SAN PEDRO, Calif. – A bag of specimens is part of the latest round of collections from a dive and Dean Pentcheff has come to help bring this particular batch of organisms back to the lab.
“Whenever they take a sample, they’re also taking the location and the depth," said Pentcheff. "Those are the core pieces of information that will come home from every sample.”
These samples are part of the LA Urban Ocean Expedition 2019 led by the Natural History Museum of L.A.’s DISCO program -- which stands for Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean.
For two weeks, taxonomists sort, identify, photograph, and DNA barcode thousands of specimens that will become part of the Natural History Museum’s permanent collection.
It’s all in an effort to build a genetic information database quickly and in more detail than they’ve ever been able to do before.
“We need to do that, because we know the coast is changing. We know with climate change, water temperature change, the biota, the animals are responding. Some animals are leaving, some animals are coming in,” said Pentcheff.
Leslie Harris is an expert and huge fan of polychaete annelids, better known as marine worms.
“Worms are fabulous, up the worms,” said Harris.
As a leading taxonomist on this bio blitz, she says it’s important to find unknown creatures.
“There are so many animals that we don’t know about and yet if we lose some of them for whatever reason: environmental change, degradation of the environment, it may ultimately affect us," said Harris.
But the benefits of this research are endless, whether they be medicinal or helping to predict where species will live in the future due to ocean change.
There’s also future career opportunities.
Alta Sea is leading the way in the blue economy, expecting to generate 700-800 sustainable jobs over the next year or two.
“Combination of research and business that we think is really going to generate a job profile and job growth area here in San Pedro, here in Wilmington, and this area of the bay and we’re really excited to contribute to that,” said Pentcheff.
Once the genetic database is created, they can develop the technology of e-DNA that makes it possible to measure our environment quickly.
Animals in the ocean are always shedding DNA, so by taking a sample of water, scientists can see which animals and plants were around in that time -- creating a species inventory.
“We can do the sequencing today, but what we need to do is build that database so we’ll know what the species are that correspond to the sequences that we get from sequencing the DNA in the seawater. That’s the real goal of this project,” Pentcheff.