Get Inspired

White seabass restocking project- The goal of this project is to restock white seabass along our coast by teaching kids in schools to grow them. We build seabass nurseries in classrooms and spend the whole year teaching the kids to care for them and about their ecology and biology. Kids get hands on science experience. Last year we taught 1600 kids to grow white seabass and they released over 300 fish along our coast. We also decided to teach the kids to snorkel so that they could snorkel with their fish when we released them!

Aquaponics programs- We have six aquaponics systems in schools in Orange County providing learning for 275 students in their classrooms. Rooftop aquaponics system at Santa Monica High School is still being constructed and is running with the inclusion of the Team marine students from their environmental science class.

Pismo clam restoration project- The goal of this project is to restore Pismo clams to our coast while involving our community. We are the first in the world to learn to spawn and grow the pismo clam. We are in the process of surveying the entire Orange County coast for clams to determine how many are left and how old they are, where they like to live and where they don't. We do this with community volunteers. We had over 400 volunteers help with this project last year. We successfully spawned 1.8 million eggs in November and our baby clams are now 1mm in size. We hope that we can soon put these animals in the classrooms and restore them to our coast. We have 4 interns this year working on this project and we will all be presenting our findings at the Southern California Academy of sciences conference in April. Northern California kelp restoration project- We spent 10 years successfully restoring the kelp forests of Orange County and we have now turned our attention to the 600 miles of lost kelp forests in Northern California. We are working on restoring a large area of Mendocino county for the 800 species that rely on the kelp forests.