Blog 5 (10/7/3026)

Hello! Once again, we are group 5. Our first Sunday here at Stanford started off with a yet another mouth-watering breakfast. Dazed, we hopped on the coach with our caps and hoods covering our sun-burnt faces and scalps. Then, we started our seemingly endless journey to Monterey.

Originally, we expected the format of the Ocean Park aquarium back in Hong Kong, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium was better than we thought. It was packed with different exhibits containing various species of marine creatures, such as Open Sea for the jellyfishes, the Splash Zone that inhabited the sea otters and the penguins, and we even found Dory. There, we discovered that camouflage is an essential requirement for creatures such as octopi and squid to survive, and it took us great effort to spot some out at times.

In the Open Sea exhibition, two staff members showed us two jars of water. The first contained some plastic bags, resembling the other, which contained actual jellyfishes. The staff members explained to us that the similarity between the two might lead predators to mistakenly distinguish between the two, which the worst case scenario can be death.

The random presentation activated the thought train in our minds. The adorable creatures we have seen today, they won’t exist in the near future if we continued these disastrous, inhuman acts of disposing waste and oil into the ocean. Water pollution exists and is worsening, in spite of the denial of other gullible beings, but the only choice we have is to fulfill our own responsibilities and conserve, not only marine life, but the ecosystem as a whole. We should be a community of harmony, but currently, it is not the case. This environment is ours to save, and the methods are easy, such as not eating shark fins and not disposing trash and pollutants into the beautiful, glittering ocean. 

After today, detailed memories and moments of the trip might fade gradually, but this lesson is ours to save.