In 1940, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts led a voyage to the Sea of Cortez. Sea of Cortez was published a year later and included both Steinbeck’s account of the memorable voyage and Ricketts’s scientific review of their findings. 64 years later, Professors Gilly, Baxter, and Shillinglaw led another expedition to update Steinbeck and Ricketts's voyage both in public awareness and scientifically. That voyage in turn inspired the Holistic Biology program, which began in 2005 and had its first field component in Mexico in 2006. Now, in 2008 we're going to go again.

Why go on such an expedition?

“One of the reasons we gave ourselves for this trip - and when we used this reason, we called the trip an expedition - was to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and to record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced. That plan was simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth. But we did tell the truth to ourselves. We were curious. Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny. We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality.”
Steinbeck & Ricketts, Sea of Cortez (1941)

This course will attempt to satisfy the goals of the1940 voyage, both in the "simple, straight-forward" elements of biology and in the unlimited bounds of curiosity. 

• We start at the now abandoned tuna cannery in Cabo San Lucas.  From there we travel to La Paz, where we will become familiar with local fauna at original1940 sites, both in town and on nearby islands.
•  A week at sea will follow, in a search for Humboldt squid and marine mammals.  We will also study relevant oceanographic properties and dynamic features of phytoplankton blooms.
•  We then explore protected Isla Santa Catalina and then move to Santa Marta on a remote region on the Baja Sur coast. From there we will carry out surveys of the rocky intertidal at two nearby sites as part of our ongoing monitoring program. 
• On the last phase, we will return to the social element, visiting missions at San Javier and Loreto, squid fishing operations in Santa Rosalia, and agriculture and aquaculture operations along the Sonora coast.