Outdoor kitchen expansion- Update #1

December 3, 2012 ceiblogger 1 Comment

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 →

Research Programs, Student Research

Parents’ Weekend Fall 2012

December 3, 2012 ceiblogger

This November, CEI was flooded with over 100 guests as The Island School hosted Parents’ Weekend for all 45 students. The week was full of tours around campus, a student art show, parent-teacher meetings, and plenty of free time for students to show their families the island of Eleuthera. One of the many highlights of the week came when students could share their semester research projects with their families and other members of the Foundation.

For the research presentations during Parents’ Weekend, each group had 10 minutes to give an introduction to their project, explain their hypotheses, describe the methodology and results, and share the conclusions they came to from their data. In addition, each group faced a firing squad of questions from curious parents about their topics. The parents learned a lot about a predator’s effect on the growth rate of young juvenile lemon sharks, how climate change might affect the metabolic rates of fish in mangrove creeks, and the invasion of the voracious lionfish. Continue reading →

Sustainable Systems

Design Build Workshop at CEI- February 2013

November 30, 2012 ceiblogger

Aquaculture, Sustainable Systems

Fall 2012 Cobia Harvest

November 29, 2012 ceiblogger

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.

Continue reading →

Sharks

Another expedition starts for the Historic Bahamian Shark Abundance Project

November 26, 2012 ceiblogger 1 Comment

November marks the beginning of CEI’s Shark Research and Conservation Program’s third field expedition for the Historic Bahamian Shark Abundance Project. Led by Shark Research and Conservation Program Director, Edd Brooks, and Jeff Stein, Senior Research Scientist from the University of Illinois, the project is replicating a series of fisheries-independent longline surveys, which took place over 30 years ago, from 1975-1982.The original dataset was collected by Captain Stephen Connett of the vessel R/V Geronimo, which conducted the initial surveys on the shallow bank known as “the bridge,” that connects the southern tip of Eleuthera to the northern tip of Cat Island. The initial surveys documented a total of six species, however the majority of the catch was dominated by tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) at 54% of the catch, and Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi) at 33%.

Funding for four expeditions to the bridge was obtained in 2011 and to date two have been completed. Preliminary analysis of data from the previous expeditions (November 2011, March 2012) is already providing us with some valuable results. After 12 scientific longline sets the crew has caught 84 sharks from three species and has documented a shift in the assemblage compared to the historical dataset. Now, Caribbean reef sharks represent 67% of the catch and tiger sharks only 31%. Continue reading →

Aquaponics, Sustainable Systems

Prawns + Aquaponics = Three Course Meal!

November 23, 2012 ceiblogger

The aquaponics system at CEI produces enough lettuce to feed our community twice a day, seven days a week. The fish production is increasing in the next year, and provides one meal a week of fresh tilapia. Right now the system is good, but does have a few minor opportunities for improvement. One issue we are facing is an over-abundance of solid waste settling out at the bottom of our deep water hydroponic beds. One way to solve this “problem” is to install additional filters which would have to be purchased, shipped, installed, and run on electricity. The filters would use more fresh water to clean, and require more time and maintenance. This isn’t the ideal solution when we are trying to reduce imports, simplify operations, maintain affordability, and conserve water.

We instead looked for a permaculture way of solving the solid waste issue, and found one!Last Friday a shipment arrived at Governors Harbor Airport of three small boxes from a company in Florida called Miami-Aquaculture Inc. Inside the three boxes were approximately 2,000 post-larval giant freshwater prawns (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) which can grow to twelve inches in length in just one year. Continue reading →

Lionfish

Lionfish Program Update

November 19, 2012 ceiblogger

October was a packed and exciting month for CEI’s Lionfish Research and Education Program (LREP). A new study tagging lionfish in a novel way is currently happening at CEI. This monitoring technique can help us track when, where, and how the lionfish are spawning. The hopes are that in the future we will be able to more effectively reduce population sizes.

Dr. Lad Akins, director of the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF), spent a week at CEI to help make this project happen. Under his direction, accompanied by new LREP manager Dr. Jocelyn Curtis-Quick and interns, several acoustic receivers were placed at the edge of the Exuma Sound. Divers previously scouted this area to identify hotspots, or areas where several lionfish were found together, to place these receivers. After the receivers were set up, lionfish were captured to place tags inside their guts. This required underwater surgery on the lionfish, a procedure that had never been done before. Previously, when fish had been tagged, they had to be brought to the surface. Continue reading →

Flats, Student Research

New shuttle box trials being conducted at CEI

November 13, 2012 ceiblogger

CEI recently started performing shuttle box experiments in the wet lab. The set-up of the shuttle box system is simple: two tanks are connected through a short “walkway”, and above the tanks a camera is mounted to monitor the fish movements, with little human interference on fish behavior.The shuttle box trials complement the critical temperature experiments that the Flats team wrapped up in early October 2012. These experiments tested the range of temperatures that a fish can tolerate before losing equilibrium, and are used to study how the projected conditions for climate change will affect fish in the flats ecosystems.

The shuttle box comes provides a unique aspect while studying effects of climate change, by adding a behavioral decision-factor element to the study. Trials will be run using one the common mangrove prey species (bonefish, yellowfin mojarra, yellowtail snapper and checkered puffer) in one of the two tanks and a mangrove predator (juvenile lemon shark) in the other tank. Then, the environmental conditions in the prey tank are manipulated to an unfavorable level (i.e. high temperature) and the fish is viewed on the cameras to see when it decides that being in the same tank as the lemon shark, with the threat of predation, is preferred to unfavorable environmental conditions. Continue reading →

Flats, Outreach, Uncategorized

CEI researchers and affiliates meet with members of the Bahamian government to discuss marine conservation

November 9, 2012 ceiblogger

CEI researcher Aaron Shultz along with Fisheries Conservation Foundation chair Dave Philipp, Illinois Natural History Survey Fisheries Biologist Julie Claussen, and a young member of the CEI boathouse staff Mally Goodman, took a break from their bonefish tagging efforts to meet with the Prime Minister and the Environmental Ministry of the Bahamas at Deep Water Cay, Grand Bahama on Thursday. Aaron spoke to the group about conservation, and showed a slideshow on the research and tagging project currently being conducted on Abaco. Prime Minister Perry Christie talked pointedly on the importance of protecting the natural resources of the The Bahamas, as well as increasing research and education.

Many officials from the Bahamian government and members of the press attended the event, serving as great exposure for the Cape Eleuthera Institute, The Island School, Fisheries Conservation Foundation and Bonefish Tarpon Trust. The word is spreading on some of the work that CEI researchers are doing, great work guys!

Flats

Spotlight on Master’s student at CEI: Liane Nowell, Carleton University

November 8, 2012 ceiblogger 1 Comment

I started my master’s at CEI in association with Carleton University in May 2012. I will be studying the thermal biology and spatial ecology of bonefish (for global warming implications) as a grad student in the Dr. Steve Cooke and Dr. Cory Suski labs of Carleton University and the University of Illinois, respectively.

The staff and faculty at CEI are a wonderful bunch of people. They are encouraging and eager to help me develop professionally and as a person. I really enjoy and appreciate CEI’s unique ability to engage in outdoor, experiential classrooms near Exuma sound. It’s nice to be a short boat ride away from the mangrove creeks that act as my study site. To date, I’ve been given the opportunity to work with a multi-disciplinary network of professionals including meeting and working alongside visiting world-class scientists, collaborating with other master’s students, both here and abroad, and working closely with a host of Ph.D. students at the institute. Continue reading →