Blog

We’re surrounded. Reefs teaming with color and life, fish dancing in the current, looking for a meal, and tiny crustaceans hiding within coral heads.

Key word: surrounded

I’m working now on Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas, just south of the world famous Harbour Island, where I hear billionaires are buying out millionaires.

A few days ago, while making breakfast and letting the dog out, I saw an odd shape appear at the water’s edge in front of my house.

How do we engage students in learning about science? This is an urgent matter. Afterall, the National Math & Science Initiative reported that only 36 percent of U.S. high school students are ready for college-level science.

With talks underway in Paris to tackle the big problem of global warming, and no direct mention of ocean health on the agenda, world leaders need to know the coral is depending on progress.

Corals, in fact, are at risk by two human-caused stressors.

Dear Caine [Director of Science and Research at Ocean First Education],

I would like to take a moment to update you on the progress of our research expedition to study sharks off the coast of Japan.

Have you hugged an invertebrate today?

Remember Encarta Encyclopedia? Having an entire encyclopedia equivalent to dozens of books, but at the a click of a mouse. Having to install multiple CDs was a small price to pay to have such a vast amount of knowledge at your fingertips.

As we begin to prepare for our upcoming trip to Indonesia this fall, I reflect on my past experiences with this incredible country. One of my first dive trips and by far the longest distance I had ever traveled, Misool, the eco-resort in Raja Ampat, will always remain very dear to me.

If you had to choose one message that students would remember about the ocean, what would it be? The ocean is a unifying thread that can be pulled through any lesson in any subject at any grade level. Very broad, right?

As I sit in my office working through over 250,000 thousand data points on reef fish from East Africa collected from a major expedition two years ago, I take time to reflect on one of the most amazing experiences of my life. One that had the team and myself in numerous situations that we’d planned for but didn’t expect to come to pass.

Question: What’s one of the best ways to get teens and young adults interested in marine science? I’ll provide my answer at the end of this blog post.

Somewhere between the tropics and the arctic, you can find the largest enclosed sea in the world. It is within this enclosure that my dreams came to life. The convergence of three continents, the Mediterranean Sea is known for many things besides its cultural heritage.

Our grant recipient, Dr. Sonia Rowley, will soon be heading deep below the surface to the mesophotic region of coral reefs to learn more about the evolution and biogreographic drivers of reef organisms. Dr. Rowley and her team will be using closed-circuit rebreathers to reach depths of beyond 300 ft (100 m).

Since the early 2000s, there has been an international effort to monitor the temperature and salinity of the world’s oceans. The Argo project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/), with more than 3600 buoys around the world, collects data at various depths and sends this data out every 10 days.

People ask me why I moved from the sunny beaches of South Florida to the snow-capped Rocky Mountains of Colorado to write marine science curriculum. And with good reason. Who would leave the warm, salty sea air and 24-7 access to the Atlantic Ocean for, gasp, winter!?! To be honest, it was an easy decision to make.