Dr. Mark Hixon plus four graduate students have been conducting lionfish research at CEI this summer. Dr. Hixon is the most cited coral reef biologist in the last decade and recently gave a TED talk about the lionfish invasion.
Mark and his team our the first long-term residents in Hallig House. He speaks about his experience at CEI in the video below. Mark will return later in August with Carl Safina and a film crew in tow. They will be shooting an episode for Saving the Ocean.
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Last week The Island School orchard received its first dose of steroids from the biodigester. The Island School biodigester uses naturally occurring bacteria to generate renewable energy and sterilize our septic waste. The outcome? Highly nutrient rich, liquid fertilizer that has the potential to increase crop yields substantially. In some cases, certain crops have increased their yields by up to sixty percent with the addition of biodigestion effluent. A resource such as this could work wonders for both CEI and Island School as we are always seeking more local food sources and readily available, healthy snacks. With a bit of sunshine to go with these nutrients, we could eventually put the marina store out of business. Coming into season right now are sour oranges, guava, mango, sugar apples, cherries, coconuts, sapodillas, and passion fruit. Pick your poison. The next questions to ask are how much food can we make and how fast? What does it take to ween ourselves of imported fruits and vegetables? A large part of the answer is our biodigestion system that is already producing for us on a daily basis.
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by Water is the most important resource available to CEI and Island School. We drink it, we bathe in it, we cook with it, and it all comes from the rain. Although we can never know what the weather may bring us, we can always be ready to take advantage of what does come our way as weather patterns shift. To that end, we use solar panels, and wind turbines, but most importantly, we catch rain water. Of late, one of the most important issues we’ve been tackling is how to make our water last and how to maximize it’s potential. If we catch water once, how many times can we use it before it’s gone? Last week we took a significant step towards increasing the usefulness of our water.
This spring CEI and Island School put biodigestion on the map for The Bahamas. We’ve found a way to treat our waste and generate more renewable energy, in addition to getting added utility from our water. The process of biodigestion Continue reading
by I’m Grace Dennis, one of the shark interns for the summer. I’m from Houston, TX and study Environmental Biology and Economics at Colgate University. This is my third summer on Eleuthera and I love it here. I first came to the Island School as a student for Summer Term 2010, then again last summer as a shark intern to work on the nurse shark mating project. This summer I’m lucky to be working on all three shark projects, the nurse shark mating project, Ian’s lemon shark predator and prey project, and Edd’s stress physiology project.
Currently shark team is very excited about retrieving a satellite tag, which just spent 8 months on a reef shark. Continue reading
by Chris Daniell
Hello! My name is Chris Daniell, Shark Intern and IS alum, and thank you for reading my blog post!
Being a student at the Island School was the most amazing experience of my life. I was here in the fall of 2010, and I spent the majority of 2011 trying to return. And here I am, living on Eleuthera, and living the dream.
The three months I spent as an Island School student were the best of my life. I loved every aspect of life here, from the more environmentally conscious nature of life, learning new things and meeting new people, and exploring the island of Eleuthera. However, my favorite part of The Island School experience was the connection to the ocean. My life has been dominated by a love for two things: science and the creatures that inhabit the world’s oceans. The Island School gave me my first hands-on experience with marine science, and gave me the opportunity to work with marine biologists. I was placed Continue reading
by As a Systems Intern at CEI this summer, I will work with Matt Poss, Sam Kenworthy and other members of the facilities team for the next two months. Although my main project this summer will be CEI’s biodiesel production, I will also help out with other projects that need an extra pair of hands.
At the moment we produce working fuel but don’t really know what quality it is. It’s easy to make biodiesel that seems to work well but has contaminants in it which relatively quickly destroy engines, are hazardous to the brewer and user, and which can actually be worse for the environment than petrodiesel. So having a clue about the quality of one’s product, as well as its various byproducts, is quite important! There are a lot of tests to which commercial biodiesel producers have to submit their product, but they generally require extremely costly equipment or highly trained analytical chemists, and- at least at the moment- cannot be carried out here on Eleuthera. Over the next few weeks I will therefore research different tests we can reasonably do for every batch of diesel we produce and begin to use these tests on our feedstock oil and the diesel we make. This will allow us to ensure that our vehicles run smoothly and give us an idea of how the quality of our biodiesel varies from batch to batch, which in turn will allow us to improve our production process. So far I have worked only briefly with Marco Continue reading
by Hey Everybody! My name is Drew and I am an Aquaculture intern at CEI this summer. I’m from Maryland and just graduated from high school in DC; I will be attending Bowdoin College in Maine this fall where I hope to study Biology and English. In the past I have volunteered/interned at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum and National Zoo. My specific interest is in Invertebrates, so it’s a change of pace for me to be working with fish! At the museum I worked primarily with deep water invertebrates that were pulled from Lophelia reefs in the Gulf of Mexico collected before and after the oil spill in 2010, all in hopeful preparation for some comparative analyses, and I worked at the Zoo in the Invertebrate exhibit maintaining some of their tanks. In my spare time I like to work on my marine aquarium, whitewater kayak on the Potomac, read, and explore the Appalachian mountains.
If you are not already aware, the aquaculture team (Marie, Tyler, and I) with the help of a lot of other awesome CEI people transferred our cobia to the offshore cage. For the past week or so we have been making daily dives on the cage to feed the cobia Continue reading
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We are thrilled to have UNC-Chapel Hill Morehead-Cain scholar Stephan Grabner with us this summer! Stephan joins us as the CEI Systems Intern on his third summer of the four-summer Morehead-Cain summer enrichment program. Though Stephan is a philosophy major at UNC, he will be helping Marco with biodiesel production this summer at CEI.
How does a philosophy major end up hands-on with biodiesel? For Stephan it is part of an interdisciplinary approach he is taking to find connections between sustainable development, ethics, and economics.
Stephan’s journey to Eleuthera has been a long one. Originally hailing from Vienna, Austria Stephan went on to high school at the United World College of the American West in Montezuma, in New Mexico—a small international boarding school with students from roughly 100 countries. UWC nominated Stephan for the Morehead-Cain, which had only just been opened up to international candidates.
Congratulations and Welcome Stephan!
by by This spring, two high school seniors, Louise Shiverick (F’10) and Sam Falkson, came down to Eleuthera to work at the Cape Eleuthera Institute for their senior project. Read about their time at CEI working with the lemon shark program.
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Louise
My name is Louise Shiverick and I am lucky enough to be working at the Cape Eleuthera Institute with the Shark Research and Conservation Program for my Senior Project. At my school, Hathaway Brown (in Shaker Heights, Ohio), the last thing that the seniors do before graduating is a two week senior project. The point is to give us one last opportunity in high school to get involved with something that we find really interesting. People do a variety of things, from community service at soup kitchens to shadowing a doctor at one of the nearby hospitals. While most people stay at home, I decided to do something different and come to CEI.
I was an Island School student in Fall 2010 and was on the Lemon Shark research group Continue reading
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