The secret life of sand dollars exhibition

“You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up is never an option.” Greta Thunberg
Today’s environmental crises are more frequent, widespread, and urgent than ever. Our air is being polluted, global temperatures are increasing, carbon emissions are untethered, sea levels are rising, and reservoirs are continually depleted. With ecological, social, and infrastructural systems pushed to their limits, what is the connection between design, engineering, and ecological thinking? How do we interact with and confront these realities?
This exhibition is an interdisciplinary collaboration between three departments within CSU Long Beach: Biological Sciences (Dr. Douglas Pace), Department of Design (Dr. Behnaz Farahi), and Biomedical Engineering Department (Dr. Siavash Ahrar). Our goal is to raise awareness on how lives of marine organisms (here sand dollars) are affected by environmental challenges. Supported by a collaborative award this exhibition is an interactive immersive experience exploring the morphological and behavioral principles of sand dollar larvae in response to the environmental crisis facing the ocean.
This exhibition invites the audience to discover the hidden beauty of sand dollars. In particular, we demonstrate how morphological growth patterns are sensitive to changing environmental conditions in the oceans. These different patterns result from the environment's ability to provide nutrition to these rapidly developing life stages. These changes fundamentally change the larva’s development, physiology and future success. The simple pattern is that larvae with lots of food have short “arms” and larvae with low amounts of food are forced to grow longer “arms” in the hopes of acquiring more food with those arms. These changes however have complex consequences on how they develop and in turn on how the larvae influence the environment that surrounds them, hydrodynamically.