The Third Lagoon The House of Crabs
While we worked on the Fourth and Fifth Lagoons (and other projects), we continued to pursue the question of the Third Lagoon: How much would a crab hectare cost, and how much would it earn? Along the way, we met or were approached by many people with ideas for commercially exploiting such a project. Years later, as the Lagoon Cycle took its final form, the Third Lagoon was created from the stories of these encounters, followed by our response in which we arrive at a new understanding of the nature of the estuarial lagoon.
The first story in the Third Lagoon concerns a man named Ted Hartley. We met him at a party in 1974, and he said he had a house in North Hollywood with different levels that cascaded down a hillside, the first level being his house, the second a ten- nis court, and the third “a place waiting for something to happen.” He was fascinated by our stories of the crab, their mating, and Sea Grant. We said we were looking for a place to make an outdoor lagoon and wanted to experiment with how the crabs would behave in the outdoors and respond to the L. A. smog.
After several meetings, a deal was struck. He would supply the land and cover the costs of building. We would supply the crabs, the expertise, the design, and the filtration system; our part of the work would be funded by the residues of Sea Grant monies. Collectively, we would create an outdoor piece that would be a work of art and science, behaving in part like an estuarial lagoon on his land. He would have the benefit of a complex work of art, and we the benefit of evolving our studies with the crabs.
Over a few months—without the benefit of city inspection—we built a curved shape, 12 meters long by 3.6 meters wide, that reads, from one perspective, as a section of a river. It was two meters deep at one end and 0.6 meters deep at the other. The bottom was gravel with a lot of limestone, on top of tubes that filtered the water. Working with Ranil Senanayake, we seeded the structure with 163 juveniles from the lagoon at Negombo, Sri Lanka. We were particularly interested in cannibalistic behaviors. One day, Ranil came to us and said that he would no longer work for Hartley. “Hartley’s treating me like a servant!” Ranil cried. Ranil was an original Sri Lankan: the great-grandnephew of Don Stephen Senanayake who had agitated for independence and become the first prime minister of the new country. We explained to Hartley that he was lucky to have a representative of such a celebrated Sri Lankan family at work on what we were by then calling Hartley’s Lagoon, but Hartley just couldn’t handle the information.
A few days later, in an article in the Los Angeles Times, Hartley claimed that he had discovered a crab called the “Asian Red” while on a trip to the tropics, and that he had Southeast Asian experts working on decoding the mating and cannibalism behavior which he intended to patent! Suddenly, Helen, Ranil, and I had become “Southeast Asian experts” in the service of the master entrepreneur Ted Hartley, and Scylla serrata (Forsskål) had become “Asian Red”! We were appalled by what to us were manipulative acts of bad faith, but evidently to Hartley were normal business practices. Ceasing all communication, we abandoned the work.
Because we were still in the early stages, however, we had not yet gone over a critical piece of information: to control cannibalism, at least seven hiding places of diverse sizes were required, on average, per crab. A few months later there was another article which talked about how problematic it was to attempt to produce a crab farm. Apparently someone had attempted it, starting out with many small crabs but ending up with one very large crab who had eaten all the others. This very large crab had become dissatisfied in its habitat, climbed out of the pond, and ended up in the neighbors’ backyard, terrifying them!
Some years later, in a meeting with the architect Jon Jerde, we learned that he had bought Hartley’s house, found the pond, and filled it in.
While we worked on the Fourth and Fifth Lagoons (and other projects), we continued to pursue the question of the Third Lagoon: How much would a crab hectare cost, and how much would it earn? Along the way, we met or were approached by many people with ideas for commercially exploiting such a project. Years later, as the Lagoon Cycle took its final form, the Third Lagoon was created from the stories of these encounters, followed by our response in which we arrive at a new understanding of the nature of the estuarial lagoon.
The first story in the Third Lagoon concerns a man named Ted Hartley. We met him at a party in 1974, and he said he had a house in North Hollywood with different levels that cascaded down a hillside, the first level being his house, the second a ten- nis court, and the third “a place waiting for something to happen.” He was fascinated by our stories of the crab, their mating, and Sea Grant. We said we were looking for a place to make an outdoor lagoon and wanted to experiment with how the crabs would behave in the outdoors and respond to the L. A. smog.
After several meetings, a deal was struck. He would supply the land and cover the costs of building. We would supply the crabs, the expertise, the design, and the filtration system; our part of the work would be funded by the residues of Sea Grant monies. Collectively, we would create an outdoor piece that would be a work of art and science, behaving in part like an estuarial lagoon on his land. He would have the benefit of a complex work of art, and we the benefit of evolving our studies with the crabs.
Over a few months—without the benefit of city inspection—we built a curved shape, 12 meters long by 3.6 meters wide, that reads, from one perspective, as a section of a river. It was two meters deep at one end and 0.6 meters deep at the other. The bottom was gravel with a lot of limestone, on top of tubes that filtered the water. Working with Ranil Senanayake, we seeded the structure with 163 juveniles from the lagoon at Negombo, Sri Lanka. We were particularly interested in cannibalistic behaviors. One day, Ranil came to us and said that he would no longer work for Hartley. “Hartley’s treating me like a servant!” Ranil cried. Ranil was an original Sri Lankan: the great-grandnephew of Don Stephen Senanayake who had agitated for independence and become the first prime minister of the new country. We explained to Hartley that he was lucky to have a representative of such a celebrated Sri Lankan family at work on what we were by then calling Hartley’s Lagoon, but Hartley just couldn’t handle the information.
A few days later, in an article in the Los Angeles Times, Hartley claimed that he had discovered a crab called the “Asian Red” while on a trip to the tropics, and that he had Southeast Asian experts working on decoding the mating and cannibalism behavior which he intended to patent! Suddenly, Helen, Ranil, and I had become “Southeast Asian experts” in the service of the master entrepreneur Ted Hartley, and Scylla serrata (Forsskål) had become “Asian Red”! We were appalled by what to us were manipulative acts of bad faith, but evidently to Hartley were normal business practices. Ceasing all communication, we abandoned the work.
Because we were still in the early stages, however, we had not yet gone over a critical piece of information: to control cannibalism, at least seven hiding places of diverse sizes were required, on average, per crab. A few months later there was another article which talked about how problematic it was to attempt to produce a crab farm. Apparently someone had attempted it, starting out with many small crabs but ending up with one very large crab who had eaten all the others. This very large crab had become dissatisfied in its habitat, climbed out of the pond, and ended up in the neighbors’ backyard, terrifying them!
Some years later, in a meeting with the architect Jon Jerde, we learned that he had bought Hartley’s house, found the pond, and filled it in.
