Erin Sullivan stepped quickly over seaweed-coated rocks at Hazard Reef in Montaña de Oro State Park. There it was: a red octopus with orange spots, a little larger than a foot, curled in her classmate’s gloved hand.
Its tentacles moved rapidly, like flowing water, the Cal Poly biology sophomore recalled.
“I’ve had classes with intensive labs, but this actually feels like I’m gaining something by going out into the field,” Sullivan said.
Students like Sullivan are not just finding sea creatures, they are contributing to international marine science research. At five colleges across the West Coast, including Cal Poly, students are collecting data to be used to track coastal ecosystem changes over time.
Sullivan is one of 20 Cal Poly students enrolled in MSCI 300: Marine Ecology, a course that takes students into the field each week to study marine ecosystems up close. That research is feeding into DIMES, or Diversifying and Integrating Marine Education at Stations, a network of marine biology labs stretching from Mexico to Alaska. At each site, students collect data from rocky intertidal zones and upload their findings to a shared database used by scientists.
This spring marks Cal Poly’s first time participating in the DIMES project led by biological sciences professor Crow White.
“It [is] classic learn by doing,” White said. “Students [are] learning marine ecology by doing it, and then we as a class, including myself, [are] learning about this new protocol that the other institutions are conducting.”
That research helped connect Cal Poly students with peers at the University of Oregon and the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexico through a Zoom meeting to share what they found.
At first, the conversations were tentative. But soon, students began to find patterns and shared interests in their research.
“They found commonality, and the commonality was a love for marine science and a love for the oceans,” White said.
One key trend scientists across the DIMES network are monitoring is tropicalization — the northward migration of species from warmer waters into cooler, more temperate ecosystems.
“Changes in the environment are pushing systems to collapse, and you need the data,” says DIMES founder Rodrigo Beas, a marine sciences professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexico. “That data is going to be available to scientists to go back and say: what happened in that moment, in that place, along the coast? It’s like an oracle of what’s going to happen to California, or farther north, in the future.”
Beas launched DIMES with the goal of increasing collaboration across borders and expanding access to hands-on science education. The program now includes five marine biology labs in California, Oregon and Alaska— including institutions like Stanford University, Cal State Monterey and the University of Oregon.
At Hazard Reef, Cal Poly students arrived with sloggers, clipboards and packed lunches for the six-hour field trip ahead. The reef, nestled within Montaña de Oro’s 8,000-acre coastal expanse — just 20 minutes away from Cal Poly’s campus — was teeming with life that morning.
As the students fanned out, thousands of mussels laid upon the rocky outcrop, cemented with seaweed. In one tidepool, vibrant green seaweed stalks draped across the rock and into the water where an apricot-colored starfish rested, arms slightly extended.
Students split off into small teams, each responsible for surveying a section of the reef. They scoured tidepools and crevices, identifying seagrass, hermit crabs, sea anemones, sea slugs and more. Once they identified the organisms, they began quadrat surveying, a method used to estimate population sizes of the ecosystem.
Marine sciences sophomore Jake Pederson was in the middle of the reef when he noticed an octopus camouflaged among seaweed in a tidepool. Slowly, he took out his phone and snapped a photo. The pair made direct eye contact before the black and green creature disappeared. It was the first time Pederson had seen a lesser two-spot octopus like that in the wild.
Meanwhile, Annabelle Tweet took away a greater understanding of “what it’s like being out in the field and out in the elements,” she said. The marine sciences sophomore witnessed nudibranchs, or sea slugs. For her, the class helped her learn more about marine sciences, and how her career might align with the field.
“You get a good experience of what it’s like being out in the field and out in the elements,” Tweet said.
Sullivan hadn’t felt the hours slipping by until her stomach reminded her. Starving, she realized her last meal was breakfast. She stood contemplating on her hard day’s work while eating her peanut butter and jelly sandwich,one of her classmates stood beside her eating a turkey sandwich.
“It gets like that when you’re doing ecology-type field work, but it’s the price I’m willing to pay if I get to do such cool stuff,” Sullivan said.
White plans to continue integrating DIMES into his marine ecology course in future quarters at Cal Poly, contributing to a dataset that students will be able to reference over time to track coastal changes.
“Ultimately, [this research] should result in a publication in a scientific journal with students along as co-authors,” White explained.
More than anything, White hopes the experience helps students see themselves as part of a broader scientific community.
“They are being scientists,” he said. “It’s not like they’re looking from one side of the glass across to the other side and saying, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to be.’ Instead, they’re saying, ‘I’m a scientist right now.”
As the tide began to rise and the fog thinned, students packed up their gear and hiked back to the parking lot. Tired, wet and exhilarated. For many, this was more than a field lab. It was a glimpse into a future they could already see themselves in.
Correction: This article was edited on Aug. 11 at 3:39 p.m. to fix a misspelled word. The word ‘mussels’ was previously written as ‘muscles.’
