“You might see a squad of pelicans or a sea otter tying herself to the kelp canopy,” said Adam Cole ’10, describing a typical scene at the Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey. “You will definitely see a harbor seal. And always you can smell the ocean–the same ocean that inspired Steinbeck–gray-green in the morning sun and thick with swaying, gold-flecked life.”
Alexandra Pounds ’11, another Hopkins alum who will finish up her degree in Earth Systems with a Concentration in Ocean Science this fall, remembers other details about the center.
“Looking out past the large boulders that stick out of the water, you remember all the biodiversity you saw at low tide and wonder what it’s doing under the water,” she said. “The sun and the wind make everything feel fresh. The mass covering of greenery the surrounds the station is actually invasive, so you don’t feel bad trampling on it to get a better look at the baby sea lions lounging on the beach.”
Yet the picturesque Central Coast oasis was not always so serene, a theme that Hopkins Marine Station Director Stephen Palumbi chronicled in his recent book, “The Death and Life of Monterey Bay.” The book, released in November 2010, covers the bay’s tumultuous history, from the times of Spanish exploration to cannery exploitation to today’s model of a successful ecosystem revival.
Monterey Bay is “a story of revival” because despite suffering problems similar to those faced by other ocean ecosystems, such as pollution and overfishing, it has recovered dramatically since the 1930s, Palumbi said.
In the 1920s, the Hopkins Marine Station housed part of the California Department of Fisheries, which studied the effects of the sardine fishing industry. Researchers there found the canneries’ pollution and overfishing to be unsustainable for the bay.
This data fell on deaf ears until Julia Platt, a marine biologist, advocated for a clean bay. Though she won a series of court cases against the canneries’ pollution, nothing was done, prompting Palumbi to call this “a hollow victory.”
Platt subsequently established the first community-based marine reserve on the West Coast. With such a reserve, she could protect the animals from everything except pollution, hoping that they could come back strong when the pollution was finally eradicated, Palumbi said.
Palumbi explained that the area near the Hopkins Marine Station incorporated the strongest protection through a no-take zone for scientific study and protection of the shoreline. By the 1960s, impressive abalone colonies were growing, attracting the return of sea otters. As the sea otters consumed the herbivores, a vibrant kelp forest returned.
Founded in 1984, the Monterey Bay Aquarium changed the relationship between the bay and the community. Instead of acquiring a profit by taking precious resources out of the bay for consumption and sale, the aquarium and ecotourism business profit by celebrating the ecosystem’s health and making it possible for others to do the same. As locals saw that a healthy, productive and diverse ecosystem was both beneficial for the environment and “good for business,” more people began to advocate for its growth.
The aquarium now sees more than two million visitors per year, whom it educates on the values of ecosystem diversity by engaging them with marine life directly–be it walking alongside massive tanks of jellyfish or holding starfish.
Through the enlargement of Platt’s original reserve, the anti-pollution efforts of the region and the influence of the Aquarium, Monterey Bay is now in its best shape of the past 200 years. Some problems still exist, especially pollution via agricultural runoff, but “people are able to talk about it, to come to grips using the bay and not let future problems overwhelm the bay as past problems used to,” Palumbi said.
He noted that Stanford’s classes and various overseas and off-campus opportunities–including those in Australia, Hawaii or Hopkins–best foster environmental discussion among undergraduates as they allow students to become involved with real ecosystem issues.
“They open up the natural world to real, intense academic study,” he said.
Hopkins offers combined lecture and field classes on kelp forest ecology, marine conservation biology and marine and molecular ecology, all of which draw from the bay itself–literally.
“One day, one of our professors, James Watanabe, went scuba diving in the bay before class, scooped up a bucket of life and brought it back,” Cole recalled. “We spent several hours sifting through it and examining the diversity under a microscope. That was pretty representative of how Hopkins classes are run.”
Be it working on worms that his group collected in the tide pools or analyzing the behavior of snails that the students found crawling in the bay, Cole described other hands-on experiences in his time at Hopkins.
“Every class, every professor and every research project at Hopkins is inextricably linked to the ecosystem that surrounds it,” he said.
Like Cole, Pounds’ quarter in Monterey Bay instilled in her a lasting love for the outdoors that she hopes to incorporate into her future career.
“Hopkins made me realize how much I love being outside and interacting with nature–I don’t think a desk job is right for me,” she said. “I need to be seeing and watching nature in a personal manner to have an engaging life. At Hopkins, I interacted with the ocean, its variability and changing mood, and now I could never abandon that relationship.”
Caroline Caselli contributed to this report.