Last week, the nearby settlement of Deep Creek had their annual homecoming called Conch Fest. The Cape Eleuthera Institute (CEI) set up a booth amongst all of the conch fritter and local craft stalls at Conch Fest to give information and answer questions about CEI and Island School, as well as play a few games with the children who stopped by the booth. Here are a few pictures of the booth at Conch Fest.
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Two students from Carleton University in Ottawa, Felicia St-Louis and Petra Szekeres, will be on The Island School campus until June 19th collecting data for their research on the thermal biology of the checkered puffer fish (Sphoeroides estudineus) and bonefish (Albula vulpes). Over her short visit this past February, Felicia was able to validate intra-muscular cortisol injections as a method of increasing blood cortisol (i.e. a stress hormone) to ecologically relevant levels in the checkered puffer for her MSc project. She is examining the effects of short-term cortisol elevation on the thermal biology of the puffers in the lab as well as in the field. By building a thermal profile of Page creek and releasing puffers tagged with thermal logging iButtons within the creek for a one month period, she will be able to compare habitat preferences between control and cortisol-dosed puffers. Continue reading
by Cape Eleuthera Institute’s Kristal Ambrose embarked on her epic journey to of plastic research, leaving on April 24th.. From Nassau, Bahamas to Texas, USA; from Tokyo, Japan to Guam; and finally, on to Majuro, Marshall Islands, the last two weeks have been a whirlwind of exploration, opportunity, and learning for Ambrose, CEI’s Aquaponics Intern and researcher dedicated to finding solutions to plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.
“Most of what we eat, drink or use in any way comes packaged in petroleum plastic—a material designed to last forever yet used for products that we use for as little as thirty seconds then throw away,” describes Ambrose on her blog. “Plastic creates toxic pollution at every stage of its existence: manufacture, use, and disposal. This is a material that the Earth cannot digest. Every bit of plastic that has ever been created still exists, including the small amount that has been incinerated and has become toxic particulate matter. In the environment, plastic breaks down into small particles that release toxic chemicals into the environment. These particles are ingested by wildlife on land and in the ocean, contaminating the food chain from the smallest plankton to the largest whale…This trip will serve as my formal training experience to tackle the plastic pollution and marine debris issue within my country.”
In Nassau during the days before departure, Ambrose was invited to tea at the home of His Excellency Sir Arthur Foulkes, Governor General of The Bahamas. Continue reading
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A PhD student from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Mike Logan, will be on the Island School campus until May 31st collecting data for his research on thermal adaptation in lizards. Mike’s PhD focuses on the response to climate change in lizards, and in the Bahamas he is conducting transplant experiments to examine how traits like the thermal sensitivity of running speed might evolve in response to environmental warming. This May, Mike is capturing roughly 100 individual Anolis sagrei (Bahamian brown anoles) from a shady habitat on the interior of the island, measuring their running speeds as a function of body temperature in the lab, and then releasing them onto a sun-baked peninsula. Each lizard will be individually marked, so that when Mike returns in late August he can recapture all the survivors from the sunny habitat and figure out which lizards were “selected for.”
His hypothesis is that the lizards with the highest thermal tolerance (highest ‘optimal temperature for running’) Continue reading
by The Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) at University of Miami has announced its new Coastal Sustainability Science and Practice Track through their Master of Professional Science Program. It will be offered for the first time this fall 2012 at the Cape Eleuthera Institute. We are excited to welcome these Masters students to the CEI campus! This course will equip students with advanced training in the expanding field of sustainability, with a combined focus on the practical aspects of systems management and the theoretical understanding of whole-systems design. The goal of this track is to train future leaders who create solutions for sustainability issues at local and global levels. If you are interested in this program or would like more information, visit the program’s website here.
by Researchers from Carleton University (Cooke Lab) was at CEI last week studying flats ecology. The team is determining whether radio tags can be used to track the movements of checkered puffers in shallow mangrove habitats. Radio tags normally are used only in freshwater because signals are attenuated by sea water. However, the researchers have modified the tags such that the antenna points vertically and breaks the water surface as puffers swim about in tidal creeks. In addition, the researchers placed tri-axial accelerometer loggers on bonefish in McKinney Creek at CEI. The loggers record information on swimming (e.g., tail beats) and feeding (e.g., tilting as they dip their heads to feed) activity. This is the first time that such loggers have been used on bonefish and will provide information that will serve as the basis for a bonefish bioenergetics model. The same loggers were also placed on some fish in Kemps Creek to evaluate the effects of different handling techniques on post-release behaviour. The Carleton team includes Jake Brownscombe, Felicia St. Louis, Charles Hatry, Jason Thiem, and Dr. Steven Cooke.
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by This fall, Cape Eleuthera Institute’s conch research intern from the College of the Bahamas, Tarran Simms, facilitated the donation of 500 masks & snorkels from Dolphin Cay at Atlantis resort in Nassau to Ron Knight, Island School Director of SCUBA operations and waterfront manager. Knight in turn, divided the bulk of the snorkel gear among every 4th, 5th, and 6th grader between Tarpum Bay & Deep Creek, where the excited students and teachers accepted appreciatively. Knight also intends to distribute the remaining gear to student of DCMS in Deep Creek, Eleuthera.
by If evolution is a transformative process, then who’s to say we aren’t evolving everyday?
As our third week here at CEI comes to a close, all of the gap year interns are beginning to naturally expand into our own place here. We all have developed and begun to find our place in the community at the Cape Eleuthera Institute; some of these changes we discover together, and some we can only find on our own.
This week we all brainstormed on ideas for our Independent Student Project, or ISP, which is the research or outreach project that we want to dedicate our time here to. Gap interns Sarah and Lulu are joining the Shark Team, I am joining the Lionfish team, Shaquel is focusing on gathering data on local knowledge of CEI projects, and Jon and Cole are developing an independent project studying filter feeders. The unfolding of each of our interests is becoming more apparent!
As we make these decisions, we are having plenty of fun in the meantime. SCUBA! This week we are working on Advanced Open Water Scuba, which involves a boat dive, deep dive, night dive, naturalist dive, and navigation dive. Here’s a drawing I did of the scuba transformation!
by Hi everyone! My name is Sarah Meyer, and I’m one of six students participating in the Spring 2012 Gap Year Program. We’re nearing the start of our third week here, but it seems like we’ve been here much longer than that because we’ve been so busy!
So far, we’ve been spending a lot of time being exposed to many of the research groups at CEI, such as the aquaponics, aquaculture, patch reef, lionfish, and shark teams. It’s nice to have the ability to “scope out” the different aspects of each group before we decide which one interests us most; after we pick a team, we will choose a mentor who will help us with our Independent Student Project that we’ll complete by the end of our semester. Continue reading
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So everyone has heard of climate change/global warming- increased anthropogenic CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere shifts annual global climate, which then leads to other catastrophic events within the Earth’s ecosphere. An increase in oceanic temperature and acidity is among the most pressing and readily apparent effects of climate change. Past research has shown fish of tropical reefs to be particularly sensitive to changes in ocean temperature and pH. In the flats department, we aim to determine whether common teleost occupants of tropical mangroves exhibit a similar sensitivity to such changes. Using bonefish (Albula spp.), checkered puffers (Sphoeroides tetudineus), juvenile yellowfin mojarra (Gerres cinereus), and juvenile yellowtail snapper (Ocyurus chrysurus), we aim to determine the Critical maximum and minimum temperature and pH at which each species looses equilibrium (“goes belly up”). Continue reading
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