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elcome to the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, where Mindee the housekeeper’s poetry won’t win any Nobel Prizes, but some of the students and scientists staying in her dormitory someday just might.
Welcome to the Philip K. Wrigley Marine Science Center, a USC facility located on the rugged northern coast of Santa Catalina Island, near the postcard-perfect village of Two Harbors, where the winter population of 86 swells to a metropolitan 250 after Memorial Day.
Welcome to paradise, where gull cries pierce blue skies over clear, azure waters; where you can wade with leopard sharks in a natural sanctuary.
“Welcome,” says Tony Michaels, the oceanographer who since 1996 has directed the USC Wrigley Institute and its Marine Science Center – both administered by USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
The genuine, heartfelt welcome cuts right to the core of the changes Michaels has wrought in the past three years. Yes, he’s proud of the center’s upgraded facilities, proud of the students who come to the island to study, and proud of the scientific research fostered here. But his greatest source of pride is something much less tangible: it’s a new spirit of openness that has spread across the Wrigley installation like the fresh, tangy smell of the sea blown in on a strong wind.
“There were ‘No Trespassing’ signs here when I came,” Michaels remarks.“No more.”
Wrigley director Tony Michaels |
On sunny, summer Saturdays, as many as 500 pleasure boats will anchor off the end of the Wrigley dock in Big Fisherman’s Cove for the weekly open house, dubbed “Saturday at the Lab.” Students, researchers and staff are all pressed into service to show visitors the laboratory and to spread the word about the unique treasure that is Santa Catalina Island. Michaels wants people to know that their lives are influenced by what goes on here – at the only island marine laboratory between Puget Sound and the Galapagos Islands.
In the early 1990s, marine laboratories around the world were failing financially. Expensive enterprises to operate, they are too often seen as an academic frill rather than an invaluable research component. Since his arrival, Michaels has done a lot to turn that stereotype around, creating programs that clearly connect the lab to the rest of USC, to Southern California and to the world. The public, he believes, will support a marine lab and its science if they understand the context.
“I want people to see the connection between our science and the choices society faces,” he says. “This lab’s role is to do scientific research that absolutely needs to be done for society and that can best be done here.”
So visitors, Michaels has decreed, are not trespassers. “We want visitors. There may be 22 miles of Pacific Ocean between us and the rest of California, but we are not isolated.”
NO ONE IS MORE deeply immersed in this contextual-environmental ethic than the students who come every spring semester to live and study at Wrigley. This is an extraordinary undergraduate education experience.
“We have students who take an extra year of college just to get this semester in,” Michaels says.
Students like Ken Iwaki, who has already graduated from UC Berkeley and has come to USC for the Catalina Semester, which he hopes will help prepare him for graduate school. Or Sharon Walker ’98, who took last year’s Catalina Semester, graduated with dual bachelor’s degrees in environmental engineering and environ-mental studies/biology, and is now back at Wrigley as a staffer, serving as mentor for the 1999 group. This fall, she plans to enter a doctoral program in environmental engineering at Yale University.
“There are never more than 25 students in the program. It is very unusual for a university to do this, very unusual,” says Christopher Pomory, a postdoctoral fellow who serves as education officer for the undergrads.
The students, mostly juniors and seniors, live in the marine lab’s dormitory for the entire spring semester, according to Wrigley Institute program manager Ann Close – the self-described “den mom” who deals with everything from recruitment and advising to “excited and sometimes teary calls from overwhelmed students.”
Despite appearances, Catalina Semester students aren’t enjoying a seaside vacation. During the term, they take three courses on a block schedule – which means they spend the first month working full-time on one course, the next month on the second course, and the third month on the final course. The faculty – who are hand-picked from among USC’s top biological and environmental scientists – live in the same dormitory with the students during these intensive learning periods.
Besides the faculty, each course also has at least one teaching assistant. And if that isn’t enough, there’s Walker, along with Pomory and fellow postdocs Rebecca Korb and David Carlon, all available night and day to mentor the students in their research endeavors.
All of this may sound like overkill, but it’s not. The research these students are doing is hardly the standard senior thesis fare: some will eventually be published in scientific journals, no small accomplishment for undergrads. And virtually all will attract the attention of the year-round islanders who live off the bounty of the sea, as well as that of the Catalina Island Conservancy (the nonprofit ecological protection group that controls 86 percent of the island) and the Santa Catalina Island Company (the Wrigley-owned company that manages the property in and around the town of Avalon).
KEN IWAKI AND ALAN SMITH, for example, are doing much-needed “aquaculture” research on white sea bass, a popular game fish and gourmet’s delight. Maybe white sea bass are too popular for their own good: they’re growing scarce because of overfishing.
In Two Harbors, locals have started the Catalina Island Sea Bass Program, which raises the fish and releases them back into the wild. Harbormaster Doug Oudin secures fingerlings from a hatchery in Carlsbad, Calif., and sets them free when they reach eight to 10 inches in length. Other islanders are exploring raising the fish for food.
But repopulating Catalina’s waters isn’t such a simple pro-position.
“One of the problems with aquaculture is that a lot of fish die from bacterial infections,” says Iwaki. “Over in Cat Harbor, they have two pens of white sea bass. In one pen, they had 7,000 fish in the original stock. What they have now is about 900.”
Iwaki thinks bacterial infections may be responsible for most of the die-off, so for his research project he took water samples from Catalina Harbor (called Cat Harbor by anyone who has been here more than an hour) at different locations and depths to test for bacteria and create a bacterial “gradient” of the harbor.
Meanwhile Alan Smith – a junior biology major from Anchorage, Alaska – wants to know how many white sea bass is too many. In 20-gallon sea-water tanks stacked on the Wrigley dock, he raised fingerlings in three different population densities. In the middle-density tank, the fish enjoyed the same breathing space allowed in local Cat Harbor pens. The other two tanks held either lower densities or higher densities of the fish. After 10 weeks, Smith sacrificed a portion of the white sea bass in each tank, measured and weighed them, and analyzed how much tissue was allocated to carbohydrates, proteins and lipids.
“I expect to find that as we increase the density, the added stress will decrease the amount of energy that they are able to store in muscle tissue,” Smith predicted in April, before his final results were tallied. “They will probably eat less and allocate less energy to muscle. But, I could be wrong. It may be possible to raise the fish at a higher density and not suffer any deleterious effects.”
An aerial view of the Wrigley complex at Big Fisherman's Cove. |
Pomory – whose own research focuses on the California red sea urchin and other echinoderms – says projects like these provide first-hand experiences that are far more relevant to what scientists do in the real world than the typical undergraduate lab experiments demonstrating “known” results. Most college students who are science majors, he says, really end up being information majors. They study. They read lots of books and papers. They gather background information, and they do textbook experiments in laboratories. They rarely conduct scientific studies outside a lab or library.
“But out here, they are doing original work,” Pomory says. “And we won’t know what the answers are to their [research] questions until they gather their data, analyze it and produce results. When these students graduate and get jobs as scientists, this is the kind of work they are going to be doing. If they go on to graduate school, this is also instructive.”
Some of the projects are deceptively simple: Kanoelani Kane, a USC junior from Hawaii, is studying how ultraviolet radiation affects the reproduction of copepods – tiny underwater insects at the bottom of the marine food-chain.
“I just collected these guys,” says Kane, holding up a bottle as she sits at her lab station. “I hiked up over the hill and down to the tide pools.”
Once the microscopic creatures were collected, Kane separated out all the fertilized females from the rest. Then she exposed the females to differing amounts of ultraviolet light. After the UV treatments, she counted the copepod eggs and watched to see how many would progress to the larva stage.
It’s a narrowly focused project with implications potentially as wide as the hole in the Earth’s ozone layer. As anyone who has ever shunned a styrofoam cup knows, the ozone layer blocks most of the sun’s UV rays. As the layer is depleted, more of the Earth’s surface – including its oceans – is exposed to UV light.
Technically, the copepods that Kane collected are crustaceans – microscopic cousins to lobsters, found in the waters from Alaska down to Baja California. But copepods are also “plankton,” a collective term for the tiny animals and plants that form the dietary staple of most aquatic life. If it turns out that increased UV radiation is detrimental to plankton reproduction, then ozone depletion stands to harm the entire ocean ecosystem. Kane’s research will show how UV rays affect one part of that ecosystem.
For Kane, the Catalina Semester has been just another chapter in a spectacular series of travel-study adventures. Before her Catalina Semester, she took courses in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii.
“It was all through USC,” she says. “There are so many opportunities out there that no one takes advantage of. I just go. Next semester, I’m going to Africa to study wildlife.”
For that program, she’s tagging along with a group from Boston University. Because USC is an affiliate school, Kane got priority over other applicants in that study-abroad program. “You just have to learn to use the system,” she says.
THOSE WHO REGARD scientific research as tedious hours spent in a lab with only test tubes and Bunsen burners for companions should spend an afternoon with senior Travis Brooks.
During his Catalina Semester, the environmental studies major donned a wet suit no fewer than 20 times, then “free-dove” (sans scuba gear) to depths of 20 to 25 feet in sea water that dips to winter temperatures of 55° F or lower.
Why? To collect samples of mud from both Catalina Harbor and Isthmus Cove – the harbors for which the tiny village of Two Harbors is named.
“I want to compare the two because there’s something going on there,” he says.
Two Harbors is a geographical curio-sity: it stands on an isthmus at the narrowest part of Catalina. Here you can walk the entire width of the island – from harbor to harbor – in less than 15 minutes. On the Pacific side, well-protected Cat Harbor has been recognized as a safe place to weather storms since the days of the Spanish explorers. Isthmus Cove, on the protected channel side, is the main recreation ground for summer boaters. In the spring, the number of crafts in Cat Harbor outnumber those in Isthmus Cove. It’s common knowledge that boaters empty their bilges and dump their toilets in the harbor, though by law they’re supposed to go three miles out to sea.
For his research project, Brooks decided to collect mud with a giant syringe from 10 randomly chosen sites at the same depth in each harbor. In the lab, he extruded the water from the mud, then measured the levels of nitrates, phosphates and dissolved oxygen. Like Iwaki, Brooks was also testing for bacteria.
Wrigley postdoctoral fellow Rebecca Korb, too, spends a lot of time underwater conducting research on algae. An experienced diver, she hopes to become one of the volunteer crew at the USC Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber, located beside the Wrigley dock.
“I’m looking at the carbon isotope ratios in kelp and the factors that affect those ratios,” Korb says, describing the research that will occupy her for the next two or three years. Geochemists use carbon isotope ratios to calculate the kind of atmosphere present on Earth thousands of years ago. Korb believes her research will reveal a lot more variability in these ratios than scientists have previously assumed.
Brooks’ and Korb’s projects aren’t aberrations. Much of the research work at Wrigley takes place outdoors, and often underwater. The science doesn’t end when the sun goes down, either: certified students get training in night-diving.
To make sure nothing important escapes their scrutiny, the marine scientists have even installed an underwater camera beneath the Wrigley dock to keep an eye on their subaqueous neighbors. Another camera is pointed at the dock and the helipad, and more cameras are slated for installation soon. Live pictures are posted on the Web (wrigley.usc.edu/live.html).
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