1All three are retired, but on Thursdays from September through April, they get up early, don rubber gloves and spend the morning cleaning homes.
Called the Home Crew, the three are among the cadre of volunteers who provide maid service to Pinky the Sea Star, Abby Abalone, Ruby the Octopus and other residents of the touch tanks and aquariums at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center.
“You dust and vacuum, just like you do your house,” Petrie said.
Staff members perform the job in the summer when the building is open every day, staff Lucy Carpenter said.
But in the fall, winter and early spring, Home Crew volunteers take on the work, coming in three times a week.
On the job
Last Thursday, Petrie, Walczak and Dengler, along with Sandy Dengler and Joe Ryan, reported for duty at 9:30 a.m.
They started by hooking up the siphon tubes to clear plastic hoses that empty into the bay, from which tank water is pumped.
Like siphoning gas, the cleaners created a vacuum in the hoses by sucking on one end.
“You don’t want to get a mouthful of sea water,” Walczak said, “but it happens.”
The hoses hooked up, the Home Crew volunteers vacuumed the sand floors of the five touch tanks, three rectangular aquariums and two large circular tanks.
They were careful to remove only the silt and sediment . . . and other material.
“Sea cucumbers suck up sea water and filter out the nutrition,” Walczak explained as bits of detritus flowed with the water through the tube.
“All this you see is sea cucumber poop. I’m sucking it up.”
Petrie used a kitchen baster to dust the sea anemones, then reached into a touch tank and lifted out what appeared to be a shrimp.
The molt, like the vacuumed debris and water, went down a hole in the floor, which is the deck of the pier, dropping to the water below.
When a storm stirs up sediment in the bay, it adds to the tank-cleaning job.
But the volunteers persevere.
“If we didn’t do this, you wouldn’t be able to look into the tank and see the fish,” Bill Dengler explained to visiting students from Port Townsend’s Grant Street Elementary School’s preschool, “and the fish wouldn’t be able to look out and see you.”
Clinging animals
Other problems encountered that are unusual for housekeepers are:
• Algae and tiny white tubeworm larvae come in with the sea water and have to be discouraged from taking up residence on the sides of the Plexiglas tanks, Petrie said.
• And sofa cushions don’t wrap their tentacles around the cleaner, like the resident octopus.
“I’ve had one crawling up my arm while I was vacuuming,” Petrie said.
“Fortunately, it dropped off.”
Sea stars also will grab an arm during the cleaning process, Dengler said, although they usually just lift the tips of their tentacles and watch, the eyes being on the tips.
Shrimp, having short memories, always seem curious when the tubes suddenly appear in their domain, Carpenter said.
• Furniture doesn’t spawn, either. For these housekeepers, eggs get washed back in to the bay, their natural habitat.
That’s not the only thing that has.
“We have accidentally liberated things,” Petrie said.
The grunt sculpins, which walk on their fins and resemble tiny hedgehogs, lay their eggs inside barnacles and fan them, Petrie said.
Sometimes members of the Home Crew gather up touch tank progeny and free them from shore, she said, so that they don’t go “overboard” with the siphoned water.
“It’s a big drop,” Petrie said.
And unlike cleaning the living room, tank cleaning is different every week.
New critters
When Petrie came back from being out of town for two weeks, she found all kinds of new critters had been added to the menagerie, she said.
Working on the Home Crew is also fun and good exercise, volunteers said, and produce visible results.
“It’s something very specific you can do to make life better for the animals and to help people learn about them,” Walczak said.
Bill Dengler said he and Sandy joined the Home Crew because they like being involved behind the scenes.
Another perk of the job: when the tanks are clean, the crew gets to feed the residents lunch.
Dengler used a long-handled tool to tempt fish out of hiding spots in the large circular tank, the fish darting out to swallow a chunk of food.
Ryan doled out clams for the starfish, which draw the clams in, then insert their stomachs in shell cracks to digest them.
Walczak placed pieces of brown kelp on the spines of the spiny abalone.
“They didn’t like the frozen kelp we had in the winter,” Walczak said.
Working on the Home Crew is also more challenging in the winter, when the temperature of both the room and the water is cold.
Bill Dengler’s secret for avoiding housewife’s hands.
“I have on knit gloves inside the rubber ones,” he said.
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Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.
