Cavalcade of Sea Stars : Live Video Shows the World Beneath the Waves at Anacapa Island

Clad in scuba gear and thick gloves, National Park Service diver Diane Richardson held out a purple spiny urchin for the underwater video camera.

She gently set the creature on the ocean floor next to a small cluster of other urchins. The camera panned across a Technicolor carpet of algae until a salmon-colored fish swam into view. Mouth half-open, the fish stopped momentarily to gawk before slipping behind a curtain of golden kelp.

These are a few of the sea critters that star in a live video show presented every Tuesday and Thursday by the National Park Service on Anacapa Island, about 11 miles off the Ventura County coastline.

Throughout the summer, park rangers slip into the chilly waters with a video camera and special microphones, bringing the kaleidoscope of undersea life to visitors crowded around TV monitors on the dock above. It is the only program of its kind in the national park system.

“Half of the Channel Islands National Park is underwater,” said Carol J. Spears, chief of visitor services. “Until people have broken the surface of the water, they have no idea of the fascinating and mysterious world below.” More than a third of the 6,000 park-goers who have seen the program in the past six years have come from area schools. On Tuesday, Joan Brown’s sixth-grade class made the trip from Dos Caminos Elementary School in Camarillo across the Santa Barbara Channel to see what lives beneath the sea.

“There’s a starfish!” shouted one student, pointing at the screen.

“We are looking at a sea star,” said Nate Keever, a seasonal ranger who helped narrate the show. “People call them starfish, but they really aren’t fish.”

Head diver David Stoltz donned a special mask outfitted with earphone and microphone so he could answer questions and take requests on what the spectators wanted to see.

“How deep is he?” one student asked.

“Twenty-five feet deep,” Stoltz said through the mike, which picked up every rasping breath through his air regulator.

Within 15 minutes, the schoolchildren and others saw a sea cucumber, a sheepshead fish and other creatures that live in the vast seaweed jungle.

The giant kelp provides food and shelter for a wide variety of marine life around the Channel Islands. Some biologists believe it is the richest ecosystem on the planet.

The underwater video show, called “A Nature Hike Through the Kelp Forest,” began in 1985, when a consortium of offshore oil-drilling companies donated $20,000 for the specialized scuba and video equipment.

With continued donations, the National Park Service has been able to offer the program twice a week between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

A glitch in the camera’s battery cut the show short Tuesday. But that didn’t seem to bother the sixth-graders, who were entertained with a chance to handle spiny urchins, nobby starfish and slimy sea cucumbers in a makeshift marine petting zoo.

When naturalist Alex Brodie was handling a sea cucumber, it squirted water in a long, narrow stream. Brodie seized the opportunity to spray the unruly class.

Through the end of the school year, students are the most prominent visitors on Anacapa Island. But as summer vacation begins, tourists eclipse their numbers, with adults paying $34 and children $18 for a daylong boat trip with the park’s sole concessionaire, Island Packers.

Joan Brown said each of her students shelled out $25 for the field trip. “It’s a great learning experience,” she said. “These kids live only a few miles from the coast, but I don’t think any of them have been out here before.”

Her students seemed to enjoy it too. “It was pretty cool,” said 12-year-old Justin Howe of Camarillo, from behind his wraparound mirror sunglasses.

Brown, on her third annual trip to the island, is the only teacher who has brought a class from Dos Caminos Elementary School.

“That’s because she’s the best teacher,” one of her students said.

“No,” Brown said. “It’s just that the other teachers get seasick.”