NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:Ocean’s wildlife on view at aquarium

On Friday, Vic and I went to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach with Laura Bandy, education director of the Bolsa Chica Conservancy, and Bob Adams of the Southern California Marine Institute. Although this sounds like a lark, we were there as science instructors for a field trip with the Orange County Conservation Corps.

Thanks to the generosity of aquarium management, we were able to take all 40 high school students from the Corps for free.

I had made a worksheet for the students to fill out as they went through the three main habitat areas of the aquarium — Southern California and Baja, Northern Pacific and Tropical Pacific — plus the gallery of venomous creatures of Southern California, the lorikeet forest and the shark lagoon.

I originally thought each one of us professional biologists would take a group of students, accompanied by a teacher and staff member, but the field trip ended up being far more loosely structured, as groups of excited students formed, broke up and reformed into new groups.

It was like trying to keep track of a swirling mass of autumn leaves during Santa Ana winds. But it worked. Each of us ended up being with a number of different groups and individuals as they explored the mysteries of the deep.

The biggest surprise to me was how much more than fish the facility interprets. There is a “Dazzling and Dangerous” theme that focuses on spines, stingers, fangs and venom. In addition to poisonous lionfish and stonefish, we saw rattlesnakes, tarantulas, gila monsters and black widow spiders.

The learning opportunities there are incredible because of the terrific signage. For example, we learned that poison dart frogs have poisonous secretions on their skin because in the wild they eat insects that feed on plants that contain poisonous compounds. In captivity, the frogs lose the poison in their skin.

For me, the highlight of the morning was seeing Corps members feed the rainbow lorikeets. These Australian birds have weak gizzards and feed mostly on nectar, flowers, pollen and fruit.

I paid for $2 cups of nectar for all of the students so they could experience having these lovely birds land on them and drink from a hand-held cup. A couple of the young men were afraid of the birds — lorikeets can draw blood when they bite — but most of students had a great time feeding them.

The Aquarium of the Pacific has plenty of opportunities to touch live animals. As I expected, the boys really liked the shark lagoon, especially getting to pet live sharks and stingrays.

They tended to be more leery of touching the sea urchins, sea cucumbers and sea anemones, but, with encouragement, they reached into the tanks to see which ones were soft and slimy, and which ones were hard and sharp.

One of the tasks on the worksheet was to list new words that they learned. We had to prod them to come up with answers. “Aquarium” one boy volunteered. “Ocean” another offered.

Laura looked askance at the students. They admitted that those weren’t new words. On further thinking, they came up with “pelagic” (pertaining to the ocean), “plankton” (microscopic plants and animals in the sea), “nematocyst” (stinging cell) and “arthropod” (a group of invertebrates with hard exoskeletons that includes crabs and lobsters).

That was more what I had in mind.

Once the students got started talking about what they learned, it was hard to keep up with their answers.

They learned that garibaldi — our state fish — is a brilliant orange, and that swell sharks hatch out of hard egg cases. Demetrio Pineda said he learned that sharks don’t leave behind skeletons because their skeletons are cartilage and decay easily. “And I learned that they’re always growing new teeth,” he added.

We asked what they liked most about the field trip. Demetrio summed up the opinions of the majority of students by responding, “Touching stuff, seeing the sharks and feeding the birds.” Others enjoyed seeing the variety of fishes and all their different colors.

The display of marine life at the aquarium really is dazzling. One student responded that he liked the sawfish the best and learning how it used its chainsaw-like snout to stun the fish that it attacks.

Another question asked was what benefit the field trip hadfor students? That one was harder, but once they thought about it, they came up with good answers.

“This new experience helped me enjoy and appreciate wildlife more, especially wildlife in the ocean,” Philip Pena said. That was certainly a message that we hoped would get across.

Mario Vasquez picked up on another key message. He said, “We learned that some of these animals are endangered, like the red-kneed tarantula and the Vaquita, the little whale.” That was definitely a common theme at the aquarium.

You couldn’t help but notice the “vanishing species” signs on so many of the tanks and cages.

The aquarium features island species such as the dusky pademelon, a member of the kangaroo family, and the binturong, a mammal from Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific Islands that smells remarkably like buttered popcorn.

Islands are an important part of the ocean ecosystem, and their inhabitants are facing increasing threats of extinction.

A trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific offers an incredible education about the strange and wonderful underwater world that lies just offshore. Go experience it for yourself.