Campus: UC San Diego

Instructor: Kaustuv Roy

Reserve Used:
Scripps Coastal Reserve

Featured Reserve:
The Scripps Coastal Reserve is a highly diverse site, offering both terrestrial and marine habitats, including coastal sage scrub, succulent scrub, disturbed grassland, coastal strand, rocky reef, sandy beach, submerged sandy plain, pier pilings, and submarine canyon and
associated ledges.

Small classes like this lend themselves to real teaching. The students' grades are based entirely on their reports. The first few are often rather miserable, but they improve dramatically later in the quarter. That's a skill they'll use throughout their careers.

-Kaustuv Roy, UC San Diego

At the first session of each new class, Kaustuv Roy warns his students that this 6-unit course won't be just "a day at the beach." He explains: "I tell them, when it's pouring rain, we'll be out collecting. When it's cold and miserable, we'll be out collecting. And when we're not collecting, we'll spend a lot of time peering down microscopes."

Later that day, the group meets at the Scripps Coastal Reserve near the San Diego campus, and Roy proves his opening point - by having his students wade out into waist-deep water to look at the pier pilings. A few drop out, but those who remain are committed. "It's a great learning environment," observes Roy. "I know each of the 20 to 25 students. They feel comfortable knocking on my door when they have a question. And the student approval ratings this year were 100 percent."

The class meets two days each week. There's a morning lecture from 11 to 12 o'clock; after lunch, there's a full afternoon in the field or in the laboratory. "We start from ground level," Roy explains. "Identifying the animals and plants, learning different sampling techniques, and then bringing everything back to the lab to do the analytical work on the computer."

The Scripps Reserve continues to play a key role throughout the course. Its pier pilings provide a clear example of intertidal zonation, something that's often hard to find in southern California. Another trip focuses on collecting meiofauna. "This is the really tiny stuff that lives in algae and sediment," says Roy. "It's a wow! moment because this is a world none of them has ever seen, yet it accounts for most of the intertidal biomass. This year one of the students wanted to look at them live, so we brought back some seawater, put it in Petri dishes, and watched them interacting. I even learned things from that."

The Scripps shoreline also provides a boulder field environment where students conduct both transect and exhaustive surveys. They then compare these to a nearby bench habitat to learn about the differences in diversity and habitat structure. "I try to make the labs practical," Roy explains. "I tell them that in real life time and money are limited, so they need to find the most efficient way to collect the data they need."

The final weeks of the course focus on human impacts - mostly trampling and illegal harvesting. For these sessions, Scripps serves as a "semi-protected site" (the rocks receive a lot of visits from students attending classes at the nearby aquarium), which students compare to other sites that are both more and less protected. "These comparisons provide perfect examples of the impacts humans are having on both community structure and the sizes of individual animals," Roy notes. "The activity really raises their awareness."