At this impressive-looking aquarium, there are over 25 marine exhibits.
In the middle of the main room, there's a 15-foot-long wave pool, a series of shallow touch-tanks, and a large estuary exhibit complete with a mural.
But this isn’t any regular aquarium, and we don’t have a regular guide. Our guide is Olivia Lossing, a 17-year-old high school student at Cabrillo High School. This 6,000 square feet aquarium is on the school’s campus and fully student-run.
"Students are in charge of maintaining tanks, doing things like water quality tasks. So we have students who test the water. It's all student-run and involved," explained Lossing.
"We do all the water quality yucky stuff. We filter waste in the water, and students know how to do everything," she said.
The aquarium has just received the state’s highest recognition for museum-based education, the Superintendent’s Award for Excellence.
They also picked up an Environmental Stewardship Award recently from Explore Ecology.
But it’s not new. For 40 years, this aquarium has been growing in size and growing minds.
The students participate in the care of the critters, as well as the cleaning and feeding. They also put together the marketing materials and welcome over 7,000 guests for tours a year, most of whom are young or underserved community members.
"That's so awesome. I get to learn about it in the program, and I do know of a few students in our program who hadn't seen the ocean before, even though we do live close to it, because we are kind of an underserved community. But through our program, we do field trips all the time, and then you are literally at the beach here," said Lossing.
"We do tours for all of the elementary classes in our district. It's weird to think that other high schools don't like have a program like this because I feel like I've learned so many unique skills that you can apply to normal life," she said.
"When I started the program my sophomore year, I was really, really shy, and I had a lot of trouble speaking to people. But look at me now! It's really easy, because you talk to guests all the time, and you have to communicate with your peers," said Lossing.
"There's so many different things you can be a part of in this program that's outside of just taking care of animals. We have a newsletter, water quality, all of this stuff, like our summer camp, so you can really find out what sort of floats your boat," she said.
"It's just such a break from boring. After this, I go to AP Calculus, which is like, why would I go there when I can stay here?" she laughs.
"We utilize the sea as a catalyst of learning in all disciplines," explained Greg Eisen, the Aquarium Director, who oversees the aquarium's cross-curricular hands-on education program.
He says it's the only high school aquarium at this level in the country, but that before guests have seen it, they imagine it to be a "room with maybe a couple of tanks in it."
The Cabrillo High School Aquarium in Vandenburg Village opens to the public roughly once a month, and admission is free.
