Watsonville Area Teens Conserving Habitats (WATCH)

Partnered with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Pajaro Valley School District

During my senior year of high school, I participated in the Watsonville Area Teens Conserving Habitats (WATCH) program run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium which provided students with the opportunity to conduct research with a team and present their findings. My research was focused on how a species of Corixidae, commonly known as Water Boatman, reacted to different levels of water parameters such as temperature and salinity. After doing some background research, we realized that Water Boatmen are tolerant towards water pollution. With this information, we stopped looking at the local farm pollutants near the study site and looked at how salinity plays a role in the abundance of Corixidae found in our plankton tow nets. We created a poster to present our results in three different locations: Moss Landing Marine Labs, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Mello Center at Watsonville High School.