Pacific Coast Trip: Santa Cruz

Even a decision to stay very local yielded fun times and lots of brain expansion!! We needed the morning to do laundry and get some work done. Poking around the internet, I found 2 marine centers in the local area. They were both great! The kids really enjoyed the Marine Sanctuary Center where there were many hands-on exhibits. I personally loved the video of the sea turtles’ journey. The center at UC Santa Cruz gave Ainsley to opportunity to see dolphins up close. She was thrilled!

Ainsley:

I went to the Marine Sanctuary Center in Santa Cruz. We got stickers and a button. There weren’t any real animals but we saw lots of fake plastic animals. I did a virtual reality thing. I got to explore a kelp forest. It was like I was really there!  There was a wave water bottle that I learned about the waves. I also saw a little town, not a real town, a model. I would turn a wheel and it would start to rain. When I stopped turning the wheel it would stop raining. It taught me about the rain source and how the water goes through the city and into the bay.

Next, I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz.  We went on a short tour because we were a little late. We saw dolphins swimming in a pool. The researchers were checking the dolphins a lot. The tour guide explained why the dolphins were there and what they did. I saw a box of balls that the dolphins play with. The researchers have to give the dolphins time to play everyday. We didn’t get to see the dolphins being fed, though.

When we got back inside we saw a touch pool with mini sharks, sea anemones and an octopus. I didn’t get to touch the octopus, I just got to see it. I touched a swell shark and my mom let a hermit crab crawl on her hand.

Dolphins and octopuses and sharks, oh my!

Travis:

Today I went to the Marine Sanctuary Center in Santa Cruz. There aren’t any live animals though. One of the exhibits, there was a big tank of water with a subdrone. The subdrone had a camera on it that did live feed to a small tablet on the control table and on a larger tv. This way people could watch what I was doing without looking over my shoulder. Next to it, there was a big poster showing what animals and plants you could find at that level in the ocean. The underwater camera was streaming video of the different ocean levels. I really liked this exhibit!

In another exhibit there was a small magnetic board. It had different fish and animals in the ocean. There were also different boats that were made for different types of fishing. Some examples were the purse seiner, the troller, and the crabber. The purse seiner catches sardines by taking a big purse-shaped net into the water, waits, pulls it back up, and ties off the sardines inside. The troller catches big fish like tuna by luring them to the line that is moving fast with the boat. Finally, the crabber catches crabs by setting down crab traps like the ones we saw in Louisiana. I learned a lot from this exhibit.

Then, we went to University of California at Santa Cruz, UCSC. We decided to do a tour of the back lab to see the dolphins and Hawaiian monk seal being researched. One of the dolphins kept going to a gate to look in a small, empty water tank. I wonder what he thought was in there; it was empty. It’s been a very long time since I saw dolphins. After the tour, we went into the museum and saw a cool touch pool with some hermit crabs, sea urchins, and sea stars. There was a sea cucumber, too. There was also an exhibit where you can “scan” fake sea otter food to see if it is healthy or hazardous. When I scanned it, only one out of the four was healthy. That’s not good!

Today was a very awesome day!