“Ia orana!” That’s “hello” in Tahitian, and how Jeanette Mills begins e-mails she sends to her family and friends from Moorea in French Polynesia. Jeanette, 21, is on the island just west of Tahiti, with a group of 24 UCLA students for their Marine Biology Quarter (MBQ), a two-month-long field program in marine biology. Actually, she’s a dance major with a passion for marine science who grew up in the Palisades and trained at Emily Kay’s Fancy Feet Dance Studio for 12 years. She was a lead dancer in Palisades High’s spring musicals throughout high school. Though she has chosen to concentrate in dance through the World Arts and Cultures (WAC) department at UCLA, she continues to take marine biology classes and was the only non-science major accepted to the MBQ program, which is held alternating years in Bodega Bay, California, Hawaii and Moorea. In the weeks before her departure for Moorea, Jeanette attended preparatory lectures and seminars during the day and, at night, rehearsed for WAC Smash, the annual student-choreographed, student-performed showcase of the WAC department. The week after her performance, she left her tap shoes behind and boarded a plane destined for the Polynesian islands. Jeanette arrived in Tahiti on April 15 and took a ferry to Moorea, where the students, along with four professors and three teaching assistants, stay at the UC Berkeley Gump Research Station on Cook’s Bay. On April 17, she began writing e-mails back home to update everybody on her adventures and to keep as a journal for herself. First, a little bit about the research station: It’s right on the water, with beautiful views of the bay and the mountains. Basically, there is a student dorm that I live in, a wet lab, a dry lab, a library, dive lockers, and a traditional Tahitian meeting hut, complete with hammock, a dog named Chicken and a cat we call Turkey. A friendly housekeeping staff prepares our meals, which so far have been pretty good. Baguettes with every meal (this is part of France, after all). The staff here are mostly Polynesians, and they don’t speak much English, only French and Tahitian, but that doesn’t matter when they are demolishing us on the volleyball court. (I don’t play’haha, funny’but I watch.) On Monday morning we went on our first scuba dive, on the outer reef just off the bay. It was beautiful, a spur and groove area just beyond the reef crest. I love tropical water! Thin wet suit, only 8 lbs. on my weight belt, and 45 minutes in the water without getting the slightest bit chilled. The reef here is so healthy. It’s gonna be great doing research here. Moorea is a triangular island encircled by a lagoon and the reefs of the Polynesian sea. The students’ first two weeks on the island were exploratory, as they visited different sites, went snorkeling and grew accustomed to the marine life and island lifestyle. Jeanette quickly discovered the difficulty of conducting marine research in areas with strong currents, where you have to “concentrate on not getting bumped into coral or urchins.” The students completed a class project dealing with water flow and sedimentation before starting their first of two research projects. They’re testing the effects of light on demersal zooplankton (plankton that emerges out of the sediment at night and returns during the day) and how plankton emergence is related to substrate type and light vs. dark. Jeanette joked that their traps “are super high-tech, made from plastic Coke bottles and glow sticks,” but they work. “We set out a couple right on the reef in front of the station and went back to collect them a couple hours later, and they had caught a bunch of little critters, which we will be counting and sorting in the lab.” A week into the project, Jeanette wrote: After some preliminary test runs, during which we discovered lots of little problems, we’ve made a few slight adjustments to our trap design and project plan, and now we’re underway collecting data which we hope will be legit and sufficient. It’s so exciting to realize that we’re actually doing real research, doing things no one has done before and, hopefully, finding out things that no one has found out before. Even though it may seem like we’re just cutting up plastic bottles or sticking spikes in the sediment or tying Styrofoam floats to orange flags, this is real science. Even if we have to chug a 1.5L bottle of Coke in one sitting just so we have enough bottles, it’s all in the name of science. Even if I have to wade through urchin-infested waters alone at night to retrieve the plankton traps and hope that I don’t misstep or fall while I’m holding a flashlight between my legs and simultaneously trying to pick up the trap carefully so that nothing spills out, it’s exciting because we’re out here doing real things with unknown results and that’s so much more interesting than reading a book about what other people have already found out. In a separate e-mail to the Palisadian-Post, Jeanette said that she hopes to gain a better understanding of what being a field biologist entails. “So far, I’m mostly learning what it would be like to be a plankton biologist, which is probably not what I would want to pursue as a career, but it is a valuable and rewarding experience nonetheless. Even if I end up doing something unrelated, like photography or teaching dance, I will always be able to say that I did marine biology research in Moorea. (But I can’t imagine myself not doing something that is somehow related to marine science.)” Of course, Jeanette found the opportunity to dance during a Tahitian feast and party. The Polynesian housekeeping staff and their families helped cook the food, which included taro (a tropical plant), breadfruit, sweet potato, plantains, pork cooked in the ground, poi (a Polynesian staple food made from taro), a soupy chicken dish, a yogurt-like coconut dipping sauce and strong fermented raw fish. After dinner, the fun began: …Some of the Polynesians blasted some Tahitian music from the trunk of their BMW and, as soon as I heard the drumming, I was there. I had been itching to do some Tahitian dancing for two weeks, especially every time I hear drumming coming from across the bay in some live hotel show that I can’t see. A couple of the kids showed us some Tahitian dancing and then we were invited to join in. So I did, and I tried to remember as much as I could from my Polynesian dance classes [at UCLA]. When I get back home, I’m starting class again’. There was one little boy who kept running into the middle of the circle and busting some Tahitian men’s dance moves, and I went and did the women’s counterpart, and everyone laughed and it was great. Then one of the Polynesian women started doing a hula when a particular song came on, and at first I kind of followed along from the side’Because it was a hula, and quite a bit slower than the Tahitian drum dancing, it was pretty easy for me to follow along, and it was so great to be dancing hula again. While dancing is a great release from marine biology research, so is a little dose of city life. Last week, Jeanette took a break from sorting and counting plankton samples to take a ferry ride to Tahiti. The downtown area is really nice, with a combination of quaint Tahitian shops and familiar brand-name stores like Quicksilver, Billabong and, of course, McDonald’s, which made us feel a bit more at home. (What’s a big metropolitan area without the golden arches?) There is also a great, two-story open-air marketplace where we spent a long time admiring fruits, veggies, meat, fish, perfumes, vanilla beans, woven baskets, carved necklaces, black pearls, pareos [sarongs] and endless other Tahitian handicrafts and jewelry. I bought a carved shell necklace and a beautiful tan pareo with two Tahitian dancers and a drummer dyed in brown. After we had our fill of shopping, the four of us sat on a stone wall on the side of the street, just watching the cars and people pass by, breathing in the exhaust fumes, feeling at home. Usually you hear people talk about taking a break from civilization and going somewhere remote to relax, but for me it was the opposite. I needed a good dose of citification. Having just reached the halfway point of her program, Jeanette still feels that she has quite a bit of studying and research to do. She also admits she has “mixed feelings” about the thought of the program ending: “On the one hand, I’m excited to go home and to dance class again, to go to Disneyland and drink real milk and not feel dirty all the time. On the other hand, I know I’ll miss this place like crazy and have major culture shock and withdrawal when I come home.” She plans to update the Palisades community on her experiences after she returns home on June 10. Jeanette’s father, Rick, is a realtor with HomesUSA and her mother, Ruth, is a Spanish teacher at PaliHi. Her brother, Josh, is a senior at UCLA.
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