Oceanography Excursions

Today I went sailing with the Monterey Bay Aquarium out into the bay to get the Oceanography Merit Badge. About 20 scouts from our troop went on the trip on a medium-sized sailboat docked on Fisherman's wharf. On the way to the boat on the wharf, we passed by a seagull nest on top of the restrooms.

Beginning at 10 in the morning, we sailed around the bay for three hours, completing various ocean-oriented activities. After a talk about safety, we began by discussing local marine life including the sea lion, harbor seal, and abalone. One of the crew members brought out a giant plankton net, and after trawling it behind for five minutes, we brought it up and it was filled with dark green phytoplankton. Then the naturalist taught us how to make your own net out of a nylon stocking, bottle, coat hanger, tape, and twine.

After this basic introduction, we split up into groups: 6^th graders, 7^th graders, and 5^th and 8^th graders combined. My group, the latter, first went to the rear of the boat where they had scooped up some kelp from the ocean and laid it on deck. We talked about how so many common items, like toothpaste and ice cream, are made from carrageenan, a product of kelp. Then we searched for small organisms like isopods and snails in the kelp, and viewed them in a small magnification container.



The next station was inside the cabin, where we looked at the plankton we had scooped up from the beginning of the trip. It turned out to be mostly phytoplankton, plants, but there were some zooplankton like small crab larvae and some things that oddly resembled glass shrimp. In the cabin, we discussed the differences between plankton (drifters), nekton (swimmers), and benthos (bottom dwellers). The boat was equipped with a nice refracting microscope, much like the ones we used last year studying cells in Science.

The last station was back on the deck (thankfully, out of the stuffy cabin) and we discussed the physics of oceans, including the three types of waves: wind, tidal, and seismic; and some wave terminology, ie. amplitude, frequency, wavelength, etc. We also tested the salinity of the ocean, turning out to be 38‰ (parts per thousand) saline. Toward the end, Oliver spotted his house from the boat and stopped to take a photo of it with his 12x optical zoom.

Finally, while we were getting back from the group activities, the staff somehow brought out a fish tank with 15-20 bat stars in it, a type of sea star (incorrectly called a star fish) with webbing between each "foot." The bat stars originally came in purple from the north and orange from the south, but cross-breeding produced a wide array of color combinations, including an olive-and-orange spotted one. The boat was involved in a bat star relocation project, so when the time came we were told to "gently" drop them overboard (like anyone actually did that!) before we sailed on back to shore.



As we came into the dock, we completed all of the requirements for the Oceanography merit badge, except for the 500-word essay of the trip, which also happens to be this blog post.