Science by the Sea
Photo by John Livzey
Welcome 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
Photo by John Livzey
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.
CATALINA ISLAND
A short distance from USC’s Wrigley Institute, the village of Two Harbors straddles the isthmus at the narrowest part of Catalina. Here you can walk the entire width of the island – from Isthmus Cove to Catalina Harbor – in less than 15 minutes. The waters off Catalina, among the cleanest in Southern California, are home to highly productive kelp beds and thriving colonies of sea mammals.
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.”
An aerial view of the Wrigley complex at Big Fisherman's Cove.
Photo courtesy of USC Wrigley Institute
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).
DID YOU KNOW THAT...Five species of land mammals and five species of bats are native to Catalina. Twelve introduced mammal species, including a herd of 200 bison and a small population of wild pigs, also live on the island; so do 14 species of reptiles and amphibians and nearly 400 native plants. Some 280 species of birds have been observed on or near Catalina, and nine of these – including the Catalina quail, the orange-crowned warbler and Allen’s hummingbird – are endemic.
Photo by John Livzey
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.
Alan Smith cleans his white sea bass fingerling pens, as mentor Sharon Walker records fish mortality rates and tank conditions. Smith repeated this pungent, hour-long task every three or four days.
Photo by John Livzey
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.”
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.
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.
Photo by John Livzey
“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.
SURFING FOR MARINE LIFE Scuba divers can only see garibaldi damselfish in California’s coastal waters, but Web surfers can see the bright-orange fish anywhere on the planet. An underwater camera anchored on the Wrigley dock feeds live video of action in the kelp beds 24 hours a day to anyone who cares to look. Internet visitors must install the free Real Video Player to view the site.
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.
Students Paula Shulman and Reni Schimmoeller collect marine water samples from precise depths.
Photo by John Livzey
“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).
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.
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 number 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.