed up as a penguin and her classmate “nemesis” was dressed as a parrot.

They were asked to make up some lines based on what they had learned.

“Penguins are ugly.”

“Parrots smell.”

“Penguins eat turds.”

“Parrots just repeat things.”

I am sure the Aquarium staff had them say some other things, but laughter does increase knowledge retention according to some academic researchers.

The only exhibit we did not visit was the ocean bird exhibit.    The ocean bird exhibit area is small and better suited for families I thought.  The Aquarium’s films about the deep sea creatures it is studying in the Monterey Bay Canyon are best seen as a family I thought, too.  The Monterey Bay Canyon is deeper than the Grand Canyon and is just as interesting as the moon to explore I think.

I have always enjoyed visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Permanent exhibits and took visitors to see them during the thirteen years that I lived in Monterey.  The overall experience of visiting the Aquarium makes you feel as if you have been on a diving trip.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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