On an overcast November morning, 15 apprehensive fourth-graders tumbled out of a pale yellow bus at Treasure Island. They got here to expertise the joys of crusing on the San Francisco Bay — and to get a lesson on its ecology.
The scene has performed out frequently for the previous decade on the Treasure Island Crusing Heart, a nonprofit that seeks to make crusing accessible to younger individuals across the Bay Space. Whereas the group suspended its operations in December to start development on a large enlargement undertaking, it spent a number of months final yr highlighting a brand new attraction in Clipper Cove: a car-sized, floating marine biology lab.
Earlier than shifting to its new residence, the Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab spent the previous 5 years moored off the Port of Oakland, quietly accumulating information from the Bay with audio, mild and temperature sensors, a GoPro and an array of underwater racks.
Bobbing in small boats, clad in helmets and life jackets, the fourth-graders from San Francisco’s Dr. Charles R. Drew School Preparatory Academy hollered as they handed by the cove’s newest addition. The bulbous lab, as soon as iceberg-like with a white fiberglass body that’s a mirror picture form above and under water, is now laden with barnacles, algae and chicken droppings. Regardless of its scuzzy look, Chris Childers — the crusing middle director — is happy concerning the lab’s new lease on life as an academic device at Treasure Island.
“The lab’s charismatic,” mentioned Childers. “It’s a really effective tool for our STEM curriculum that gives it more pizzazz.”
The lab emerged from a partnership of native educators, architects and scientists. Collectively, they needed to experiment with floating structure that’s resilient to local weather change, whereas accumulating scientific information and elevating consciousness of the consequences of rising sea ranges.
The construction, which has received design awards, was the brainchild of California School of the Arts college, designer Margaret Ikeda and designers Evan Jones and Adam Marcus — who now leads analysis on the Heart on Local weather Change and Urbanism at Tulane College. Marine biologists affiliated with the Benthic Lab at Moss Touchdown Marine Laboratories fine-tuned the design, and Invoice Kreysler, a famend fiberglass innovator, fabricated the construction. College students from all the educational establishments took half within the course of.
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“People are very excited about the float lab,” mentioned Ikeda, who began CCA’s Architectural Ecologies Lab with Marcus and Jones, her husband. “The design of it, the unusualness of it, has resonated really around the world.”
The float lab’s unique mission was threefold. First, the biologists needed to know whether or not the lab’s undulating floor would entice a various group of species. Architecturally, the lab was a prototype for bigger fashions, testing whether or not floating constructions — and the organisms hooked up to them — couldn’t solely stand up to rising seas, but additionally dissipate wave power and stop erosion on shore. Lastly, the group hoped the lab can be instructional, drawing consideration to local weather change.
After it deployed within the port in 2019, tough waves from passing cargo ships and storms took a toll. The researchers struggled to observe and keep the lab, which was a uneven, 30-minute kayak paddle from shore. Underwater racks, designed to entice a variety of organisms, and dangling woven baskets for rising thick algae and sheltering fish broke free.
Some constructions clung on, resembling cylinders of calcium carbonate that mimicked pure reefs. Inside months, invertebrates crowded the columns, fanning out like multicolored wigs. Nevertheless it turned out that nonnative species like sponges and tunicates — filter feeders with sac-like our bodies — dominated. These species are frequent within the San Francisco Bay, usually introduced in by the ballast water and hulls of visiting cargo ships. Among the many tiniest creatures, some native crustaceans, mollusks and sea slugs snuck in with the invasives on the columns.
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“We figured things would grow on the lab, but we just didn’t know what,” mentioned Kamille Hammerstrom, who directs the group Coastal Conservation and Analysis in Moss Touchdown, and co-led the organic analysis. “What happened wasn’t a surprise, given that the San Francisco Bay is one of the most invaded estuaries in the world.”
Whereas the poor exhibiting of native species was disappointing, the float lab outcomes helped inform a subsequent undertaking in brackish water close to the San Francisco Presidio, coaxing native oysters to develop on fiberglass panels the CCA college students designed. From what they realized with the float lab, Hammerstrom and her crew sought a peaceful, accessible place within the bay so they might go to usually. They discovered salinities, depths and light-weight ranges the oysters want.
The lab additionally helped biologists think about how “fouling” organisms that boaters usually clear off their vessels’ hulls may really grow to be an asset for floating constructions, mitigating wave harm and boosting ecology.
In its new location at Clipper Cove, the float lab will grow to be the hub for 3 floating mini-labs, every three ft lengthy and fitted with a tool to observe plankton — the drifting, microscopic algae and creatures which are central to marine meals chains that may additionally explode into poisonous algal blooms.
The machine, a “PlanktoScope” designed by scientists at Stanford College, appears like a big, selfmade radio and captures pictures of plankton. The plan is to tie one in every of these child labs onto the mom lab in Clipper Cove and moor two others elsewhere within the Bay earlier than the top of the yr.
At Clipper Cove, the lab’s instructional function can be coming to the fore, as its creators put it entrance and middle within the area journey curricula offered for the 1,200 youth that the nonprofit Treasure Island Crusing Heart hosts every college yr.
After the Charles Drew college students clambered off the boats, Childers reached into the water and yanked out a handful of what was rising under. The fourth graders crowded round his open palms, sifting via inexperienced and purple seaweeds and some creepy crawlies.
Chris Childers, backside, Govt Director of Treasure Island Crusing Heart, collects inexperienced algae and different tiny creatures dwelling underneath the deck to point out college students from Dr. Charles Drew Elementary Faculty of San Francisco after driving on sailboats from the TISC, the place the award-winning Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab is anchored close to the Treasure Island shore in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. The floating lab, designed in collaboration with California School of the Arts and Moss Touchdown Marine Labs, celebrates its fifth yr within the bay. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
Then the scholars filed into the middle’s waterside classroom. As an instance the native ecology, a instructor from the crusing middle supplied everybody a coloring guide. Ikeda, Hammerstrom and two of their graduate college students created the guide, that includes zoomed-in pictures and descriptions of all of the life rising on the lab.
Donald Bursey, who teaches the fourth-grade class at Charles Drew, watched from the again of the classroom, happy that his college students have been getting such a vivid expertise of marine ecology.
“Here out in the Bay, they get to see the animals that live here, the rocks, the type of plant life that grows in the water, and they interact with it,” Bursey mentioned. “A lot of kids who grow up in urban areas see the Bay, but they don’t get the chance to be out here on the water.”
Chris Childers, backside, Govt Director of Treasure Island Crusing Heart, collects inexperienced algae and different tiny creatures dwelling underneath the deck to point out college students from Dr. Charles Drew Elementary Faculty of San Francisco after driving on sailboats from the TISC, the place the award-winning Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab is anchored close to the Treasure Island shore in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. The floating lab, designed in collaboration with California School of the Arts and Moss Touchdown Marine Labs, celebrates its fifth yr within the bay. (Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group)
