This is my second week working for REEF, and it’s been a lot of fun. My mentor Kyler was gone on the second School ex trip (the boat tour of the Channel Islands), so I spent most of my time working in the aquarium and helping run programs.
The Nautilus is an exploration ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and every year Scott Simon, the manager of REEF, gets to send a student, who works at REEF, on the ship. One of the programs the Nautilus runs is communications, and because one of Scott’s students is on the ship we were able to Skype them during our own program for the orientation. This grad student talked to us about the opportunities she’s had to explore via Hercules (basically just an underwater drone), places other people have never been or seen. And as Scott said, with the number of exploration ships we have in the ocean today it would take 200 years to map the whole ocean floor.
The aquarium has been a good learning experience because I have been picking up fun facts and names for all the animals while I help out with the touch tanks.
When we are closed they often have me siphon the tanks, mop, check water quality and census, food prep and any other odd jobs they have. On a normal day I start at 9 do some odd jobs until 11 then we run our first program. I eat lunch and then in the afternoon we run another couple programs. Finally to end the day off I clean up the aquarium and leave at 4:30
There are six aquarists working for REEF and Nelson, one of the aquarists, has brought me back to the tank where they keep the white abalone. White abalone are reproductively extinct (they can’t bring back their population without the interference of humans), so he is working to release the captive ones back into the wild. In order to release them they have tanks with filtered sea water from off the coast along with a tank of the unfiltered water from the same place. 
They put some from both categories into tanks with their predator, the Giant Spiny Sea Star, to see if the abalone reacts in the correct manner. With the little bit of free time I have outside the aquarium and the programs, I have helped Nelson feed the abalone. Feeding them is actually a bit of work because of how endangered they are. We need to have a special tank of kelp that is washed daily, we have to wash our hands even if they were just in the other tanks water, and we have to make sure the kelp gets to the snail.
Another task that I’m not really part of is the fishery testing. The REEF helped to build a spot to test scallop breeding, and because 10 percent of the average diet comes from the ocean they want to try and make it sustainable. We have built 10 tanks all for different ages scallops. Similarly there is a red abalone fishery down the road (we just got 5 babies from them) and they are trying to keep the wild population while still keeping the delicacy.
When I’m not working at the REEF I spent my time at the recreational center and on the beach with Jonah. 
One of our neighbors was kind enough to lend us surf boards for the rest of our time here and we really look forward to using them. We haven’t really gotten to use the boards yet because it has been very gloomy.
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