(seagulls squawking") - [Luan] It's really cool to look around and see this really urban environment with people coming and going and living their lives and ferries passing by and fishermen in their boats.

And you go to the dock and if you don't look over the edge of it, you would never know there was this whole little world in miniature right underneath your feet.

(soft music) Docks to me are like portals to other worlds.

The side of a dock is basically a living reef.

It's here kind of both because of the human existence and kind of despite of it at the same time.

I think of it as a liminal space that doesn't really exist in one realm or another.

It's an interface of these two, both oppositional and collaborative forces coming together to create this ecosystem.

People I think get really confused by the concept of dock fouling.

It hasn't really been done as a almost like systematic hobby until more recently.

Technically, when you talk about dock fouling, you're talking about organisms that are settling on manmade structures that are submerged in the ocean.

When I use the term dock fouling, I'm referring to the activity of going out to these structures and observing the organisms that are fouling the structures.

To dock foul, you just position yourself on the edge of a floating dock, just as I am, and you're just looking over the surface.

It definitely looks a bit goofy and that's just because people don't know what you're doing.

- [Mom] People are so weird.

- It's absolutely nerdy.

Like bird nerds but different.

I think it's a bit more like punk rock than birding.

Sorry, birders.

But you are having to do a lot of things which people haven't really officially established and you have this funky name for it, dock fouling, which sounds like something you might get in trouble for with your landlord.

It's definitely like a bit out there still.

One of the great things about dock fouling is that it's an easily accessible way for anybody to participate in science.

There they are.

(soft music) Throughout the year, I'm going to docks once every other week, once a week when I can, and I'm contributing around 100 to 200 observations every other week.

We don't really even have a baseline of what we would expect to see when we go out and look at these places.

So I started a bioblitz and a bioblitz is where you're trying to get as many people as possible to document observations.

I just started calling it Docktober, because that seemed obvious.

I had folks coming from out of state to come visit during that first Docktober.

I've just been trying to do that every year since.

So far, we have about 32 people who've contributed and almost a thousand observations of 180 different species.

There's some in Scotland, some all the way it looks like in South Korea as well this year, which is super exciting that we've gone international with the project.

(soft splash) My friend Jolie designed this card the first year of Docktober.

The inspiration was to just give people like a basic guide of what they might expect to see when they go out to the docks.

And I like to give a prize to the first five people who get a bingo just to add a competitive element to it.

Just right now, I've seen skeleton shrimp, bryozoa, colonial tunicates, bivalves, lots of anemone, a jellyfish, lots of gulls, sea stars, solitary tunicates, tube worms, plumose anemones and barnacles.

(playful music) I think for a lot of people, they almost need to be given permission to go out and do it to feel like it's something that they're allowed to participate in.

Sometimes people need that little nudge to get out.

Nice and quiet today.

Basically I would hold an open session where anybody can come along and just come hang out and look at the organisms together.

Oh, here we go.

See?

Like way back in there.

- [Friend] Oh yeah, that's gorgeous.

- [Luan] Yeah.

(soft playful music) Dock fouling has given me something meaningful to spend my free time doing.

That's something I've been seeking kind of my entire life.

I don't see myself stopping doing it.

There's always an element of something new that makes it exciting and renews your interest constantly.

Recreating that sense of wonder and curiosity over and over again.

(soft playful music continues) You never know what else is going to be out there.

(soft playful music continues)