Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory Celebrates Festivities Showcasing Sea Life Wonders

Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory (KML), home to important biological discoveries since 1929, has won its first accolade in a different sphere: the Rookie Award in the annual Newport Beach Christmas Boat Parade and Ring of Lights.

For this year’s holiday event, researchers in the KML teamed up with members of the Rotary Club of Newport-Balboa to make decorations for the building that included hand-cut 4-foot wooden mermaids, starfish, and sand dollars.

The laboratory hosted festivities focused on marine life and science, an all-hands-on-deck collaboration that included KML interns from Orange Coast College, Rotary Club members and other friends of the KML, and students and postdoctoral scholars from the research group of Victoria Orphan, Caltech’s James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology and the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair and director of Caltech’s Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions.

Visitors to the lab enjoyed a taco station, dessert bar, and live music, as well as tours highlighting the laboratory’s history and current research. Geobiology postdoctoral scholar Dan Utter and geobiology graduate student Rebecca Wipfler led interactive science demonstrations in KML’s teaching laboratory.

Utter helped visitors view and count marine plankton, small organisms afloat in the waters below the pier at KML, using a low-cost PlanktoScope operated by a Raspberry Pi minicomputer.

Wipfler led a “crush your own ornament” activity where visitors decorated Styrofoam balls, put them in the KML’s high-pressure incubation chambers, and used hand pumps to increase the pressure to mimic the squeezing effect of being 3,000 meters deep in the ocean—the depth of the Titanic. With the air in the Styrofoam squeezed out, the ornaments shrank before visitors’ eyes.