LONG BEACH AQUARIUM PLANS SPECIES ROUNDUP.

Byline: Gary Robbins The Orange County Register

And you thought Noah had it tough filling the ark.

Curator Ken Yates has just over a year to gather 12,000 creatures for the Aquarium of the Pacific, a $117 million high-stakes bid to revive a waterfront here once known as the ``Coney Island of the West.''

Yates' shopping list includes:

Sea otters that must be periodically frisked to see if they're hiding crab shells in their armpits that they can use to scratch their acrylic tanks.

Yellow tang that manipulate their sharp, retractable tails as precisely as a surgeon uses a scalpel.

Slender, 2-foot opaleyes that bully sharks twice their size.

And sea lions. But not too many; they scarf down herring faster than kids slurp Jell-O.

The animal roundup is among the largest in California history and is part of the delicate, exacting, never-ending process of stocking and maintaining a major public aquarium.

Even small mistakes - such as failing to feed sharks enough vitamins or putting a tad too much ozone in tank water - can harm prized fish and disrupt the tenuous harmony of exhibits designed to attract millions of people.

But Long Beach officials feel that creating such an aquarium is the best way to reinvigorate the Pike, the area below Pine Street that was home to one of the nation's busiest amusement parks until it began to fade in the 1950s and was later bulldozed into history.

The aquarium is scheduled to open in June 1998 as the centerpiece of the Queensway Bay Project, a $650 million attempt at urban renewal off Shoreline Drive that encompasses everything from trendy restaurants to a big lagoon for visiting boaters and a seaside esplanade.

``Our city lost 58,000 jobs over the past decade due to the closure of the naval base, downsizing at McDonnell Douglas and the recession,'' said Long Beach Mayor Beverly O'Neil. ``The aquarium will help us turn things around.''

At least, that's the hope.

Cities such as Tampa, Fla., and Camden, N.J., have tried to stir commerce over the past half-dozen years by building aquariums that are going begging for customers. San Francisco's UnderWater World will celebrate its first anniversary Saturday having drawn barely half of the projected 2 million annual visitors.

The notable exceptions include the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which underwent a major expansion and drew more than 2 million people last year.

Long Beach hopes to avoid trouble by creating an aquarium so spectacular it will draw the 1.6 million visitors it needs annually to cover $23 million in operating and debt-service costs.

Long Beach will try to do so without live whales and dolphins, a major attraction at such places as Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. Long Beach decided not to stock these animals because of cost and possible conflict with animal-rights activists.

Instead, the local nonprofit corporation constructing the Aquarium of the Pacific will try to lure visitors with a building of extraordinary beauty. Or, as aquarium director Warren Iliff puts it, ``We want to create an icon as recognizable as the Opera House in Sydney, Australia.''

Long Beach will collect, buy or cultivate species from near and far in an attempt to market itself as the only major West Coast aquarium with lots of animals from throughout the Pacific Ocean. Biologists say the advertising claim is probably true, but note that there is little that is unusual or daring about Long Beach's species list.