Synopsis

Ecology, Evolution and Management of The Gulf of California is an intensive, eighteen-day field course taught at The Vermilion Sea Field Station, in Bahía de Los Ángeles, Baja California. While most courses in environmental science focus on a single discipline, invoking a variety of systems or case-studies to illustrate fundamental principles, this course inverts the traditional arrangement: we focus on a single ecosystem—the Midriff Island Area of the Gulf of California—and invoke many different disciplines to illuminate it. Beginning with physical oceanography, moving on to evolution and ecology, but never dropping the thread of local natural history, we will equip students with the intellectual tools that will enable them to perceive more closely and comprehend more deeply the exceptionally rich and productive marine ecosystem they engage on each day’s excursion into the gulf.

2009 Instructors

In the first half of the course, Veronica Volny, who has taught at the Vermilion Sea Field Station for over ten years, will introduce us to gulf oceanography and natural history. Dmitri Petrov, who joins us from Stanford University, will focus on the molecular evolution of gulf organisms. And Aaron E. Hirsh will discuss evolution and community ecology of the Midriff Island Area’s ecosystem.

Equipped with the basics from the first part of our course, we will treat the Midriff Island Area as a case study in the challenges facing any effort to develop a sustainable relationship with marine ecosystems. In our discussion of strategies for managing and protecting the area, we will be led by two visiting instructors. Carrie Kappel joins us from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, at UC Santa Barbara. She is an expert on the design and ecological impacts of marine protected areas. Carl Palmer is an MBA who works in the field of conservation real estate. He will introduce us to some very practical financial tools for achieving our management and conservation goals.

Daily Schedule

Our days at the Vermilion Sea Field Station are divided into three parts: in the morning, we explore a new location, often by snorkeling, and we perform the day’s field work, which will be described in more detail below; early afternoon provides time for the students to read and complete course work, until the day’s first lecture or seminar takes place; and the evening is devoted to the day’s second lecture or seminar. Our schedule is rigorous: we complete over 20 lectures, each between 60 and 90 minutes; in addition, we conduct a number of structured conversations with people from the local fishing village. These conversations, in which students discuss local environmental and economic issues with local political leaders, fishermen, and other representatives of the town’s society and culture, provide invaluable context for our more formal study of resource management.

Field Work

Certain regions of the Midriff Island Area have recently been designated a Mexican National Marine Protected Area. Students in this course will have the opportunity to participate in research designed to inform management of the new marine park. Our first three mornings will therefore compose a crash-course in basic shallow water ecological research. Students will learn two different protocols for surveying biodiversity on the reef. While these protocols do not require much technical training—equipment consists of nothing more than a meter stick and an underwater digital camera—they do require several days of practice. Once students have demonstrated competency in both basic protocols, they will begin collecting data, which they themselves will enter into our database when we return to the research station. Toward the end of the course, we will perform some simple analyses on the data, summarizing our findings and testing several hypotheses about species distribution and abundance.