How Deep is the Ocean?

A story from Laura Barnes Walker.

Cross jellies & salps

What’s it like taking kids who’ve never seen the ocean before out on a catamaran to do plankton tows and learn about navigation and conservation? Laura, Education Director for O’Neill Sea Odyssey, has heard it all from “It looks fake!” to “Is this the ocean?” With her job cut out for her, she leads her charges on an exciting path of discovery as they hunt for seals, otters and hopefully whales.

LAURA BARNES WALKER is Education Coordinator for O’Neill Sea Odyssey, which provides hands on educational experience for young students, encouraging them to protect and preserve our marine environment. The program takes 4th through 6th grade kids out on Monterey Bay in a catamaran. The students do a three-station program of Marine biology, marine ecology and navigation, which serves as an introduction to marine science for these kids. Most have never been on a boat before. Laura teaches on the boat, all three stations. She also writes and researches all the curriculum, manages grants, schedules teachers, pays for buses out of Sea Odyssey’s scholarship fund, mops up, scrubs life jackets, and makes visual aids.

Laura was born in Santa Barbara, CA and grew up there. Her dad worked on the water, so Laura grew up on boats. Her first job was getting her allowance from scrubbing the bottom of her dad’s boat.

Laura studied humanities at San Francisco State University, because she wanted a really well rounded education. However the ocean life continued to call. Immediately after graduating, she worked for the Maritime Museum Association in San Francisco. Then she got offered a job sail making for the America’s Cup.

But Laura really wanted to travel, though she didn’t have the necessary funding. So she got a job as a tour guide in Alaska. There she spent a couple of years working for land-based eco-tours, like camping tours, and also worked on Prince William Sound as a naturalist on a glacier and wildlife day-tour charter boat.

Upon returning to California, a friend suggested Santa Cruz as an antidote to big city life, which would have been hard after the wilderness of Alaska. Once settled, Laura went to the harbor to look for a job. She approached Save Our Shores, as she wanted to do something good for the environment. During her time in Alaska Laura was sometimes shocked by the lack of environmental awareness she often observed.

Save Our Shores (SOS) didn’t have any jobs, but they had a Sanctuary Stewardship Program, which included 100 hours of training about the ecology of Monterey Bay. Laura completed the ten-week course, plus 100 hours of community service public outreach.

Near the end of that program, SOS told her O’Neill was looking for someone with boat experience who had worked as a naturalist. Laura was hired and started as an Instructor in the Sea Odyssey program in 1999. A few years later she was asked if she’d like the Education Coordinator position to write their curriculum as a book.  Laura said yes and has been at O’Neill Sea Odyssey ever since.

You can watch Laura’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/KtZHGB74OSw

HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN? 

So, if you ask me about one particular, impactful experience that I’ve had on the ocean, I think I would have to say dealing with a population of kids that live 20 minutes from the ocean, but have never seen it, introducing them to the ocean and marine science. I have a lot of kids that have never been on a boat, or their only experience on the beach is maybe they took a trip to the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz on their summer break. They don’t really have any idea of what’s living out there, so and teaching them about the ocean becomes a very memorable experience.

We get questions all the way up the dock, as we’re walking with the kids. They’re just shooting questions at us the whole time. “How deep is the water here?” “How deep is the ocean?” That is a really common one: “How deep is the ocean?” I go, “it depends on where you are! If you look at the depth finder right now, we’re at sixty feet, but if you go out fifty miles that way, it’s like two and a half miles.” That’s a real concept for them – about how different it is, not just one big puddle. And also how vast it is.

They learned in school, oh you know, the ocean is more than 70% of the earth’s surface. They know that, but then when they get out there and they see it, they look at me and they say, “Is this the ocean? Is this the Pacific Ocean? What ocean is this? Where are we? Like, is this the ocean? Are we on the ocean? Are we going on the ocean?” There’s a lot of that! Even when we’re out there!

Almost every day I get kids looking at the water, and they’ll say, “It looks fake.” I think it’s because so many kids experience things through video. When they see something that’s real on video, cause video looks so real, they’re confused when they see reality. It’s much more unusual for them to be in a real environment than it is in a video environment. I see that every day. I can’t count how many times the kids look down at the water and say, “It looks fake.” “It looks fake. Is that real? It looks fake.”

So a big hurdle we have to deal with when we’re trying to introduce kids to the ocean is getting them to understand that the ocean is a living thing: it’s a living habitat full of all kinds of animals that have their own reasons for doing things, their own motivations, their own destinies to fulfill.

So a lot of kids will come out and some of the questions that they ask heading down the dock are, “Are we gonna see whales? Are we gonna see dolphins? Are we gonna see sharks? Are there sharks living here? Can they jump up and grab us off the boat?” You know, stuff like that.

And I say to the whales and dolphin questions, “Maybe. I don’t know. We might have to look for them.” And they don’t really get that, you know. I say, “Well we’re definitely gonna see sea lions, cause they kind of hang out in one place. We’re definitely gonna see sea otters, cause they kinda hang out in one place. We’re definitely, well, we’re probably gonna see harbor seals, but only maybe, you know, cause they don’t always hang out in one place. Whales and dolphins, they have business to take care of. They’re doing their thing. I don’t know what that business is. Maybe they’re off getting something to eat. Or migrating north, or whatever they’re doing. We don’t know if we’re going to see them or not.

And that is a new concept, cause sometimes the kids arrive and they think it’s like Sea World. We can just whistle or snap our fingers, oh, there’s the dolphins! You know, they’re not kept anywhere. And that’s another thing with language that we see from the kids a lot. We say, “Do you guys know what a Sanctuary is?” And they say, “It’s a place where you keep the animals.”

We go, well, we don’t really keep them. That’s not really how it works. This is where they live. It’s like your house isn’t where we keep you. Well, maybe it is, you know, but it’s where you live, right? Your city isn’t where we keep you. These animals just live here. They might show up and they might not, depending on the conditions. And the conditions are gonna change, right?

So, it’s funny cause kids who don’t come here often, they get to see a lot of pictures of the beach - of the beach on TV. Even if it’s cold where they live, they’ll come in shorts and bathing suits, even if the live just a half hour away. So it’s really getting them to understand this is a real, natural environment. It’s gonna change. You’re gonna have to adapt to it. Like it’s not gonna always adapt to you like our human environment that we control so much.

They have a hard time believing us, especially since they’re really obsessed with sharks. The kids come out and they say, “Are there sharks here?” We have to teach science. We have to teach the absolute truth. I don’t ever lie to them. I say, yeah, there’s sharks here, a lot of kinds. “What kinds?” “All kinds, you know. There are leopard sharks and great white sharks, you know, salmon sharks and all kinds of sharks.” And they’re like, “What are we doing out here?” cause they think of sharks as this great monster enemy. But they don’t jump out of the water like in the movies, and I’ve been working on this boat for 18 years and I’ve never seen one. I wish that I could. You know, they don’t come up for our convenience. It’s a challenge getting the kids to understand that wild animals have a mind of their own, and that they’re just doing their job and fulfilling their destiny out there.

Another thing that is really fun, and one of the most impactful things that we do, is show them the plankton. We get plankton samples every day and identify the different types of plankton. So we’ll get a group of kids out on the boat, and they will actually take the plankton samples themselves.  I’ll go, “here’s your net, throw it in, pull it out, hold the jar, pour the plankton in the jar.” So they do every step, totally hands on! They pour it in the jar. They can look in and see tiny little dust-like specs in the jar. And then we come back here, and I put the plankton under the microscope, and it shows up on our TV.

And, you know, the questions that we have before the sample goes up on the TV are like, “What does plankton look like?” How can you tell phytoplankton from zooplankton?” “Well, they all look different. And, you know, how do you tell a daisy from a redwood tree? How do you tell a dog from a rosebush?” It’s very important that they know that there are thousands of types of plankton, and not just one.

So we get here in the lab, and the plankton have such endearing characteristics, even for the kids. When they see a baby barnacle, they just go, “oh, look at that guy, it’s so cute”. I talk about the plankton, their lifecycle, what they eat and what they do and how their life is and some of the challenges they go through just to survive, especially meroplankton. You know, so much meroplankton exists just to be eaten, so that a single one can survive. And getting the kids to understand that? Well, it doesn’t really happen. They don’t really get it until the very last ten seconds of the program.

The kids will look at the plankton on TV and we’ll identify the species, and they’ll ooh and ahhh. Then at the very end, we take the slide out from under the microscope, and we pass it around right under the kids’ noses so they can see that those little specs of dust right there are what they just saw on TV. And that is the only moment when they really get it, because, you know, we pass that slide around and they go, “No way!” And then the inevitable questions, “When you’re swimming, are they all over me?” “What happens if I swallow them?” “Are they going to swim around inside my stomach and live?”

So we have to put a lot of those fears to rest. But the kids really start to care about these tiny little microscopic creatures. By the end, they’re thinking about, “Well what are you going to do with them now?” “Are you going to put them back?” Like they’re really interested!

We see a lot of pregnant cladosera[1], and the kids are like, “Well she’s gonna have babies! You’ve got to put her back in the ocean!” “What about that fish egg we saw?” “You have to put these back” So we’ll take the samples and put them in a cup and ask the kids to take them and pour them off the dock back into the harbor. Pretty much every day.

And that makes them feel connected. You know that makes them feel like this cup of water, which before they would have just poured onto their sand castle, this is alive! These are living creatures, they’re just not the same size as us. So that, I think, is one of the things that I enjoy most about my job - having the kids make that connection, and I think it takes the whole three hours to get there.

Honestly, you think it’s gonna happen right when they get on the boat, but they are questioning their reality so much throughout the whole process, that I really think it does take the whole program for them to get it, a lot of times. Especially if they’re kids that haven’t been exposed to the ocean environment before.

Thank you for sharing your story with us Laura!

[1] They are also known as water fleas, tiny crustaceans that are holoplankton – planktonic for their whole lives. They have live offspring, which is very different from most other holoplankton crustaceans, who lay eggs.