Since 2007, Verrado High School AP Biology and Honors Anatomy teacher Sucheta Thomas has hosted a field trip to San Diego, oriented around the city’s wonderful conservation and marine biology efforts targeted towards her AP Biology. This year’s trip to San Diego was extra special because it is her last year at Verrado High School.
At the beginning of the trip, students started their day off bright and early by boarding the bus at 5:00 am, followed by the long four-hour drive to San Diego. Each year the order of activities they do changes, so this year they made their first stop at SeaWorld.
”[My] favorite part of the trip was Seaworld, I loved going on the rides, and the shows were very cool,” AP Biology student Aiden Cline stated.
Students spent the entire day at SeaWorld observing the different marine life in their enclosures. They had a wide variety of various animals, ranging from penguins to beluga whales.
Thomas explained, “Another important reason is to give students an exposure to the varied careers in Biological Sciences.”
Cline would reiterate, “At the aquarium, we were able to learn a lot about marine life, one of the workers gave us pretty cool information about shark eggs. It helps a lot.”
Along with closed-off enclosures, students also got to experience the animals hands-on and talk with the various types of animal handlers at SeaWorld. Over at the sea lion and seal enclosure, students got to feed these animals and learn about their diet out in the wild.
When SeaWorld closed, the group ventured to find a place to eat. Most of the meals were on your own–so students had plenty of options for where to eat. After this, they went back to their hotel at Best Western and ended their day.
On the second day of the trip, they started the day with a visit to the beautiful Birch Aquarium. However, the group was disappointed to find that over half of the aquarium was closed, so they spent most of their time around the anemone and touch tanks.
Once they had used up all their time in the aquarium, they traveled to San Diego’s very own Seaport Village–an outdoor mall full of niche stores with jewelry and hot sauce. Students were allowed to spend the next two hours of their day shopping and exploring the village.
One of the aforementioned niche stores would be a small hot sauce store called ‘Hot Licks’, on the tail end of a hat shop in the Seaport Village. Within the small confines of the shop, a tight-knit community of workers bonded by their shared love of hot sauce. The customer service would be similar to having an old buddy who has sat down to chill and talk about finding your desired hot sauce.
Going to the food shop regarded as “The best fish tacos in San Diego — maybe even the coast — dude you’ve gotta try them” by hot sauce connoisseur, and ‘Hot Licks’ salesman Tony Eckelberger, you’d find yourself amid a bustling family-owned restaurant by the name of Quiero Tacos. Their specialty — the aforementioned fish tacos.
Within those tacos was some classic family-owned-restaurant magic, when paired with the hot sauce, it was heavenly, but as far as ‘best on the coast,’ I’ll leave it for you to try next time you find yourself at the Seaport Village.
To finish off their second day in San Diego, they all adventured to the beach, where they’d spend the rest of the day soaking in the gorgeous Pacific coast.
To start day three, the students began their adventure by going whale watching. What would begin quite slowly would turn into spotting wild dolphins following them at the hull, which would eventually turn into spotting grey whales.
What was assumed to be a mother grey whale and its offspring were spotted migrating from where we spotted them to over to the Arctic, which is their feeding grounds.
When asked what was going through his mind when the group spotted the whales, Cline recounted, “The thought running through my head was that we even saw any [whales] at all. We were told that we may not even see any, so seeing their tails on the water was amazing.”
After the whale watching excursion would come the group’s venture to the San Diego Safari Park.
Before students were allowed to roam free and explore the park for themselves, Mrs. Thomas had them all board the ‘Safari Ride,’ which toured most of the 1,800 acres of land in which animals roam.
There is so much land because they can grow endangered animals in a wildlife habitat that simulates one back home, so that they can be released there with all of their instincts intact.
Once the ‘Safari Ride’ was done, students were free to adventure through all the different habitats the park had to offer to the public.
Some of the most notorious animals at the park are: African rhinos, elephants, cheetahs, lions, giraffes, and even platypuses.
The day would end with a night in Old Town, San Diego, and a dinner at Barra Barra.
On their last day in San Diego, students were more than excited to visit one of San Diego’s most notable national monuments–the Point Loma Tide Pools.
“It is about phenomena in the real world that tie back to concrete topics studied in the class. Students see science come alive!” Thomas elated.
The group got the chance to study the more unseen marine organisms such as anemones, ranging from the size of a small rock to that of a grown adult’s hand. There was also a long list of organisms, such as barnacles and small crabs, hiding in the cracks of every rock and surface.
”I loved finding all of the crabs in the cracks of some rocks, as well as feeling the wild anemone,” Cline would recall.
Along with just getting to see these creatures out in the wild, they also got to touch some of them.
When the anemone is touched by a fish, their stingers paralyze the fish in preparation for them to be eaten. However, when a human, with our thicker skin, touches one of these stingers, all they do is stick to your skin.
Once their hour at the tide pools was up they went to the bus and traveled to their last stop of the trip–the San Diego Zoo.
The San Diego Zoo has over 4,000 different species of animals, all of which are in carefully curated enclosures specifically designed to suit the needs of each individual animal.
Once done with the zoo, the tired group would climb in the bus for the last time in San Diego as they drove back to Arizona. They arrived back in Arizona at the high school campus, and Mrs. Thomas celebrated the end of her last school trip to San Diego with Verrado High School.
