Call for marine ecology, sustainable food production, and renewable energy-related intern applicants!
Interested in gaining experience in the marine sciences? Perhaps sustainable living and food production? Please note the approaching application deadlines:
Summer 2013 intern application deadline: April 1, 2013
Fall 2013 intern application deadline: May 1, 2013
The Cape Eleuthera Institute, The Bahamas, is accepting intern applications for the following research programs:
Flats Ecology and Conservation Program
Queen Conch Ecology and Conservation Program
Shark Research and Conservation Program
Open Ocean Aquaculture
Aquaponics and Permaculture
Lionfish Research and Educational Outreach Program
Engineering and Sustainable Systems
Biodigestion and Sustainable Development
On Tuesday morning, CEI had an exciting visit from a local South Eleuthera primary school, Wemyss Bight Primary. Mrs. Paul’s grade 4 class came for a morning field trip as a way to supplement their curriculum on the topics of ocean resources, ocean pollution, and ocean movement (tides & currents). While visiting our campus, they explored the various sustainable systems including the farm, orchard, biodiesel lab, resource center and the wet lab.
The wetlab proved to be one of the most exciting spots on campus, as this group of 10 year olds was able to see juvenile lemon sharks, yellow stingrays, checkered pufferfish and the freshwater tilapia found in our aquaponics system. This gave them a taste of some of the current research projects at Cape Eleuthera Institute and the valuable marine resources found here in the Bahamas. Continue reading →
The Island School and CEI’s journey to becoming a zero-waste campus while extending the
concepts of this model to our neighbors on the island of Eleuthera has taken patience, but we are
now excited to announce we are one step farther.
This particular initiative began in 2010 as CEI outreach collaborated with the Deep Creek
Homecoming Association at its annual homecoming festival “Conch Fest” using the tagline “da Creek gone green”. CEI worked diligently with the food vendors to source products that promoted sustainability and were a viable alternative to using Styrofoam. The venture was particularly challenging, as sourcing the right company to provide the products proved difficult. The import duty on Styrofoam-alternative products was 45%, which made using these to replace Styrofoam was an unattractive and expensive option for the average resident. Through generous sponsorship, CEI provided the products to the vendors, which drastically reduced the cost of going green. Continue reading →
An excerpt from the Gap Year Student update from Gapper Will Fox:
Beach Plastic One of our last activities of the week was on beach plastics with Kristal. We started in the presentation room, watching Kristal’s presentation on her experience researching the Pacific Ocean gyres. We then went out to a beach in Wemyss Bight to do some surveying. The results we got were pretty surprising — we found a ton of micro plastic pieces in each of the quadrants we surveyed in. The microplastics came from larger pieces of plastic in the ocean breaking up, a current environmental issue that researchers at CEI are hoping to learn more about in order to affect change both locally and globally. Continue reading →
Last week, 22 middle school students from the Lillian and Betty Ratner School in Pepper Pike, Ohio visited The Islands School and CEI. Over the course of the week, Ratner dove into our various programs on campus. Many of the students experienced snorkeling for the first time, visiting our off-shore wreck, the reefs off fourth hole and the mangroves of Paige Creek. This group also learned firsthand about plastic pollution circulating throughout the worlds’ oceans through a plastics workshop with our own plastic guru Kristal Ambrose.
The final days of this energetic group were filled with lionfish dissections , permaculture explorations, cutting lettuce in the aquaponic grow beds, and getting a real taste for the sustainable lifestyle of our community. Continue reading →
January 2013 has seen lots of action at CEI; programs are visiting, research is ongoing, and buildings are going up. Carter Brown (SP09) visited CEI for a week to assist with construction of the new recycling facility on campus. While on Eleuthera, Carter installed the first completed segments of the building’s glass bottle walls, demonstrating reuse at its best!
Carter created a mosaic of color that both permits natural lighting to the building and makes use of bottles collected over the last several months. Nice work, Carter!
Anyone who has been to an Island School Parent’s Weekend knows how crowded the outdoor seating can get when there are guests around, especially on a hot day when everyone is looking for shade. Part One of our outdoor kitchen expansion addresses this shortcoming of the dining hall by installing addition seaside seating in the shade of six beautiful palm trees on a permeable rock patio next to the dining hall. Beginning with student legacy days this semester, the area between the dining hall and the coastal sand dunes was cleared of ground cover and readied for natural stone pavers.
Our campus landscape team, consisting of Joseph, Shivardo, and Fran worked with sixteen students and several faculty to clear the area. After clearing, they taught students and faculty how to shape what Joseph refers to as “wash rock,” or the loose bedrock stones found out in the bush around Cape Eleuthera. Each rock weighs between ten and forty lbs. depending on size and must be “shaped” using a hatchet or machete to attain a strong edge and reasonably flat face for walking on. The sound of chipping rock filled the air! Continue reading →
For the first time in almost 3 years the aquaculture team is harvesting fish from their offshore cage! The fish will be eaten in the Island School’s dining hall as a demonstration of a community-based aquaculture program that is focused on producing local food, while also reducing fishing pressure on wild fish stocks around South Eleuthera. We all ate cobia for breakfast on Thursday! All of the harvested fish carcasses will be used to make silage that will eventually be used to make tilapia and pig food. This is an attempt to produce as little “waste” as possible, and a way to utilize all of the nutrients that are lost after the fish is filleted as a way to produce more food.
As you may remember, CEI outfitted the offshore cage with Predator-X netting that was donated by the materials company DSM, www.dsm.com, and the net production company Net-Systems, www.net-systems.com. We are happy to announce that this netting did survive shark predation attempts, showing minimal damage from any shark bites it did endure. The netting, in conjunction with adequate cage maintenance (such as removal of any dead fish and regular cleaning) is the answer to the aquaculture program’s major problem of fish escapement, and will lead to yearly cobia growouts and year-round harvest.
Interested in gaining experience in the marine sciences? Perhaps sustainable living and food production? Please note the approaching application deadlines:
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