Parks and Rec

Teens Get Hands-on with Habitats

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Look out George Lucas, one of Hollywood’s biggest secrets might be out of the bag and kids from the County’s Spring Valley and Lakeside teen centers are on to it.

About 25 teenagers visited the Living Coast Discovery Center and San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge to learn about the environment and habitats of several animals and organisms and one of the things they learned was where the movie industry gets a lot of its ideas for aliens and monsters.

At one of the stops, they were able to harvest their own phytoplankton and zooplankton from the bay and look at them under magnification.

“They’re all crazy, fun organisms to look at because they all look like what we’ve made space aliens and monsters out of,” said Marian Fuchs, who was showing the kids how to harvest and examine their samples. “You know, George Lucas designs all his monsters off basically little tiny organisms and insects that are just bizarre.”

“It’s kind of like Star Wars in the ocean,” added a volunteer.

The teens were able to net starfish nymphs, little green shrimp (because they eat algae), sea anemones and phytoplankton such as diatoms and dinoflagellates.

“We have the kids out here in an environment they are not normally exposed to,” said Kevin Payton of the Spring Valley REC Club, as the teen centers are called. “We (do projects) with the Sweetwater River because that’s in our backyards and so coming out here shows them where the water leads and they get more of an idea that what they do at home comes down to the ocean.”

There were four stations the teens rotated among before having lunch and then spending the afternoon learning about sharks, stingrays, shovel-nosed guitarfish, sea urchins, turtles and other aquatic life inside the Discovery Center.

They made reusable shopping bags, bracelets or dog chew toys out of recycled T-shirts, went on a bird-watching hike and planted coastal sage scrub and San Diego sunflowers.

The plants become part of the natural habitat for the creatures that reside at the refuge.

“It gives them that aspect of I’m putting something into this environment and knowing they were a part of helping this environment grow,” said Payton. “It gives them something to come back to with their families and they can let them see what they’ve done.”

The County’s teen REC clubs goals are to provide a safe, fun and positive environment for middle and high school youth to grow through physical fitness, art, leadership development, community service and educational activities.

“We definitely like to expose them to a lot of different experiences,” Payton said. “When we take them out to any of our County parks, for instance, we do lessons to get them involved and learning.

“(Trips like this one) are always good to get them out and seeing things. A lot of our kids have never been exposed to this.”

Tom Christensen is a communications specialist with the County of San Diego Communications Office. Contact