Technology and Culture

For the uninitiated, large public aquariums might seem like glorified goldfish bowls. Samantha Muka's richly textured Oceans Under Glass explodes this simplistic view and shows how "tank crafters" create complex and intricate systems for a variety of purposes. Specialized aquaria function as simulacra of different aspects of oceans in miniature, which have shaped our perceptions of the undersea world and even scientific understanding. To my surprise, much of the "undersea" footage of David Attenborough's award-winning Blue Planet was aquarium based, although viewers assumed expert cameramen-divers had been filming underwater. While "no tank system can perfectly replicate the natural environment" (p. 60), information gained from keeping undersea species alive in such tanks necessarily informs our knowledge of these difficult-to-monitor lifeforms.

Although the title Oceans Under Glass captures Muka's focus on the centrality of aquaria to marine biology, she also seeks, in this highly original work, to give due credit to an extended community of hobbyists, engineers, and professional or self-trained experts in "tank craft." Through tinkering and successful improvisations to advance tank technology and techniques for keeping marine species alive, these experts are essential to scientific investigations but have preferred in-person and in-situ communication rather than formal publications. Meanwhile, marine scientists usually divorce biological information from its derived context in their publications, seldom mentioning the technicians and hobbyists who have enabled their investigations. Due to the scarcity of sources on the history of tank crafting, Muka was forced to dive into hobbyist manuals, magazines, journals, and global online communities to learn their history. She visited public, private, and for-profit aquariums to interview willing tank crafters and also to view these miniature oceans.

Oceans Under Glass is divided into five main chapters. While each focuses on different aspects of aquarium history, Muka presents the different specializations in their chronological order of emergence, beginning with a general introduction to the tank-craft community. Later chapters focus on photography and film aquariums; aquaria specialized for keeping delicate animals such as jellyfish alive (Kriesel aquariums, in which water is agitated to simulate the natural environment); reef tanks; and breeding tanks. In [End Page 407] each, she highlights the contributions by key individuals and links their advances to external outcomes. Early twentieth-century marine dioramas were used to exposit nationalist themes: Germany's Museum of Natural Sciences in Berlin used marine dioramas "to engage [the public] in the new German goal of naval and oceanographic expansion" (p. 34). Photography aquariums enable improved marine taxonomy illustrations, since marine species rapidly deteriorate after death. Specialized reef tanks require delicate and constant tinkering: some hobbyists use "living rock" (i.e., rocks covered in natural biota) and natural seawater, while others use sterilized rocks, carefully introduced biota, and artificial seawater for control and disease prevention. Neither gives greater insights into natural ecosystems. Desirable aesthetics drive aquarists' choices that affect our understanding of nature. In thinking "of reefs and their physical experience with them," even experienced ocean divers prefer to envisage Ocean World's hyperreal, enriched artificial reef system in its huge open-air and swimmable "Discovery Cove" tank in Orlando, Florida. They thus allow "the simulation to become the new real environment" (p. 177).

Oceans Under Glass also explores the irony that intensive harvesting of tropical species, to meet tank crafters' and hobbyists' demand globally, had reduced natural populations to between 2 and 20 percent of their former numbers by 2005. Women hobbyist-scientists in Hawaii pioneered "closing the circle" of life by breeding and raising captive species in multiple tanks to provide appropriate environments and food for life stages from microscopic larvae to fully adult forms. Muka reviews the history of scaled up—but often secretive—commercial breeding operations for popular reef species, which may save natural populations. She also posits new roles for aquaria as spaces to keep species under threat in the wild, including many corals, alive until conditions become right for their reintroduction.

For anyone...