PORT ANGELES — The start of the Feiro Marine Life Center’s off-season schedule this week also marks the opening of a new fish tank for the 32-year-old center.
Kerri McHenry, marine life center staff member, said the 450-gallon tank was unveiled last week after being delivered to the marine life center in July.
The opening of the new tank comes as the marine life center on Port Angeles’ City Pier switches today to daily operation between noon and
4 p.m. for the off season, a change from daily operating hours of 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the summer.
In a Monday interview, McHenry said volunteers and staff installed a foam base on the inside bottom of the new tank and covered that with cement, which was then dotted with fist-sized, and larger, rocks pulled from local waters.
Some rocks came with barnacles attached, many of which survived the trip and now live and feed in the tank, McHenry added.
A volunteer also built the waist-high wooden base the tank sits on, she said.
“If we didn’t have our volunteers, we could not be running still today,” McHenry said.
The tank’s most noticeable inhabitants are five large fish species that will likely stay there for the winter season, McHenry said, with individual fish being rotated in and out so no one fish stays there too long.
Center staff may turn the tank into a display of solely intertidal species in the future, McHenry said.
Such intertidal species can be found in tidepools throughout the North Olympic Peninsula, McHenry said, and comprise many of the species living in the marine life center’s touch tanks.
The fish living there now were caught by marine life center staff and volunteers from local waters,
McHenry said.
“Everything in here comes from [within] about 20 miles,” McHenry added.
The fish species calling the new tank home include the copper rockfish, sporting sharp but not poisonous spines along its back, and the red Irish lord, which bears a striking resemblance to the rocks installed in the tank.
The water in the tank, like the others in the marine life center, comes unfiltered directly from the surrounding harbor, McHenry said.
This means algae spores and sea anemone larvae, among other microscopic life, will find their way into the tank naturally and continue to populate the enclosure with local sea life, McHenry explained.
For more information, contact the Feiro Marine Life Center at 360-417-6254 or visit feiromarinelifecenter.org.
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Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.
