musical instrument. She’s painting ish and
needs to know if she has the colors right. And
she has more questions: Do the insides of the
mouths of diamond lizardfish fluoresce?
What about the patterns on its ventral side?
How about these eels? She’s painting several
diferent species, and she depends on these
answers to get them right.
Then she asks an odd one. “Do the speci-
mens still glow when they’re dead?”
Sparks thinks, a little amused. “For a
while, yes,” he says. “The problem is, you
can’t really tell how long. Because we put
them in forma lin and that tends to luoresce
as well. You look at it some years later, and
it’s still brightly luorescent. You can’t really
tell. In the formalin it just stays, yes. But if
you left the ish out in the sun, it would fade.”
Herein is the essence of the ifth loor’s
work. In the hands of the scientists, the
glowing ish go into specimen jars on shelves
somewhere and continue to glow long after
what would be nat ura l. In Carba llo’s hands,
hunks of foam and resin that were never
alive shine with the brilliance of what Sparks
has found, for everyone to see.
His eyes alight on one of the ifth loor’s
larger creations for this exhibit, a tasseled
wobbegong, a ive-foot-long bottom-dwelling
shark that looks to be made of rocks and
coral and bearded with lichen. “I don’t envy
who has to paint that thing!” he says.way and that. “At the highest point. And I’ll
orient it so that as I pour in the resin it’ll
force the air out.” Maybe if she does that
slowly enough, she can insert the brain dur-
ing the pour and it’ll stay put.
87 DAYS
UNTIL OPENINGHOW TO
ACCURATELY PAINT
BIOFLUORESCENT
SEA LIFEJohn Sparks, the curator of “Unseen
Oceans,” makes his rounds. He’s only in
his early fifties, and yet he can tell long-
ago stories about seeing his hand blow up
like a balloon from the venom of a scorpion
ish and getting rammed by a sixteen-foot
shark in a personal submarine at seven hun-
dred meters. He has a boyish face and an
undimmed enthusiasm for fish. His par-
ticular expertise is ish that glow, and the
third room of “Unseen Oceans” focuses on
his work on biof luorescence—on fish that
absorb and give of light.
Preparators are building two hundred
ish of eighteen species, painting them in
f luorescent paint to be lit with UV light.
Sparks is up here constantly, examining
the models for anatomical correctness.
Now he’s meeting with Celeste Carballo, a
painter, whose cubicle is a hoarder’s dream
of ish photos and paints and the occasional
Carba llo chides him. “Act ua lly, that’s the
fun part of it, John.”BASIC COPEPOD ANATOMYThe problem with the sapphirina, Bec Meah
thinks, is that it’s too beautiful. It’s a cope-
pod, a kind of tiny crustacean, maybe half
a millimeter in size, with a pearlescent blue
glowing shell. She’s carving one enlarged to
two feet. She sits on the loor next to a Crock-
Pot illed with gray-brown molding clay and
the model, which she tends to with the looped
end of a sculpting tool and a box knife, cut-
ting grooves and smoothing seams with her
thumb held so taut the tendons nearly vibrate.
The sapphirina’s shell consists of indi-
vidual panels, and this is not Meah’s first
attempt to it them together correctly. She’s
surrounded by academic papers, but even
scientists seem to be obsessed w ith the glow—
she can’t ind a paper that explains the basic
anatomy. She thought maybe the shell was
like a lobster’s tail, a bunch of adjacent plates,
but when she asked a curator about it, the
curator said no way. Then again, this curator’s
expertise wasn’t copepods. It’s a funny thing
that happens when the preparators build—
they quickly ind the limits of expertise.
She takes a knife and gouges a hunk of
clay loose, so deep she cuts into the blue foam
core. She picks up a wooden spoon that’s