The schoolhouse

Just around the corner from my lab, on the appropriately-named School Street, is a large schoolhouse. It's home to a daycare co-op during the school year, but in summer, it hosts a local tradition: the Children's School of Science. You can always tell when CSS is in session because you see middle-schoolers walking around town in large groups, carrying plankton nets and buckets or snorkels and fins. Teachers lead the curious students to local habitats and expose them to marine animals. The whole town turns into one giant summer camp.

Belly Biology with the Children's School of Science.
Photo by Olivia Rauss.

This year, a CSS teacher reached out to me to ask if her students could see my lab. She was just a few days too late to catch the live-animal experiments that took place in my lab this summer, so I suggested we go outdoors instead. Kharis and Johanna were available to help out, so we split the group of 14 into two smaller groups of 7 - half on the dock, half in the lab. 

Out on the dock, we did something I call Belly Biology. It's simple: you lay on your belly on the dock, peer over the edge into the water, and see what you find. The students really surprised me - for middle schoolers, they already knew so much about marine animals. They pulled up club tunicates (Styela clava) and knew what they were. The piece that my lab members were able to teach them was noticing all the other, smaller organisms living on top of the tunicates in a community. Each Styela they pulled off of the dock had colonial tunicates, bryozoans, amphipods, and baby crabs were arranged in a three-dimensional matrix. The kids marveled at being able to hold a whole community in their hands. 

A CSS student about to throw the 
plankton net in the water. Photo by 
Olivia Rauss.

While some of us laid on the dock, the other group of students collected plankton from the water and looked at tiny organisms under microscopes in the lab. Again, I was super impressed because the students already understood the basics of how to use a plankton net. What we were able to teach them was how to identify all the small animals living in the water column. Copepods abound, but there are also tiny babies of the same species we were seeing on the dock. Most people don't even realize the diversity of animals that live in the water, but that's what my lab is best at - identifying the tiny little babies that drift on the current and will grow up to dominate the seafloor.

I spent most of the day out on the dock with the one group, but when I came back inside, I noticed Kharis had drawn diagrams of a few larval forms on a whiteboard in the lab. Baby snails, pluteus larvae, and other zooplankton had been drawn for the students to visualize under the microscope. They must have found some cool stuff in the samples. 

I'll finish by telling you just one more little twist: the teacher who had asked to visit my lab actually plays in the local amateur chamber orchestra with me! We recognized each other right away - that's life in a small town, I guess. I'm really glad we were able to help out the Children's School of Science and introduce the students to the diversity of invertebrate organisms!