Muralist and Aquarium volunteer Cleo Vilett adds her finishing touches to the new Pollution Corner exhibit. Photo: Randi Parent/Heal the Bay
A beautiful moon jelly in the new 180-gallon sea jelly kreisel. Photo: Jose Bacallao/Heal the Bay

Where’s my watershed? What’s a watershed? These are questions all good Heal the Bay-ers get asked a lot. As anyone who has worked a tabling event knows, the general public has little if any knowledge about the workings of the watershed and the impact pollution inland has on Santa Monica Bay and its marine life.

Visitors to the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium can gain a better understanding of the connection between urban living and the ocean environment through a new pollution corner exhibit.

A three-dimensional, interactive exhibit along the wall depicts scenes of the watershed from the city to the shore and ultimately, into the open ocean, illustrating the human impact on the environment along the way.

A new 180-gallon sea jelly kreisel represents the open ocean, filled with majestic moon jellies, Aurelia aurita. Moon jellies are born and raised at the Aquarium and a small nursery tank has displayed these young jellies for the past year.  The kreisel is a round tank specially designed to protect the fragile structure of a jelly. Visitors will also find an eerily similar form floating in a tank alongside the jelly kreisel. Drifting close to the surface of the water, with long tendril-like strands extending downward, out in the open ocean this “creature” would be observed from below by sea turtles and the ocean sunfish, looking for a tasty meal of sea jellies. But rather than a nutritious meal, a case of mistaken identity turns this plastic bag into a death sentence for sea jelly predators.

Tying directly into Heal the Bay’s single use plastic bag ban efforts at the state and local levels, the floating plastic exhibit demonstrates how marine debris’ animal mimicry often results in the death of the marine life that mistakenly ingests the floating plastic.

The sea turtle and the albatross are used to illustrate this consumer-produced problem through a colorful mural with paintings of life-sized marine animals, as well as three-dimensional models and interactive exhibits. The mural - which spans two and a half walls in the southernmost corner of the Aquarium - and the life-sized wooden albatross, were designed and created by professional muralist Cleo Vilett. While the plastic bag exhibit explains the struggle of sea turtles in a marine debris-laden ocean, the albatross is a tangible example of how our use of plastic materials has impacted the open ocean.

When albatross chicks get ready to leave the nest, they regurgitate a tangle of indigestible material called a bolus. The bolus should contain a combination of fish parts, squid beaks and crustacean shells  - the leftover scraps of months of food fed to them by their parents.

The new pollution exhibit includes a black-footed albatross bolus and the contents of the stomach of a Layasan albatross. Both were acquired by the Aquarium through Cynthia Vanderlip, the manager of the Kure Atoll Wildlife Sanctuary on Hawaii.

The sample bolus includes large amounts of monofilament fishing line, which Vanderlip says is common. The young Layasan albatross most likely died from plastic ingestion, Vanderlip told the Aquarium. And as public programs manager Tara Crow sorted through the stomach contents for display, she found one piece of plastic that was more distinct than the others: a yellow plastic cowboy figurine. The cowboy, at an inch and half long, was headless and missing hands and both feet; one leg was cut off at the knees. Crow did a bit of research and dated the figurine to somewhere between the 1960s and 70s.

The plastic cowboy is the perfect example of how long plastic items can float around the ocean before being swallowed by an albatross, which then feeds it to its young.

In an effort to lessen the impact on the environment, recycled materials were used wherever possible.

The California Coastal Conservancy funded this exiting new exhibit through a capital expenditure grant awarded to the Aquarium.