In 2019 we came up with a community service program – “Sounds of the Bay Citizen Science” project, wherein we take Bay Area youth out on research-equipped vessels and introduce the kids to deeper ways of exploring the Bay.
We typically have four “stations.” We use a manta-net to trawl for plankton, which we observe through a video microscope. We drop benthic scoops to sample mud – which we paw through, introducing the students to marine benthic invertebrates. At our water quality station we pull up sea water, testing for pH and salinity, and deploy a Secci disk to evaluate water turbidity.
And of course we drop a hydrophone into the Bay, listening (and seeing on a running spectrogram) the sounds in the water, discussing if there are any correlations between the various site-specific quality and quantitative observations.
And then there are the plethora of seabirds and marine mammals on and in the water, which we point out and discuss.
Our first adventure was with about thirty 4th and 5th grade kids from Marin City “Bayside – MLK Elementary School.” We didn’t get a lot of Science done in our three-hour cruise, but watching all of the transformations that happened to these youngsters in that short window of time was mind-boggling.
Marin City is predominantly “Section 8” housing, so most of these kids have never been out on a boat before. The boat – the Freida B – is a beautiful wood-hulled, gaff-rigged schooner, so once the sails went up, the deck was anything but level. For the kids, the first 30 minutes were “pure adrenaline.”
But skipper Paul Dines got the kids behind the wheel, and soon enough they were excited, but comfortable with the vessel.
We cruised to four different locations for our samples – three inside the Bay, and then under the Golden Gate Bridge into ocean waters. (Cruising under this majestic bridge gives ME goosebumps.)
I had a couple of young ladies from Mexico who demonstrated good engineering skills in handling the hydrophone – carefully deploying and retrieving the equipment, and using thoughtful knots in securing the cable to the railing. They quickly became my deck engineers, helping me set up our sound samples between their other station visits.
As we headed back to the docks, all of the kids just crashed on the deck into the “land of nod.” This awakened a hidden care-taking predilection in Daniela, OCR’s VP of Communications, who retrieved blankets from below the decks and covered the children for the voyage home – and to our Sausalito park picnic (courtesy of local market, The Good Earth).
We have done a few other cruises since then with high-school students, sponsored in part by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
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Bayside MLK Students take the helm!