LiMPETS leader and Branson School science teacher Kathy Soave. (Photo courtesy Kathy Soave)

Soave looks exactly the same as she did when she taught me high school chemistry ten years ago: slender, with surfing-sculpted arms, a bob of curly hair, and a dash of marine-themed jewelry. Even her living room, adorned with curtains of shells and cluttered with dive gear for an upcoming trip, is homage to the sea.

The ocean enticed Soave from an early age. On family vacations she used to go tide pooling with her father before her siblings got out of bed. “It was cold and early, and no one wanted to go, but I loved it,” Soave remembers. “Ever since I’ve loved the ocean: love being in it, love being around it, love poking around in it.”

The trips to the coast animate her students, Soave says, just as tide pooling with her father excited her. “Getting out into the field leaves its mark,” Soave says. “It makes you care.”

Soave takes every chance she has to bring students with her to surf, dive and explore the ocean. In 1999, Soave found an opportunity to give those explorations some scientific rigor when she was named Teacher at Sea for the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, and handed a mandate to engage her students with the ocean. Soave chose to monitor rocky intertidal ecosystems at Duxbury Reef. Duxbury had no ongoing permanent record of invertebrate and algae populations and Soave saw an opportunity for her students to be the first ones out there “taking the pulse of the rocky intertidal.”

Laure Katz, then a sophomore at Branson, remembers loving the idea: “As soon as Kathy brought up the idea of Sustainable Seas I was on board,” she says. As was Courtney Hart, another sophomore who had heard about Soave from her older siblings and volunteered immediately to help planning and design.

Soave worked with intertidal experts at the Farallones to develop the methodology and select indicator species that students could easily identify in the field. Katz and Hart recruited new members and taught them that methodology.

Fifteen years later, student leaders are still responsible for becoming experts in the field. Leaders teach their peers how to collect data from quadrats – PVC panels gridded with strings – and how to position those quadrats along two linear transects that stretch from shore to sea. They also make sure their peers don’t confuse a whelk (Acanthinucella spp.) with a turban snail (Chlorostoma brunnea/funebralis), or a limpet (Lottia spp.) with a pink acorn barnacle (Tetraclita rubescens). Leaders give new members a role to aspire to, and they help the group grow.

Hannah Bassett, who became a Sustainable Seas leader after Katz and Hart graduated, says she remembers Sustainable Seas becoming so popular by her senior year that Soave had recruited half a dozen student leaders to train its members. Sustainable Seas started recruiting new members at the beginning of the school year by hosting reef outings, where students would search the reef for tide-pool all-stars like octopuses and leopard sharks. Leaders began strolling campus in bright green sweatshirts with Sustainable Seas Leader splayed across the back, like football jocks displaying their Varsity sweaters. “We were pretty proud,” Bassett says.

Rainsford became a leader as a sophomore last year. “This is probably one of the most influential experiences of my high school career,” she says. She likes to emphasize to other members the importance of good data: how each contribution going into the database builds on 15 years of work and how the project’s success depends on upholding that tradition.

In 2002, the Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association appointed Dr. Jennifer Salzman, the director of outreach programs at Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences, to work with Pearse, Soave and other marine ecologists to expand coastal monitoring to the entire west coast, and LiMPETS was born.

For Soave, who still leads the program, it’s a high school teacher’s dream: she has made her subject cool.