Back in the day, I was once the 1st Cook in a not so famous restaurant in Miami. The steak and seafood house’s claim to fame was a truly gigantic salt water aquarium that featured the first living coral reef to ever succeed in captivity.
The one-of-a-kind aquarium separated the nightly hot spot bar from the restaurant’s open kitchen and large dining room. How big was this thing? Think of the corridor of a sizable hotel encased in 8 ft tall panels of 1” plus thick glass and filled with fresh ocean water pumped in and filtered directly from Biscayne Bay. Whoa.
Sometimes We Learn Unexpected Things
I’d bet there is no way they’d allow anyone to do such a thing in this day and age. At the time this aquarium project was a “well-meaning” joint science project with a couple of the nationally known Florida and Miami universities and the world-famous Miami aquarium. You could say the owners had connections.
I’m pretty sure the owners made far more money shipping US and German luxury cars into various South American markets than selling steak and seafood. They were certainly in the import/export business, but what do I know?
The restaurant was one of those fanciful places where the customer gets to pick their fresh lobster from yet another gigantic tank or two. You could choose between Florida lobsters and flown in Maine lobsters. There were only a few places you could get Maine lobster in South Florida in those days.
If you so desired, you could sit and watch us cook the beast and your choice of very expensive steak with an appropriate alcoholic beverage for about the price of a night’s hotel room on the Beach. Eheh.
Many of the dining room seating areas featured other large aquariums with some spectacular reef fish and animals. Who knew sea cucumbers come in colors? Back to that in a sec…
I had the tough job to face this spectacular reef wall of living water for 8-16 hours a day and chat up and entertain customers while I oversaw the staff and did my own chef work.
There were people there cleaning and maintaining the tanks part time pretty much 24 hours a day.
Most of them were unpaid Marine biology students, but there were serious ocean scientists in and out on a daily basis. Back then keeping coral alive in any tank was a dark art overseen by super-fit 60-year-old wizards with bushy eyebrows. The suntanned, science folk collected every occupant of every tank personally.
I learned what a slurp gun was.
Oscar the Octopus
One of the smaller specialty tanks included a small native Florida octopus. I have no clue as to what kind of octopus he was. His name was Oscar and he was at the time locally famous. His tank was located between the bar and the reception desk. His tank was very boring compared to the rest of the displays most which featured colorful native fish.
Most of the day Oscar simply made himself invisible and hid in the shadows - That is except at suppertime.
The everyday tradition was to start out Happy Hour in the bar by feeding Oscar. At 5:00pm or so, a feeder fish or two would get dropped into Oscar’s tank and they’d turn up the lights in his tank.
If you paid a little attention, you would also notice the Oscar would get much more active in the minutes right before 5. He’d actively change colors to make himself much more visible when the senior aquarium boss came around to feed him.
Yes. There was a bet or two to be had with that rum and Coke.
How Long Does a Feeder Fish Last?
Most of the time one small fish would last less than a couple of minutes. Mind you. These fish would seem to magically disappear. Oscar was a lot quicker than anyone would expect. Two fish might last ten minutes on a bad night.
Then came the day when the feeder fish were simply ignored. Oscar wasn’t interested at all. The senior scientist was deeply concerned. Fish and animals die. This lack of appetite went on for a couple of days. The restaurant staff were accused of surreptitiously feeding Oscar for God knows what reason.
I was interviewed. I was there most of the day doing the prep work and in charge of the setup prep staff. I witnessed most of the comings and goings and the aquarium maintenance. I was totally clueless.
The only thing I had noticed was that the number of small fish in the main tank was noticeably reduced in the last week. The total number of small fish in the huge tank changed almost daily. The students would add small fish and the bigger fish would either eat them or sometimes kill them outright. There were certainly territorial battles.
The Fishy Mystery
In the end Oscar ratted out the culprit. He couldn’t help himself.
We discovered than a new graduate student was temporarily acclimatizing the new daily small fish destined for the main reef tank in Oscar’s tank. He believed the octopus’s tank was empty and was located there where it was for that purpose.
The student would drop in the one to two dozen small fish in the tank and Oscar would eat his fill. The student would catch the remainder and move the survivors over the main tank. He later claimed he believed the missing fish were hiding somewhere in Oscar’s tank.
This made sense to him until Oscar began to light up like a Christmas tree every time the student walked by his tank. Oops. That tank is not so empty is it?
Then Oscar’s refusal to eat at 5:00 became an issue.
Goes to show that our daily work can appear to work out just right until it doesn’t.
Who Knew?
Back in the day the science types all insisted that octopus were solitary hunters. Have gun will travel. Eheh.
It turns out that this behavior is apparently a myth.
In the wild, some octopus like Oscar hunt on the reef with a pack of hangers on fish.
These fish hunt together in conjunction with the octopus.
He or she keeps the helpful fish in line with an occassional whack across the chops.
Ever tried to catch a small reef fish?
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