A unique floating lab in San Francisco Bay has been invaded — and researchers are learning from it

On an overcast November morning, 15 apprehensive fourth-graders tumbled out of a faded yellow bus at Treasure Island. They came to experience the thrill of sailing on the San Francisco Bay — and to get a lesson on its ecology.

The scene has played out regularly for the past decade at the Treasure Island Sailing Center, a nonprofit that seeks to make sailing accessible to young people around the Bay Area. While the group suspended its operations in December to begin construction on a sizable expansion project, it spent several months last year highlighting a new attraction in Clipper Cove: a car-sized, floating marine biology lab.

Before moving to its new home, the Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab spent the past five years moored off the Port of Oakland, quietly collecting data from the Bay with audio, light and temperature sensors, a GoPro and an array of underwater racks.

Bobbing in small boats, clad in helmets and life jackets, the fourth-graders from San Francisco’s Dr. Charles R. Drew College Preparatory Academy hollered as they passed by the cove’s latest addition. The bulbous lab, once iceberg-like with a white fiberglass frame that’s a mirror image shape above and below water, is now laden with barnacles, algae and bird droppings. Despite its scuzzy appearance, Chris Childers — the sailing center director — is excited about the lab’s new lease on life as an educational tool at Treasure Island.

“The lab’s charismatic,” said Childers. “It’s a really effective tool for our STEM curriculum that gives it more pizzazz.”

The lab emerged from a partnership of local educators, architects and scientists. Together, they wanted to experiment with floating architecture that’s resilient to climate change, while collecting scientific data and raising awareness of the effects of rising sea levels.

The structure, which has won design awards, was the brainchild of California College of the Arts faculty, designer Margaret Ikeda and architects Evan Jones and Adam Marcus — who now leads research at the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University. Marine biologists affiliated with the Benthic Lab at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories fine-tuned the design, and Bill Kreysler, a renowned fiberglass innovator, fabricated the structure. Students from all the academic institutions took part in the process.

“People are very excited about the float lab,” said Ikeda, who started CCA’s Architectural Ecologies Lab with Marcus and Jones, her husband. “The design of it, the unusualness of it, has resonated really around the world.”

The float lab’s original mission was threefold. First, the biologists wanted to know whether the lab’s undulating surface would attract a diverse group of species. Architecturally, the lab was a prototype for larger models, testing whether floating structures — and the organisms attached to them — could not only withstand rising seas, but also dissipate wave energy and prevent erosion on shore. Lastly, the group hoped the lab would be educational, drawing attention to climate change.

After it deployed in the port in 2019, rough waves from passing cargo ships and storms took a toll. The researchers struggled to monitor and maintain the lab, which was a choppy, 30-minute kayak paddle from shore. Underwater racks, designed to entice a wide range of organisms, and dangling woven baskets for growing thick algae and sheltering fish broke free.

Some structures clung on, such as cylinders of calcium carbonate that mimicked natural reefs. Within months, invertebrates crowded the columns, fanning out like multicolored wigs. But it turned out that nonnative species like sponges and tunicates — filter feeders with sac-like bodies — dominated. These species are common in the San Francisco Bay, often brought in by the ballast water and hulls of visiting cargo ships. Among the tiniest creatures, some native crustaceans, mollusks and sea slugs snuck in with the invasives on the columns.

“We figured things would grow on the lab, but we just didn’t know what,” said Kamille Hammerstrom, who directs the group Coastal Conservation and Research in Moss Landing, and co-led the biological research. “What happened wasn’t a surprise, given that the San Francisco Bay is one of the most invaded estuaries in the world.”

While the poor showing of native species was disappointing, the float lab results helped inform a subsequent project in brackish water near the San Francisco Presidio, coaxing native oysters to grow on fiberglass panels the CCA students designed. From what they learned with the float lab, Hammerstrom and her team sought a calm, accessible place in the bay so they could visit often. They found salinities, depths and light levels the oysters prefer.

The lab also helped biologists consider how “fouling” organisms that boaters typically clean off their vessels’ hulls could actually become an asset for floating structures, mitigating wave damage and boosting ecology.

In its new location at Clipper Cove, the float lab will become the hub for three floating mini-labs, each three feet long and fitted with a device to monitor plankton — the drifting, microscopic algae and creatures that are central to marine food chains that can also explode into toxic algal blooms.

The device, a “PlanktoScope” designed by scientists at Stanford University, looks like a large, homemade radio and captures images of plankton. The plan is to tie one of these baby labs onto the mother lab in Clipper Cove and moor two others elsewhere in the Bay before the end of the year.

At Clipper Cove, the lab’s educational role is also coming to the fore, as its creators put it front and center in the field trip curricula provided for the 1,200 youth that the nonprofit Treasure Island Sailing Center hosts each school year.

After the Charles Drew students clambered off the boats, Childers reached into the water and yanked out a handful of what was growing below. The fourth graders crowded around his open palms, sifting through green and purple seaweeds and a few creepy crawlies.

Then the students filed into the center’s waterside classroom. To illustrate the local ecology, a teacher from the sailing center offered everyone a coloring book. Ikeda, Hammerstrom and two of their graduate students created the book, featuring zoomed-in images and descriptions of all the life growing on the lab.

Donald Bursey, who teaches the fourth-grade class at Charles Drew, watched from the back of the classroom, pleased that his students were getting such a vivid experience of marine ecology.

“Here out in the Bay, they get to see the animals that live here, the rocks, the type of plant life that grows in the water, and they interact with it,” Bursey said. “A lot of kids who grow up in urban areas see the Bay, but they don’t get the chance to be out here on the water.”