Jellyfish, Anyone? Cannery Row, Scenic Drives, Tennis—and Yes, Golf, Too—on the Monterey Peninsula
By Roger Cox

In Finding Nemo, the popular movie from Pixar Animation Studios, a highly forgetful blue tang named Dory drifts helplessly through a throng of pink jellyfish in one of the scariest scenes in the picture. There are no jellyfish quite as pink as those in the movie at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s special exhibit “Jellies: Living Art” (though the deadly pink-tentacled black sea nettles probably provided the inspiration), and none of the myriad visitors, even the toddlers, shows any sign of being scared. Like Dory, however, they do seem to drift helplessly, borne along by a current of wonder that carries them through a gallery of fantastic creatures they would normally go out of their way to avoid.

Jellyfish, it turns out, come in many more forms than the traditional um-
brella-with-tentacles version depicted in Finding Nemo. There are moon jellies, flower hat jellies, upside-down jellies, egg-yolk jellies and crystal jellies. Some have spots, others rainbow stripes. One, the comb jelly, has what look like moving columns of colored lights, as if it were not an aquatic creature but the model for a futuristic space station deep in some distant liquid galaxy. Midwater jellies bioluminesce, even dropping their lighted tentacles to confuse predators. There are jellies that dance through the water and others that row using tiny comblike plates. A few are eerie, others almost comical.

What they all have in common is an evocative beauty. The aquarium calls them “Living Art” and showcases paintings, lithographs, glasswork, poetry, video, and sometimes surprising objects like lava lamps that these strange creatures have inspired. The exhibit has been so popular, even with kids, that it attracts almost as many visitors as the aquarium’s playful and irresistible sea otters.

Jellyfish and tennis don’t usually turn up in the same sentence, but the popularity of the exhibit has made them a frequent topic on changeovers at courts throughout the peninsula. And tennis in fact has deep roots there. The very idea for Davis Cup play originated in Monterey after Dwight F. Davis attended the 1899 Pacific Coast Lawn Tennis Association Championships at the now defunct Hotel Del Monte and began to promote the idea of matches between the United States and Great Britain. The luxury tennis camp was born in nearby Carmel Valley. Tennis has long been one of the activities that lure vacationers to the region.

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