The Marine Life by gkdowney

THE

MARINE LIFE

San Luis Obispo

THE DiVR3

ost people won’t get to experience the vastness of life under the ocean. We won’t get to experience pulling on a wetsuit so thick you can’t bend your arms, just to stay warm in the freezing pacific. We won’t get to feel how heavy an oxygen tank is on our back and the flotation device attached to it, so you won’t sink straight to the sandy floor. We won’t get on a boat, review our safety plan with a diving buddy, and find a spot off the coast to anchor down. We won’t get to dive down under the water while breathing through a mask to see the coral reefs, kelp forests, and rocks and sand that litter the ocean floor. We won’t get to see the sea urchins attached

young students how to scientific scuba dive. DiVR 360 is a project started by Cal Poly associate professor Dr. Crow White. The “The DiVR 360 project is a part of White’s larger marine science project is an efprogram called Dive Befort for my lab neath the Surface. Dive to do more than Beneath the Surface focuses on marine science just scientific outreach and education research, but in elementary, middle, and high schools. also inspire the The DiVR 360 next generation project focuses on teaching middle school of people to love students how marine the oceans and scientists conduct experiments underwater and be interested in allows them to particibeing scientists pate in conducting those themselves.” experiments, all through virtual reality. - Crow White Students will be able to experience what scientific scuba diving is like and how scientists learn about the ocean through interactive videos on their phones or computers. “The DiVR 360 project is an effort for my lab to do more than just scientific research,” White said, “but also inspire the next generation of people to love the oceans and be interested in being scientists themselves.” The process to create the virtual reality science experiment videos and the lesson plan for the classroom required an intense amount of work from White and his team. 2 Crow White and Meg Beymer scuba diving in Corallina Cove. Courtesy: Meg Beymer In fact, while

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to the rocks or see any fish swim by us. Scuba diving is expensive; it takes extensive training, has detailed safety measures, and is only really available to people who live near or have the means to travel to the coast. Additionally, scientific diving requires a higher level of certification than just normal scuba diving. Not many scientists will be able to experience conducting research and experiments under water. For the majority of us, science and learning takes place solely on land. However, individuals in Cal Poly’s marine science program are looking to change the way we learn about marine life and the ocean. They want to bring the ocean into the classroom and teach

360 PROJECT

Meg Beymer filming with the 360 camera. Courtesy: Meg Beymer

White oversaw and managed the project, fourth year biological sciences major Meg Beymer, Cal Poly alum Maddie Verburg, and fourth year biochemistry major Landon Keller all worked on the day-to-day operations of this project. “I’m really interested in science, science communication, marine science, and education.” Keller said. “So [White’s project is] a perfect intersection of all that, so it sounds like a great opportunity.” Along with computer engineering students and liberal studies students, Keller, Beymer, and Verburg were the ones who developed the lesson plan and decided which experiments to conduct. Last summer, they spent their days scuba diving–along with White– in Montana De Oro and Avila in order to create the 360 VR videos that will be implemented into the classroom. Each student had to be certified in scientific diving in order to work on this project and Beymer, Keller, and

Verburg were all certified in Cal Poly’s scuba diving class. The class–MSCI 410–is held over the summer and only takes eight students a year. “I really wanted to scuba dive. This is a lab that does that and I’m also really interested in marine science outreach. I used to volunteer at the aquarium a lot, and it’s just incredibly fun,” Beymer said. In order to film the videos, the divers used a big, complex 360 degree camera with three dome lenses that filmed the waters surrounding the divers. Then they took the camera scuba diving in several different places. They filmed under the Cal Poly pier and in Corallina Cove in Montana de Oro. The camera was a challenge to work with according to Beymer and White. Before the camera could be taken underwater, several steps needed to be taken to keep the camera safe. The camera had to be housed in a waterproof casing, but any slight issue with that casing could cause major prob-

lems.

“If you seal the camera and you have just one human hair that gets in the O-ring on the seal, that could create a leak and then the camera takes in water and that ruins the lenses and the cameras inside,” White said. With these videos, the divers hope students will be able to get a sense of what actual marine scientists do underwater. With the exploratory video on the pier, they’ll learn to count the organisms–sea stars, sea urchins, and anemones–and compare those amounts to the depth of the pier. “They’ll basically learn how to be scientists. They have to make their own hypotheses and then they explore the underwater environment. They actually collect the data with us,” Beymer said.

2022 Cal Poly Projects 3

PISMO CLAMS ARE BACK How exactly the California native clam species disappeared and then bounced back.

he Pismo clam used to be a staple of Pismo Beach life. San Luis Obispo residents would spend their days digging the clams up out of the sand and cooking them for dinner. The Pismo Beach Clam Festival would serve clam chowder and people would flock to Pismo to taste the clams. But, then they disappeared. The recreational fisheries closed and the Clam Festival served clam chowder using clams fished from somewhere else. Still, Pismo beach residents remember a time when the clams were abundant all up and down the coast. The Pismo clam is not only an important organism to the California coast, but also to the culture of Pismo Beach. When the clams disappeared, the city of Pismo lost a significant aspect of its identity. The Cal Poly Pismo clam research

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project was started by Director of the Center for Coastal Marine Sciences Ben Ruttenberg as a part of his larger Marine Conservation Lab. The Marine Conservation Lab has several projects, but started focusing on the conservation of Pismo clams in 2014. The city of Pismo Beach approached Ruttenburg and his lab asking if there was a way to bring the clams back in order to allow people to start fishing them again. Despite the popularity of the Pismo clams and importance of them, not much research has been done on why they disappeared. So, the Marine Conservation Lab set out to learn what exactly happened to these clams. In 2015, scientists saw an increase in the clam population and by 2021 the population had exploded. While not quite big enough to fish yet, the clam sizes have been

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tting bigger and bigger. he epicenter of [the clam] popation used to be Pismo Beach, that’s just right in our backyard re from Cal Poly and there used be a really big recreational fishy for this species,” Cal Poly gradte student Marissa Bills said. hey’re also an important part the sandy beach ecosystem, so ey’re a neat clam just on their wn.” Bills runs the day-to-day erations of the Pismo clam lab ong with several other graduate udents. The lab focuses on three eas of research surrounding the ams. First, the lab has to underand the change in population. To ack the changes in numbers and am sizes, the lab does surveys ery month. They go to the beach, g up the clams and then count

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and measure the ones they find. “By doing that every month, we get comparative estimates of how the population is doing,” research assistant and Cal Poly alum Robert Moon said. “And that’s been really helpful to sort of track how the numbers have progressed from year to year.” The surveys are key to understanding the growth of the clams. As of right now, there is no concrete data as to why exactly the clams disappeared or how their population came back.

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