Cliff Kapono thought he might be in trouble when his science professor called him into his office. Kapono was a new student at the University of California, San Diego. “I see you’ve been doing a lot of surfing,” the professor said. “I surf every day,” Kapono admitted nervously. He thought his professor would be upset.

To Kapono’s surprise, the professor replied, “That’s awesome!” The teacher suggested that Kapono come up with a science project that involved surfing. “It was the first time I realized that I didn’t have to separate these two loves,” says Kapono, a Native Hawaiian, who grew up riding the waves. 

The project Kapono settled on was right under his nose—and all over his body! He decided to study microbes. These tiny organisms are too small to see with the naked eye. But they live everywhere: the ocean, your kitchen sink, even inside your body.

Different microbes thrive in different environments. Kapono wondered if surfers had different microbes living on them than the average person. Searching for the answer would take him all over the world. 

Kapono can spend hours surfing in the ocean every day. He wondered if surfers like him picked up microbes from ocean water that joined their microbiomes.

To find the answer, Kapono visited surfers around the globe, from Hawaii to Iceland. With their permission, he rubbed cotton swabs on their faces, feet, and other body parts to collect the microbes living there. Kapono even took small samples of surfers’ poop to study the organisms that lived in their stomachs and intestines.

“At first, the surfers were taken aback since I wanted to take a Q-tip and rub it all over their bodies,” says Kapono. But once they understood the project, they were supportive.

Kapono collected more than 500 samples from the surfers. Then he worked with a research team to study the samples in a lab. They compared the surfer samples to microbes collected from non-surfers. That would reveal whether the ocean “leaves its fingerprints on surfers,” Kapono says.

It turns out that even though surfers leave the ocean, the ocean doesn’t leave surfers. Kapono found large numbers of ocean microbes living on and inside the surfers he studied—including himself!

The amount of time a person spent in the water was also a factor. Surfers who stayed in the ocean for longer periods of time had more types of ocean bacteria living in their microbiomes.

Kapono hopes his research helps people understand that they are connected to the planet in many ways. “If we know that nature gives us bacteria that keep us healthy, hopefully we can take better care of it,” he says.