Malea Wiener (11) spent much of her childhood in the desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico. In third grade, when she moved to California, she enjoyed frequent trips to the beach with her family. Wiener played on the beach with her sisters and watched as her father, attired in scuba gear, dove into the ocean depths. He would soon inspire her to get a scuba diving certification of her own and spark her love for the ocean.
Wiener already loved the sea from snorkeling trips in Hawaii but had always hoped to be able to scuba dive with her father. Last year, Wiener earned her scuba certification during a trip to Hawaii. The lessons she completed were paid for as a birthday present from her parents. The process was much like that of getting a driver’s license and included an online class as well as several practices with an instructor.
“I had to take a 10-hour online course with a lot of reading for the safety precautions,” Wiener said. “I needed to know how to avoid getting poisoned from the nitrogen in the tank and not rupture my eardrums, for example. After I completed my online certificate, I went into a scuba shop and practiced diving with instruction, where I put together my scuba equipment, took my goggles off underneath the water, and put them back on with a divemaster.”
With her scuba certification, Wiener now attempts to find octopuses during her trips to go scuba diving. Only once in Hawaii, Wiener found an octopus, as well as its eggs, which she said was very exciting.
“I normally try and find the octopuses because I find them so cool, and they’re really rewarding to find because normally octopuses are camouflaged,” Wiener said.
She hopes to one day see manta rays as well. “Mantas are just so majestic,” she said. “They don’t seem real because they’re like birds of the ocean.”
Both scuba diving and snorkeling have nurtured Wiener’s adoration for marine life, especially since Albuquerque had no immediate access to an ocean, and are part of why she aspires to find a career in marine biology.
“After really falling in love with the ocean, I knew [marine biology] is what I’d like to do,” Wiener said. “[Scuba diving] gave me a unique way of seeing the ocean up close and really allowed me to see the environment the animals live in. I’ll maybe go into conserving marine protected areas, or just learn about marine biology. I’d really like to learn about sea turtles and manta rays, and I’d really like to learn more about different sea creatures.”
Wiener’s mom had always encouraged her to volunteer in the community, but they hadn’t found many opportunities that struck Wiener’s interest in marine life. Luckily, Wiener’s friend last year shared Wiener’s love for marine life and volunteered in the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. With the support of her friend, Wiener applied for the position and, in February, was accepted in the role of talking to visitors about the outdoor tide pools. She trained in a two-hour orientation that consisted of getting familiar with the aquarium, learning about the species on display, and understanding how to interact with visitors and answer their questions. Before her first shift at the tide pools, Wiener shadowed another volunteer for three hours. She has since taken a number of shifts to volunteer and teach, often educating elementary students on field trips, as well as many other visitors, about the different animals in the Preuss Tide Pool Plaza. She speaks to the crowds about the local species like sea anemones, sea stars, and sea urchins. One special aspect of the tide pools is the level of interaction visitors can have with the wildlife: they are given the opportunity to touch all of the creatures in the habitat.
“[The tide pools] are definitely where I feel like I’m teaching people and interacting with people the most,” Wiener said. “There are a lot of little kids who come for school trips and visit the aquarium, and they’re really excited because they’re allowed to touch something they don’t normally get to see. I remember the first time I went to the tide pools, I thought, ‘Oh, I can touch this! This is so cool,’ so I just love being that person telling them what they can touch and how they can touch it.”
Wiener has also learned more about the sea creatures at the tide pools by interacting with other volunteers. Many of the volunteers are equally interested in marine science and shared their experiences in different subfields including fishery biology, seafloor geology, and marine mammal biology with Wiener, which has helped Wiener gain an understanding of future career options.
“It’s a lot of fun, too, because I seem to learn something new every time I go,” Wiener said. “A lot of the other volunteers are either college students who had just graduated from UCSD in marine biology or retired marine biologists, so their guidance is really helpful because they are a lot more experienced than me. They’ve really helped me learn about all the different fields surrounding marine science.”
In addition to the knowledge from the other volunteers at Birch Aquarium, Wiener has learned a lot from the Marine Science and AP Environmental Science classes she took at Westview and said they’ve further inspired her to pursue a career in preserving marine life.
“I’ve always really been interested in the environment, learning about plastic pollution and things like that,” Wiener said. “So, I think I might want to go into something environmental science related, specifically marine conservation to just learn about the animals. Marine animals are similar to dinosaurs in a way that they both seem otherworldly.”
