Students of Sea Get Feet Wet

Snorkeling through kelp beds in sparkling ocean water and greeting schools of cavorting dolphins aren’t typical summer adventures of an Idaho farmer’s daughter.

But, for five weeks this summer, 17-year-old Amy Hunsaker of Rupert, Ida., and 16 other teen-agers from 12 states shared such experiences during an intensive oceanology course at Occidental College.

The program consisted of daily classroom lectures at the Eagle Rock campus, occasional field trips and a day spent every week aboard the research vessel Vantuna, a former albacore fishing boat donated to the college by an alumnus in 1968.

Excitement and Drudgery

The course allows the youngsters, many of whom live in landlocked states, to taste both the excitement and drudgery of marine biology before possibly committing themselves to its depths.

“There aren’t many opportunities for students to study the ocean where they can do more than just stand at the seashore,” said Dr. Gary Martin, a biology professor at Occidental College. He is director of the 14-year-old summer program.

“It’s been great. You get to do and learn such a variety of things in a short amount of time,” Hunsaker said during the class’s final outing to Santa Catalina Island on Friday. “Plus, we’ve been to the beach, a zillion different restaurants, shopping, horseback riding, and we learned to play beach volleyball. We’re like a great, big family.”

The eclectic group of students included a Texas football player infatuated with the adventures of Jacques Cousteau, a Vermont teen-ager who never before touched a fish and a Pacific Palisades surfer concerned about water pollution.

Each paid $1,900 for tuition, a room in a college dormitory, meals and supervised weekend entertainment. They spent another $30 on books. They earned three college semester units.

Before they were accepted, a minimum B-plus average was required. “That shows that they’re willing to work,” Martin said.

A Lot of Work

And work they did. They attended daily lectures, wrote reports and studied for two mid-term tests and a final examination.

The field trips included a 6 a.m. tour of tide pools in Palos Verdes, a weekend camping trip to Monterey and a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, an afternoon of sea lion watching near Santa Barbara Island and a day of deep-sea rock fishing.

But the heart of the program remained the voyages on the Vantuna. Occidental alumnus Gilbert C. Van Kamp Jr. donated the boat to the school, distinguishing it as one of the few private liberal arts colleges in the country with such a vessel.

The Vantuna took the students along 26 miles of Southern California shoreline and out to Catalina. The trips began July 6 with a half-day cruise around the San Pedro harbor, where the 85-foot boat is docked.

First came a brief, no-nonsense lesson in Vantuna etiquette from one of several Occidental science students assisting the group. If you get seasick, don’t use the upper deck or bathroom but “lean over the lower rails, please,” he said.

And, from another, a warning to the fashion conscious: “You’re going to get dirt, mud and fish mucous on everything you wear.” A few wrinkled their nose at the thought--but, by the end of the program Friday, any squeamishness had long since departed and the summer students seemed more like seasoned scientists.

The First Trawl

As the Vantuna slowly cut its way from the harbor dock on that first day, program instructors Mike Mullin and Tammy Bird introduced the youngsters to the trawl.

With assistance from the Vantuna’s permanent crew, instructors attached a net to the boat’s 10-ton winch and lowered it 36 feet into the water, leaving it to drag behind the slow-moving vessel.

Ten minutes later, the net, bulging with flopping queen fish, anchovies, croak fish and tongue fish, was lifted from the water and dumped onto a large wooden pallet for the students’ inspection. Screeching gulls circled above, keeping close watch on the group’s catch.

“Go ahead, you guys, grab a fish,” Bird said.

A few bold students eagerly picked up the flopping creatures, passing them through the tight circle into the hands of the more apprehensive of the group until everyone had held at least one.

Drew Hinkley of Vermont exhaled a sigh of relief after touching her first fish.

“I was kinda nervous about it,” the soft-spoken teen-ager said after dropping it back into the pallet.

By contrast, Hunsaker was more candid in her assessment.

Slimy and Gross

Blecch!” she screeched, “You can see the slime come off them. It’s really gross! Fish in Idaho, I don’t know, they’re just different. But I’ll get used to it.”

But the displays of disgust melted into awe as a second trawl from 175 feet below the water hauled in halibut, spotted turbot and two prizes: a small bat ray and a 40-pound California electric torpedo ray.

“Look at that face, you guys, isn’t that a face every mother would love?” Bird said, flipping the bat ray onto its back, exposing a small mouth on its whitish underside. The students bunched tightly around the pallet, eyes open wide, some reaching out to touch the leatherlike skin.

With their caution disappearing, the teen-agers poked, picked, and passed around the rest of the catch, including clear, jellylike creatures with spindly tentacles called salp. Students learned that salp are a species of zooplankton drifting with ocean currents and feeding on floating plant plankton.

Sea Gulls Get a Treat

Finally, most of the fish were dropped back into the ocean while some of the less fortunate were tossed into the waiting beaks of the hungry gulls.

On the boat five weeks later, the group exuded confidence, their trained eyes able to identify frolicking dolphins several hundred yards away. Within minutes of the sighting, dozens of the friendly mammals surrounded the boat and rode the bow’s wake, as if escorting the farewell voyage.

“They’re just so beautiful. You can almost reach down and touch them,” said 17-year-old Rebecca Drury of Delaware.

Sporting California tans, wildly patterned shorts and flashy sun glasses, the students continued displaying their new-found knowledge throughout the afternoon.

Words like “morphology” and “bio-magnification” glided easily off their tongues as they spoke about water pollution, ocean currents and techniques in oceanographic study.

With little prompting, they described the advantage of satellites in tracking fish populations; the newly discovered phenomenon of hydrothermal vents--which spew hot sulfur water from holes in the ocean floor--and the effects of water pollution on the ocean’s salinity and pH levels.

Total Ocean Picture

“We try to give them an awareness of the total ocean picture, but we work on detail so they can stop generalizing about the ocean,” Martin said. “That way they’ll know what we’re doing to mess it up and what we can do about it.”

“It was a lot better than I thought it was going to be,” 17-year-old Jean Zodrow of Colorado said about the program. “The things we learned were varied . . . it opened my eyes to a lot of other possibilities--from research to teaching.”

However, 17-year-old Ashby Kinch of Austin, Tex., said the course, although enjoyable, stripped him of his romantic notion of marine study.

“I’ve always been interested in Jacques Cousteau, and I’ve wanted to see what it’s like working in the ocean . . . but there’s really not that much glamour in marine biology,” he said, adding that he will probably major in English when he enters college.

By the end of each summer, only a few students still want to pursue a career in marine science, Martin said. And such realizations, he said, are among the most important lessons of the program.

“I’d hate to have 17 people leave the program thinking they’re going to get out of graduate school and get a job easily,” he said. “If you really want to work in the field, you can find a way. But it is going to be a lot of hard work.”

“Hopefully, some will pursue the route. . . . The more people we can get concerned about the ocean, the better.”

As for Hunsaker, the study piqued her interest in biology, although she said she’s uncertain whether she will major in marine biology in college. But, no matter, she said with a smile, “I’ll have some fabulous stories to tell when I go back to Idaho.”