Countywide : Marine Life Served Up in Road Show

The arthropod, of the California spiny variety, was surrounded.

Antennae waving, his layered tail twitching, the arthropod, more commonly known as a lobster, was eyeball to eyeball with about 10 second- and third-graders in Kendall Clark’s class at Andrew Jackson Elementary School in Santa Ana. Everyone wanted to touch, but Carolyn Cosgrove-Wake warned them to be gentle.

“Try not to touch his eyeball,” Cosgrove-Wake said. “Would you want anybody touching your eyeball?”

She pointed to the lobster’s antennae.

“They give him information,” she said. “And his eyes, they look like a bug’s because he is related to a bug.”

Cosgrove-Wake, a marine biologist, is the driver and lecturer of the Orange County Marine Institute’s traveling road show, Ocean in Motion. Out of a strategically loaded, new blue van, Cosgrove-Wake travels to schools all over the county offering a hands-on experience with live marine life. Joining the lobster on the traveling team is an octopus, a jar full of mussels, a sea star, oysters, clams and a sea urchin, among other creatures. The live lobster rides in a temperature controlled fiberglass aquarium custom made for the van by Cosgrove-Wake’s husband, John Wake.

The van also carries an assortment of shells, sand dollars, coral and other skeletal forms of marine life. The children listen for the sounds of the ocean and try to match the shells with a chart that identifies them.

“We try to expose the children to a broader spectrum of their environment,” Cosgrove-Wake said. “There’s a living ocean out there they need to be aware of. We also try to instill a sense of conservation and preservation of the ocean.”

The alert, twitching California spiny lobster always wins lots of attention, Cosgrove-Wake said. The students learn that he doesn’t have claws like his cousin from Maine, the family member sometimes offered in upscale restaurants; that his tail can propel him backwards to escape dangers; that like his other cousins, the bugs, he’s a scavenger on the ocean floor, and that because his flaps on his tail don’t overlap, he is a he and not a she.

Real live creatures such as the lobster can spark a fascination that may overcome what is, for many children, a dreaded word--science.

“I always tell the children right away, ‘This is science,’ ” Cosgrove-Wake said. “I’m trying to bring science back into the classroom. I tell them that we have to understand science and that it is our real world. If I can influence just one child that if we don’t protect our environment we’ll lose everything that we have, (the class) is successful.”

For some in Clark’s class at Jackson School, this was their first experience with sea creatures.

“Some of these kids have never been to the beach,” said Gloria Roelen, principal of the 1,197-student school. The student enrollment is about 75% Latino, 17% Asian, and the remainder a mixture of ethnicities.

“Some of their parents might work Saturdays and Sundays, possibly they don’t have transportation or they might not feel comfortable venturing out,” Roelen said. “Many of the parents don’t speak English.”

Clark’s class, made up of a combination second- and third-graders, is called “immersion English,” in which the students are learning the English language as well as the customs of what, in many cases, is their new country. Part of that process is hands-on experiences such as the lessons taught by Ocean in Motion, Roelen said.

“The most important thing--look at them--is that they’re learning and having fun doing it,” Roelen said. “They’re involved in the learning process and it’s not someone dictating to them.”

Cosgrove-Wake travels from campus to campus, giving lectures at assemblies, talking to high school, junior high and grade school students. Wherever she goes, her family of creatures, especially the lobster, draws a crowd.

“Sometimes I feel like the Pied Piper,” she said.