Age of aquariums

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT BEACH -- Erik Elstad still shudders when he remembers the time

the long-jawed mudsuckers ate the yellow-fin gobies.

“That was interesting,” the 25-year-old Huntington Beach resident said

on a recent afternoon.

His tone suggested that “interesting” wasn’t quite the right adjective

to describe such slaughter.

Elstad is the man who maintains three aquariums at the Marine Studies

Center on Shellmaker Island, a job that has forced him to learn, the hard

way, about the way animals behave toward each other.

The glassed-in worlds he’s responsible for are intended to capture for

Shellmaker visitors three different kinds of bay environments. One is an

intertidal zone full of waving anemones, cruising opaleye and scuttling

hermit crabs.

The other environments represent an eelgrass bed and -- in the largest

tank -- a deeper water environment that’s home to a shark and a school of

darting fish.

Keeping the water worlds and their denizens happy and healthy is

difficult, Elstad said. He learned part of the art through a course at

Orange Coast College.

But a lot of his understanding of aquariums comes from a combination

of marine biology knowledge and practical experience: He also spent 4 1/2

years at a fish store, testing the water and curing the aquarium critters

of their various diseases.

Eelgrass, for example, seems like it should be straightforward to

maintain in captivity: give it the right nutrients and moderate water

circulation, and one might hope that it would behave like the stuff that

sprouts in a suburban front lawn.

But it’s incredibly complicated.

“It just hasn’t been living for a long period of time,” Elstad said.

“You can get it to grow for a month or so, but then it dies.”

And sometimes fairly simple animals, such as invertebrates, can be

more aggravating than more complex creatures.

“A lot of them require a lot of micronutrients in order to feed, and a

certain amount of light,” Elstad said.

The most stressful case came recently when Shellmaker’s stingray was

pregnant and also infested with parasites. Elstad couldn’t figure out how

to clean the ray of the parasites without poisoning it.

The solution turned out to be simple: fresh water, which sent the

salt-loving parasites searching for more saline pastures.

It might not have made up for the gobies, but it was a small triumph

just the same.