The Bait House

This past Sunday I went to volunteer for the first time at the Island Bay Marine Education Centre weekly Open Day. It’s a pretty cruisy setup—the coordinator emails everyone during the week, you tell him if you can make it that weekend, and then you roll up on the day and do your thing.

That’s what I did. It was a cold and rainy day so a friend dropped me off on the South Coast, down the road from where I lived my first year in Wellington, when I went to that rockpool beach a lot. The tanks are in a tiny building, maybe the size of my flat not including the kitchen, called the Bait House. It’s on a sort of gravelly spit so you can go in and look at the tanks and then go out to the rocky shore to see where the creatures have come from. They do school visits during the week and then every Sunday they have an Open Day: four bucks for adults and two for kids. It’s crowded and the floors are wet and you usually have to keep your coat on. There are all sorts of things on the walls: old nets and buoys and what I think is the saw from a sawfish. The kids spend a lot of time at the touch tanks and the adults wander around and go “Wow that’s a really big paua!” It’s a nice place.

I had emailed a bit with the volunteer coordinator over the last few weeks, and he told me just to come down when I was ready and that they’d show me what to do. It turns out there wasn’t much to show: one of the other volunteers gave me a name badge and suggested, when I asked what I should do to orient myself, that I just listen to what the more experienced volunteers were saying. I edged over to the touch tanks (it was quite crowded) and peered inside and struck up a conversation about sea stars with a six year old balancing on an upturned plastic box and that was that.

I always loved marine biology. I actually did a class in high school and my favourite part was always drawing the specimens and learning the taxonomy, which is still funny to me to this day because a) I can’t draw and b) I am not much of one for memorizing. I can’t identify species, but I can say ‘mollusc’ and ‘cnidaria’ and ‘echinoderm.’ I can, it turns out, explain to a kid that a sea star and a sea urchin and a sea cucumber are all related. A lifetime of watching nature shows and reading pop science, maybe? Does that count? “Their name means spiny skin,” I said over and over to the kids at the touch tanks, for about three hours last weekend. “Hold the starfish gently, under the water, and flip it over. See its feet? See its mouth?”

I stayed mostly by the touch tanks because there were other volunteers there that could help me and because that’s what I know best. I reminded the kids to hold their hands out flat and keep them just in the water, if they wanted to hold a creature. I got good at spotting the expertly camouflaged decorator crab and saw my first duckbill limpet and wandering anemone. I checked out the octopus and her eggs—each of which is about the size of a grain of rice and has a tiny black speck which will become the baby octopus’ eyes. I spent a long time looking at a little tank full of little flatfish, thinking quite sincerely, “Wow, those flatfish are really flat.” I watched the pregnant seahorses for a while. At one point a sea star started digesting a sea cucumber right there in the touch tank, much to the horror and fascination of the assembled kids, and the volunteer coordinator disengaged it and said he’d put it out back in one of the rock pools. “It’s in pretty good nick, considering,” he said as he whisked around the corner. “Otherwise I’d just leave the starfish to it. It’s life, you know?”

My own preferences tend towards the invertebrate, in general, but of course there were fish there too, and a couple of carpet sharks. One of the long-time volunteers, who I think is definitely a retired marine biologist, offered to bring in a textbook for me so I can work on my identification skills. He told me all about various places around the world he’s dived and said that the marine reserve is great for diving. “It’s a bit cold for me,” I said. “Nah,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll get you a seven mil wetsuit and a cup of concrete and you’ll be fine!”

In the end I didn’t do very much, really, but I don’t care. I talked to some kids about sea buddies, and I listened to some other people who really know what they’re talking about. I got very cold and wet and my fingers got pruney from the seawater. I thought about things I like to think about. I can’t wait to go back.