01x09 - Underwater Eco-Adventure

[bunniefuu]

[girls] ♪ S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] ♪ We need you

[girls] ♪ S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] ♪ Come on!

♪ When I need help, and I've got a question ♪

♪ there's a place I go for inspiration ♪

♪ Gotta get to the Web, check the girls' investigation ♪

♪ What girls?

♪ SciGirls!

Whoo!

[girls] ♪ S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] ♪ I need you!

[girls] ♪ S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] ♪ Come on!

♪ You've gotta log on, post,

♪ upload, pitch in! Yeah!

♪ Wanna get inside a world that's fascinating? ♪

♪ The time is right 'cause SciGirls are waiting, ♪

[girls] ♪ S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] ♪ We need you!

[girls] ♪ S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] ♪ SciGirls!!

Iz?

Your mom said you were down here.

What?

Izzie, what are you doing?

Class superlatives came out today. Did you see them?

No, but whatever they said you were,

it isn't worth hiding out in your dryer for the next years.

I'm not hiding, I'm trying to figure it out.

Look.

So? What's wrong with that?

"Unique?" What does that mean, "unique?"

Unique good, unique bad? How am I supposed to know?

Hmm, good question.

Hey look! I'm in here.

[Izzie] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jake] "Most likely to embarrass himself

on the casting special for American Idol?"

Whoa! They like me!

They really like me, Iz!

Oh Jake, focus! The question is do they like the way I dress?

How should I know?

Oh forget it! I need a girl opinion...

a SciGirl opinion! See ya.

Ladies!

I have a fashion emergency.

Hum. Hmm, next.

Oo, colored fish, colored clothes.

Hmm, I wonder...

Oh my gosh, I've never been up here before!

My name is Meg, I'm years old.

I've dove like, way on the other side of the island.

I'm an older sister.

My younger sister is also here.

I've never scuba dived with her before so it could be different.

My name is Elle, and I'm years old.

We are going into Avalon on Catalina Island.

[Meg] My sister and I, we went to camp this year.

We both became interested in the health of the reefs

around Toyon Bay on Catalina Island.

We began to ask questions about

like, are the reefs healthy, how can we learn more?

You definitely should care about protecting the reefs

because they're a source of food for the fish, protection,

shelter, oxygen, everything we pretty much need,

and the fish need.

If the reefs are gone, the fish are going to be gone,

and then when the fish are gone, the ocean is going to die away.

♪ ♪

Los Angeles is right there, and Catalina is right here.

Yeah, so we started here, and we took a boat out to here.

And if you actually look really carefully,

right there is Cherry Cove.

Toyon Bay. Toyon Bay I mean.

Are we gonna play Frisbee?Yeah.

Awesome. I'm not very good. It might go in the water.

I have to flat out say I'm not the perfect older sister.

Try to go long.

[Izzie] Throw it to me! Throw it to me!

[Elle] Having a scuba sister is a lot of fun

because since I'm fairly new to it,

she can tell me all the tricks,

and what to do and what not to do.

[Meg] She doesn't really enjoy it if I try to teach her things.

She likes to learn on her own.

I haven't often try to mentor her on how to scuba dive.

[Elle] This is the hardest rock wall on this rock wall.

Some of the things I want to experience on my own,

and she always wants to tell me what to do.

[Meg] Titi, do not go higher than the first one

without a harness, please.

Funny.

Not like in a bad way, but she wants to help me.

She's a good sister.

I can think of worse sisters, I definitely could.

I doubt she'll ever be the perfect little sister.

There's no such thing, but she's a pretty good little sister.

Hey, what's the garibaldi's scientific name?

[Elle mispronounces] "Hypsypops rubicundus."

Nice try.

Somebody who works at camp

recommended meeting Colleen from Reef Check.

I'm not trying to pronounce all of these scientific names.

Hi ladies.Hi, how are you?

I'm Colleen from Reef Check.

Hi.I'm Meg. I'm Elle.

Nice to meet you. Your instructor told me

you wanted to learn a little more about reefs.Yeah!

By meeting her, it kind of opened up a whole door

to learning more, and comparing,

and it just became this full-on investigation.

It started off with-- are the reefs healthy?

So you guys count the fish to see how healthy it is?

We do, we go out, we count fish,

we count invertebrates, we count seaweed.

We look at the bottom, and we see what's going on out there.

I work with volunteer divers,

and we call them citizen scientists,

and they go out with us to help us collect this data,

because the of us that work at Reef Check wouldn't possibly

be able to go out and get all of this information ourselves

all throughout the state of California.

So we need a lot of help.

[Elle] So is that what we're going to be doing?

So what we can do is try to put together something for teenagers

that might be a little easier for us to do in a couple days,

and we can have you guys work as citizen scientists as well,

and we can try to figure out what our reefs are doing

here on Catalina Island.

[Elle] That'd be so much fun!

Citizen Scientist Izzie ready for duty!

I want to see how much you guys know about some of the species we have around here.

You can quiz us.

I'll do a quick quiz. Ladies, what is this fish here?

Blacksmith.

I'll pick this one.Kelp bass!

This is one of my favorites as well.Garibaldi!

[Colleen] Do you know what these... [Meg] Is that a female sheephead?

[Colleen] Yes, it is a female sheephead.

Do you know the difference between a male and a female?

[Meg] The male has the black and red stripes.

All sheephead are born female,

and when they get to be about years old or so

and they need to start thinking about reproducing,

the biggest females in the group will kind of

come up to each other and do this big open mouth contest

to figure out who's going to be the bigger one,

and whoever wins that contest ends up turning into a male.

What tends to be living on some of our rocky reef sides?

[Meg] Plants or animals?

[Colleen] Well, all of it, right?

[Meg] There's a lot of kelp forests, and there's sea urchins

that feed on the kelp and stuff like that.

There are a bunch of fish.

There's all of these animals.

[Colleen] Okay great! So it's not just one thing

we're looking at. We're not looking at say, just kelp

or just leopard sharks or things like that.

It's a lot of things kind of living

and working together in one ecosystem.

What we can try to do maybe is look at a couple different reefs

that maybe have different amounts of humans on them

to see if there's a difference between them

and see what's going on out there.

See which one's healthier, which one's not?

An easy way to do that is to pick

what we call indicator species.

If we pick a few of those that kind of have

a key part of this ecosystem, what we can do is

count those numbers and compare them between different sites.

Meg and Elle are going to be looking at indicator species.

So each one was chosen for a special reason,

either what it eats, or if it's commercially harvested,

or if it just plays an important role in the ecosystem.

[Meg] We are in the invertebrate lab.

This is a sea cucumber, and it's kind of scared

because I touched it, so it's swollen up.

If you kiss a sea cucumber, you get years of good luck.

Let's do it. , , !

Okay. Mmmm-wa!

Ew! Yuk!

An invertebrate is a sea animal that does not have any bones.

So most important is, it does not have a spine.

I like invertebrates because they're fun.

Feel him...

[Colleen] Okay good one! You got it! You got it!

Whoo!

[Colleen] You got it. Grab it.

Nice one!

So are there any animals here that are indicator species?

So one of them that I was thinking of was the sea urchin.

[Izzie] Whoa, spikey!

[Colleen] These guys have kind of teeth on the underside of their body,

and that's how they eat.

If they're eating a lot of the seaweed,

these might be good to know.

Also, we've got our sea cucumber.

I was thinking that might be

a good thing for us to look at as well.

Because they're so popular, they're everywhere.

A couple of other animals over here.

It's actually called a gorgonian.

Now these guys, if you look really closely

at what looks like a plant, do you see how there's lots

of little flower-looking things on these guys? [SciGirls] Yeah.

The gorgonian has lots of little things that are like anemones

They're called polyps. So on one gorgonian,

there could be thousands of polyps living together on this.

[Elle] There's so many, it looks like it's covered in snow.

Wow, sea urchins, cucumbers,

indicator species. Got it!

I'm sure you know what this stuff is.

[Elle] Seaweed. [Meg] Kelp.

[Colleen] What might this be important for? [Elle] Food, homes.

[Colleen] Yeah, it's going to be a great food source. Shelter.

Yeah, for the kelp fish, it's an easy way to hide from predators.

[Colleen] Exactly. Anything else? [Meg] Oxygen.

Oxygen, right? So it's really important for that as well.

So those are kind of my big reasons why I think kelp

is so important out there in the ocean.

It's also in a lot of products we use

you guys probably are aware of.

[Meg] Toothpaste. [Colleen] And? [SciGirls] Ice cream.

[Izzie] Toothpaste and ice cream? Seriously?

I think we should have some way to record information underwater.

I have these data slates that we can use underwater,

and there's one for each of you.

We talked about species of fish that we can use

as indicator organisms. We talked about species

of inverts, or invertebrates, and one species of seaweed.

So I made up this little data sheet that we can use,

and what'll happen is this has been printed on this really cool

underwater paper. What you would do is,

count how many of each of these organisms you see. [Meg] Okay.

[Colleen] So I saw blacksmith, I saw garibaldi, whatever.

We want to make sure we have some watches

so we can record our starting and ending times.

The indicator species that we were looking for

were the blacksmith, garibaldi,

kelp/calico bass,

sheephead, male and female,

gorgonian, sea urchin,

cucumber, and the giant kelp.

We can lay down a measuring tape on the bottom

and use that as our guide.

We swim along that tape and look on either side of that line

and see what we're seeing as we go.

You can dive down or swim at the surface.

[Meg] Are you going to use an actual line like a rope?

[Colleen] I have a measuring tape.

We'll go out, and we'll do several replications of this.

So we want to do this over and over

instead of just doing it once

we can really get a good idea of what's going on out there.

Then we'll come back, we'll tally it up,

and we'll compare all of our numbers and see what we find.

[Izzie] Let's meet Elle.

Hi. My name is Elle.

I want to be a veterinarian, for big animals, actually.

I have horses, Blackie and Slurpie, one dog, Gem,

one leopard gecko, Finn, chickens, a bunny named Monty,

cats, Ashy and Smudge.

[Izzie] Bye Elle! [Elle] Bye!

[Elle] We're heading out to a dive spot.

We are going to investigate how many, like, the population

and whether it's a healthy reef or a nonhealthy reef.

Whoo-hoo! Here we go! Hold on tight!

[Meg] Maybe because I've been scuba diving longer than her,

so I have more dives under my belt,

and the little things that my sister can do--

we're sisters-- little things tick us off. We're like, ahh!!

It could work, it could work peaceably,

or it could work World w*r III. So, who knows?

[Meg] What place is this? [Colleen] This is called

Lions Head, this is actually a great spot.

We'll be mostly out of the winds.

We should be protected from the surge as well,

so we won't be moving back and forth in the water as much,

which is gonna be really nice for us. It's not protected.

Not a lot of divers come here, but it does get fished a lot.

[Izzie] Hm! So this is the unprotected reef.

I'll lay the transect down, you guys will each do

your one count, and then we'll move it and do the same thing

at a slightly different spot, and then a rd spot.

So we're doing total trials,

just each one is in a different area?

Yeah, so each person will count each line once.

Okay. All right.

Here are our wetsuit babies.

We've got all of our stuff.

It makes it look even more like a bathing suit,

if you put the hood in like that.

You're gonna be cold in that.

Okay, , , .

How do I look?

All right, let's get that left booty on.

I'm not getting' cold.

Tell me you got left booties. Are you kidding me?

If you gotta do it, you gotta do it.

[laughs] You got left booties!

[Izzie laughs] I've heard of left feet in dancing, but snorkeling?

Got it! Wow, that feels weird!

Instead of being side-by-side, we're gonna go

end-to-end like this, just like we discussed.

And if you have any problems, let me know.

What are our signals if we're having an issue?

And waving if we're in trouble.

Okay, great. Sounds good.

[soft gurgling]

Cold. Very, very cold.

[Meg] When I was little, I used to think that being a scientist

was wearing a lab coat

and the safety goggles and mixing chemicals.

But then there's also the kind of scientist that Colleen is.

You get to go scuba diving, and you get to study fish.

There's so many different types of sciences

that people can study.

[Colleen] Who's going to be first on our first one?

I will go first.

I said it, you just raised your hand-- I win.

[Colleen] Meg will go first on the first one,

you'll go first on the nd one.

[Meg] Okay, I'm starting.

[Colleen] Okay, let's do a headstart. I'm ready, set, go!

[Elle] We tried the transect dive method,

and with the transect, you have a line that you're following,

and a meter on either side was our boundary

to see if any fish or invertebrates

or any of our indicator species went into that boundary.

And if it did, then we would mark it down.

[Meg] It was fun because once you get the transect method,

you kind of get into a zone, and you totally space out,

and you just focus on what the task is at hand.

[Izzie] I'm trying to find a unique fish, like me!

[Meg] There were definitely

many different types of kelp on this dive.

It was harder to distinguish the certain kind of kelp

that we're going to work on from giant kelp.

[Elle] I definitely go with the motion of swaying back and forth.

I guess in a way you could see more doing that

because you're not focused on fighting the current.

I saw a couple kelp bass, a bunch of garibaldi,

and a bunch of the kelp--it was really pretty.

[Colleen] Let's go ahead and tally up our data sheets,

put totals before we forget.

[Meg] Those boat rides are always

some of my favorite times at camp

just because you are so burnt out from scuba diving

or snorkeling, and you're on this boat,

and you're seeing the entire island.

So that's my favorite part.

[Colleen] Tomorrow we are going to the protected reef

at the Avalon Dive Park to see if anything changes

from unprotected to protected.

Now this is still pretty early in the morning

so it's not that crowded yet.

It is the summer here on Catalina on a weekend,

and so my prediction is we're going to have

probably about divers here by the mid afternoon.

It drops off pretty quick, so by the time you get

to the outer edge of the buoys, I'd say it's about -feet deep.

[SciGirls] Wow!Yeah.

This is my first time at the dive park, I'm very excited.

We're all tired, but we're having fun.

I like, times checked to make sure

I had different booties this time.

[Meg] It's been a long couple of days,

but we're having fun collecting all the data.

The beach is thata way.

Where's a meter on your bodysuit?

For me, it's from my fingertips to right around here.

I'm not gonna do free hair, I'm gonna

tie my hair back today. It just gets in my way.

Now mine's all wet.

[swak!]

[Izzie] Hm! So this is the protected reef.

I wonder if we'll see more fish here.

[Meg] So we took our first transect dive data,

and there's actually a lot more blacksmith,

we saw some blacksmith, and pretty much it was

the same amount of garibaldi and giant kelp.

We saw a few kelp bass, not many invertebrates though,

but that could change when we go scuba diving.

[Elle] I saw a few urchins when I dove down.

I saw a ton of garibaldi. I saw garibaldi.

I didn't really count how many blacksmith,

so I just said a big school of blacksmith.

[Meg] The actual transect dive took about minutes.

[Elle] I was thinking maybe it was .

Yeah, see, mine was a little bit shorter than usual.

I think I sped it up a little bit.

Any reasons why you might've been speeding up?

[Meg] The surge could be one thing.

It was really surgy in one area,

and the line was moving back and forth.

So that could've sped up our data.

It was not as clear as it can be here.

Usually here it's crystal clear, but it was a little hazy.

Hi. I'm Meg. [Izzie] Hi Meg!

[Meg] Blackie is the grumpy one.

Sometimes I'm kind of the outsider of my family though,

just because they're all big horse people.

I like the chickens the best.

They're my favorite-- they're so entertaining!

But if you ever wear bright red nail polish,

they will att*ck your hands-- it's the funniest thing.

[Izzie] Note to self: don't wear red nail polish around chickens.

[Meg] I've been playing club soccer for years. We live

in the middle of nowhere,

but I like it here.

That's a plus, that's a big plus. Bye!

All you wrote is "big school."

How am I supposed to know how much that is?

I couldn't count them all.

[Meg] We are averaging up all of the fish that we saw.

So we're going to take all of our averages

and put it into a chart to see the numbers of fish

compared to a protected area versus an unprotected area.

Now we're doing garibaldi.

, , , ,

Kelp bass. , , .

[Meg] I'm going to divide everything by .

The is because I did transect dives,

and she did transect dives, so you add them all together

because we're putting all of our data together.

Next is giant kelp. .

Next is gorgonian. Zero.

Sheephead.

Numbers.

Zero. [Elle] Zero. [Meg] It's all zero.

Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero...

[Meg] I think we worked pretty well together.

There were definitely moments where I was like okay,

this is too much of the little sister, too much

of the little sister--it's like little sister overload!

[Meg] Do you really need to do this?

Zero divided by equals...

Zero! Oh, shocker there!

[Meg] But then there's times where it's like I'm having fun.

Hey Elle, look what I found.

All right, awesome. We could use that

because the paper might have been a little small.

So we have a very large dry erase board now.

These scissors cut weird on the waterproof paper.

Because our highest number for the averages is ,

let's only take it up to ?

And there's the kelp bass.

Look at all these colors. Wow!

Giant kelp is, for Avalon, .

Gorgonian, Avalon.Zero.

Okay, gorgonian, I mean cucumber, Avalon.

Zero.

Hey ladies, how's it going?Hey Colleen.

What are you up to here?

We made a chart, as you can see,

a chart of all of the data that we've collected

over the past few days with you of all the fish

and the invertebrates and all these indicator species.

I've noticed that in all of our data,

Avalon Dive Park, the green, has a lot more numbers

than the Lions Head has.

[Izzie] Hm, I wonder if that's because the dive park is protected?

[Elle] Well, we figured out since

these are the that are fish,

there are definitely a lower amount of them because,

well, I know that the dive park is protected,

but that doesn't mean that when they're out of the dive park,

when they get fish, it doesn't really

give them a chance to come to the dive park.

[Colleen] Right, they're not always staying in the dive park.

They can move in and out-- that's a great observation.

[Meg] Also we talked about the weather

and how that could've been a large factor of why

we did not see many of these invertebrates, the urchins,

gorgonians, cucumbers, because it was so surgy.

And also with the Avalon Dive Park,

there were many other divers

that could've kicked up the bottom.

That's a good point.

So that could've hurt the visibility some.

[Colleen] Do you know what urchins primarily eat?

[Meg] Kelp, giant kelp.

[Colleen] Great! So these guys are pretty much sitting on the bottom.

They're never going to be swimming around

in the water at all, and they're eating seaweed.

Most of the time they're just going to eat drift seaweed

that's kind of broken off and is drifting by

and they could just eat it that way.

Another indicator species is the California sheephead.

Any guesses what these guys might eat?

[Elle] Kelp too? [Colleen] Nope. [Meg] Urchins?

[Colleen] Yup, they're going to eat urchins.

When the sheephead get to be pretty big,

they can actually eat urchins.

They also eat other hard things like crabs and things like that.

So if we fish out a lot of our sheephead,

if we reduce the numbers of sheephead,

what's going to happen to our other populations?

The urchin is going to grow numerously,

and then it's going to eat all the giant kelp,

and then the giant kelp is going to go down,

then any animal that eats giant kelp is going to die

because they don't have any food.

[Meg] Plus giant kelp also give shelter to many animals.

So if the kelp and the sheephead--

it's kind of like a domino effect.

So it's all interrelated... That's what I was gonna say.

the domino effect-- if we take one,

even just one piece of this giant web out of order,

then we're going to have implications down the line.

Okay. So ladies, now that we have

all of our data put together, we can go ahead

and enter it in the Reef Check database.

We'll enter our Avalon data first.

[Meg] In Lions Head, there were not as many indicator species

as there were in Avalon.

We saw a greater amount of indicator species at Avalon.

[SciGirls] Let's scuba!

This is the BC. It's a buoyancy compensator.

You can inflate it and deflate it to make you float,

bob on the surface.

When you deflate it, the weight of the t*nk

and your weight belt makes you sink down.

[Meg] I think we'll have a much greater chance of seeing

sea cucumbers, urchins, and gorgonians

because we have the opportunity to go to the bottom

and move things around and actually search for them.

Getting ready for scuba diving, putting on the wet suit,

putting on your BC, everything,

or even snorkeling, just putting on the wet suit, it's

pretty much the most challenging part of the entire dive

just because you definitely work up a sweat.

Fins on, regulator, not your snorkel--

just makes it a little easier.

Then you'll wait for a wave, you'll pop out one at a time,

swim out to me, give the okay, then the next one will go.

Whoever is going first.

I want to see some of the gorgonians

and urchins and cucumbers

because we were not able to see those while snorkeling.

♪ ♪

[Meg] When you go scuba diving, you forget about how cold you are

or how tired you are because you're so focused

on oh my gosh, look what's around me, it's so amazing!

You get up close and personal with these animals and plants.

[Elle] When we went down, we definitely saw

some urchins, some gorgonians.

[Meg] We even saw some sheephead.

Just the way the beauty is presented to you

while scuba diving, it can get your attention,

and you want to learn more about it.

I mean, if marine biology was not as beautiful work as it was,

then I doubt so many people would be interested in it.

[Elle] I think that's really cool

because we're actually helping people

and doing actual data that's going to help people

and be on an official Website to see how our reefs are doing

and how our fish are doing.

I think it's going to be really cool.

[Izzie] Cool as a cucumber!

A sea cucumber, that is.

So you went through the latest teen magazines

and found indicator clothing items.

Yup, just like you said to.

So if you have all of them,

I think it's safe to say you're a "fashion do."

All right, I'm ready!

Okay, do you have a striped scarf?

Ah, I'm pretty sure I do.

Yup, uh-huh, here.

Sweet.

Okie-dokie. How about plaid shorts?

Oh, totally.

Got 'em!

Fine. Here comes the tough one though,

polka-dotted sneakers.

Ha! Ta-dah! Got 'em!

Seems to me, if you've got the indicator fashion items,

you're good to go.

Yea!

Huh, you know, together these would make a fab outfit.

Yeah, I don't think wearing them all together

is quite what the fashionistas had in mind.

You know, Jake, I don't think I care.

Whoa!

That's, ah... unique.

[Izzie laughs] Yeah, it is, isn't it?

And I don't even care what that means.

To me it's a good thing.

♪ Ta-dah!