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YOU MIGHT THINK a group of young adults isolated from the social energy of USC’s University Park Campus – away from plays and concerts and well-stocked libraries, from fast-food and 20-minute pizza delivery, and from their friends – would complain. But the opposite is true. They don’t want the program to end; and when it does, most keep coming back to Wrigley every chance they get. Last year, half a dozen undergraduates stayed at Wrigley to work as “dive slaves” – counting algae or snails or whatever else researchers needed for their studies.
“It is a very special time because you see the people in this program 24-7 [24 hours a day, seven days a week],” says mentor Sharon Walker. “I’ve made some of my closest friends in college in this program. Out here, you have a special relationship with the professors because you are with them all the time.”
The students who get into the program, the faculty and their teaching assistants, the researchers and anyone else who stays at Wrigley share a common love for the outdoors. No one seems to miss anything from the mainland. On weekends, they can often be found skin diving or kayaking along the coast, or hiking or riding mountain bikes around the island.
“Some Saturdays, we pack the van and drive over to Avalon for a change of scenery, or shopping or a meal at a restaurant,” says Rebecca Korb, who commutes from her Two Harbors trailer on a mountain bike.
During the term, most of the students make a couple of weekend trips to the mainland to see friends; they usually return complaining about the traffic. But Alan Smith, who visited the mainland one weekend to run in the L.A. Marathon, complains about the distractions at Wrigley.
“There are too many things that I like to do out here – kayaking, snorkeling and hiking,” he says. How’s a person supposed to find time to study?
When he graduates, Smith hopes to take a year off before starting medical school. He’s bucking to replace Sharon Walker as mentor to next year’s Catalina Semester class.
Wrigley visitors often spice up the facility’s sleepy social life. Groups of K-12 schoolchildren and their teachers routinely visit. When they do, the undergraduates quickly turn into Wrigley tour guides, winning squeals of delight from the young-sters as they dip into the facility’s squishy-critter-filled touch tanks.
In the winter, Elderhostel groups come for days and mix freely with the students. On the final night of a four-day visit in March, the senior citizens invited the students to a sushi party.
A sea hare, one of the largest gastropods, plucked from the Wrigley Institute’s touch tanks, where students often temporarily deposit curious marine specimens. These voracious vegetarians feast on the kelp forests off Catalina. |
After the meal, most of the young men retired to the ping-pong table, then drifted into the cozy lounge area to watch a “Seinfeld” re-run on TV. Walker and student Paula Shulman stuck with the Elderhostel group. Eventually Shulman, a junior psychobiology major from Los Angeles, enter-tained the guests by performing Israeli folk dances. Soon she and Walker had persuaded most of the older visitors to join in, improvising a dance lesson to the tinny strains of a small, portable radio.
“They’ll sleep well tonight,” chuckled Walker after the exhausted Elderhostel guests had retired. “It’s safe to come out now,” she chided the young men in the adjacent room.
Though well after 8 p.m., Shulman was eagerly talking about her project: at midday, she had been running an outboard motor engine in a barrel to make “gunky” seawater. Two-stroke engines – increasingly the target of regulations and outright bans – are particularly dirty: they don’t burn the gas-oil fuel mixture completely, and their exhaust leaves aromatic hydrocarbons in the water.
For her research, Shulman analyzed this gunky water to identify specific hydrocarbon compounds. Next, she filled fish bowls with three different dilutions of the polluted water. Not a diver herself, she enlisted the aid of fellow students to collect her specimens – blue-band gobies – with a “slurp gun.”
“Blue-band gobies are stress-tolerant and one of the most locally abundant fish,” she says. The brilliant two-inch gobies are an iridescent orange, splashed with bright blue stripes. Though they normally eat small crustaceans, Shulman fed her specimens fish food, carefully observing their feeding behavior. Her research question: would the pollutants from two-stroke engines influence gobies’ food consumption?
“I really wanted to do something behavioral,” she says.
Because gobies are considered an indicator species, if Shulman’s gunky water affects them, it’s likely that it will affect many other marine animals too.
THOUGH CONDITIONS may seem Spartan compared to the cosmopolitan comforts of Los Angeles, it’s easy to get spoiled at Wrigley. The students believe the computer links to the Internet are faster than on the University Park Campus. They say the dormitories are better; and everyone agrees that the food is good.
The physical plant at Wrigley has improved dramatically since the late USC trustee William Wrigley and his wife Julie established the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. Their 1995 donation sparked a $60 million project to help the 30-year-old research center at Big Fisherman’s Cove expand its focus beyond marine biology to a broad range of environmental issues.
Soon after, Michaels took the helm; the facility now boasts a pair of two-bedroom suites, nine one-bedroom apartments and 18 dorm rooms – all renovated, refurnished and reopened in 1997.
“We cut skylights into the roof and lightened up a very dark interior. And we put in a big, new hot-water heater,” Michaels says.
A new 86-seat lecture hall matches the best University Park has to offer – in fact, it’s modeled after the one in Taper Hall, equipped with DVD, Internet links and videoconferencing capability. When residents visit the mainland, they often bring back videos or DVDs. Then the state-of-the art hall turns into a deluxe movie theater for the tight-knit community.
Everyone – staff, professors and students – eats together in the renovated dining hall that converts into a recreation area at night.
All of the labs have also been redone, with new floors, new ceilings and some with new cabinets. Windows overlooking Big Fisherman’s Cove surround the labs, giving them a more cheerful feeling than you’ll find in most research spaces.
Wrigley’s wet-labs are equipped with running seawater, which is corrosive and poses special maintenance problems. Before the renovation, Michaels says, the lab ceilings were sprayed with an ugly, gray acoustic material that had a tendency to flake off and sprinkle into students’ and researchers’ experiments.
“It was a big problem. We worked for months to get rid of that stuff,” he says. “By marine-lab standards, we are very good right now.”
And it’s going to get better. Michaels is planning a new dormitory building and an education building. He’s hoping to bury the electrical wires and add solar power.
“Housing is our bottleneck right now,” he says. “We can’t house as many people as our labs and other facilities can handle for programs. The kit-chen, for example, can feed 200 people, but there’s no place for even 70 to live.” Wrigley officials are actively fundraising to build additional housing.
WALKING THE DIRT road from the Wrigley Institute to Two Harbors is a pleasant half hour hike. The road curves up and down and around the side of steep, craggy hills. In places, the drop to the ocean is almost sheer. A hill separates Big Fisherman’s Cove (where Wrigley is located) and the larger Isthmus Cove.
Walking gives you plenty of time to see the breathtaking scenery. Midway through the hike, you come to a sign cautioning vehicles not to exceed 17 mph.
“Well, it did get your attention, didn’t it?” laughs Maureen Oudin, Wrigley’s administrative coordinator, who has lived on the island for 21 years. To the outsider, the pace here may seem poky, but the workload keeps Oudin hopping.
While the Wrigley Marine Science Center is owned by USC, it caters to many other institutions, including the University of California and the Cal State systems. Scientists from those and other California schools – not to mention from England, the Virgin Islands and Switzerland – frequently take advantage of the installation.
“In the summer, we’re absolutely packed,” says Oudin. “But I love it. I’m meeting interesting people all the time, and the projects are fascinating.”
Non-scientists find Wrigley just as fascinating. One of its more bizarre attractions are the leopard sharks. As the ocean warms late in the spring, female leopard sharks come during the day to wallow in the shallows beside the Wrigley dock. The 2- to 5-foot-long sharks will nu
Students Paula Shulman and Reni Schimmoeller collect marine water samples from precise depths.
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mber 50 to 100 strong as summer progresses.
And here’s the weird part: intrepid guests are invited to swim – float, really – in the water with the sharks. Scuba gear isn’t permitted, and neither is touching or otherwise disturbing the sharks. Never-theless, the activity is hugely popular. Because Wrigley doesn’t allow more than four swimmers in the sanctuary at a time, during crowded periods visitors must book their shark-swim in advance.
Afterwards, they typically visit the Wrigley gift shop, which sells “I Snor-keled with the Sharks” T-shirts.
Humans don’t pose a menace to the sharks off Catalina, but other predators do. Like the time a huge, hungry sea lion swam into the shallows by the dock one summer day in 1998, seized a leopard shark, thrashed it and ripped out its stomach. When his meal was finished, the sea lion went back for more.
“He would eat three at a time, and he kept coming back day after day,” Oudin recalls. “The sharks left two months early last year. We all had our fingers crossed that they would be back this year.” (They are.)
Students have had plenty of other opportunities to see nature in action. In 1998, El Niño produced some colorful changes around Big Fisherman’s Cove as the warmer waters played havoc with wildlife food supplies. One easily visible result was a population explosion among pelagic crabs – a bright red variety of the crustacean. Out past Big Fisherman’s Cove is guano-covered Bird Rock – home to seagulls, pelicans, cormorants and other birds. Usually coated white, last year Bird Rock turned shocking pink.
“The seagulls and the cormorants were going crazy eating pelagic crabs,” recalls Sharon Walker. “Then they covered the dock with pink guano. Yukk!”
But it was the two-day torrential downpour that left its most tangible mark on Wrigley. The rain partially washed out the road to Two Harbors and produced huge quantities of sticky mud. But, on the bright side, it supplied the necessary inspiration for housekeeper Mindee Walters’ poetic outpouring.
Such is life in paradise.
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