Just a preview

The Charleston Marine Life Center, just across the street
from OIMB

This weekend I got to do something a little different: I volunteered as a museum docent at the Charleston Marine Life Center, just across the street from OIMB. The CMLC has been under construction since I started at OIMB three years ago, and it's getting very close to being finished - close enough, anyway, that it was open over the weekend for a public preview. A lot of people were in town for the Seafood Festival, so it was the perfect time to open the museum, welcome the public inside, and give them a sneak peak at some of the exhibits.

Specimens in the CMLC's marine mammal gallery

The brain behind the CMLC is my Ph.D. adviser, Craig Young, who is also the director of OIMB. It's been neat for me as a member of his lab to see such an ambitious project come together. Craig has been planning, raising money, and managing construction efforts for the museum since long before I arrived in Oregon, because as you can imagine, building and opening a museum is no small feat. As of right now, about half of the exhibits are finished, so it should only be a few more months before all of the hard work culminates in a grand opening for the new Center. It's part museum, part aquarium, so I think the CMLC is going to be an incredible resource for outreach and education.

All the windows in the CMLC face toward the water, and
I think it has the best view in town. I took this photo from
the squid exhibit on the upper floor.

The public preview was slated to begin Saturday morning, so as students were going home on Friday night, Craig was still buzzing around, finishing last-minute tasks. A few of us stopped over to see if he needed help and ended up setting out chairs, arranging microscopes, and adding labels to displays. I hadn't been in the building for a long time, but I found I recognized a lot of the specimens. Beautiful sponges, sea urchins, whale bones, giant models of fish - random objects that had populated Craig's office for years all appeared in their intended places, and suddenly, they all made sense. I definitely had multiple moments when I realized "Oh, that's what that was for!"

I spent my volunteer shifts on Saturday and Sunday on the upper floor of the museum, showing off invertebrate specimens to the public. There were a couple large, preserved squids, plus live invertebrates collected from the floating docks just below the Center. It was really satisfying for me to introduce CMLC visitors to new animals, things that live right in their aquatic backyard, that they had never seen before. I look forward to seeing the CMLC in its final form, because it can only get better!