As a long-time Dauphin Island Sea Lab (DISL) Discovery Hall Programs (DHP) marine educator, I was lucky to be selected in July for a Sea Grant Education Network (SGEN) educator exchange with Oregon Sea Grant at Oregon State University’s (OSU) Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon. What an incredible week of education, tide pools, rocky coasts, sunsets, campers and tsunami evacuation preparedness!
I truly cannot thank my co-workers enough for this opportunity and for allowing me to leave during the busy season in late July, while DHP was still neck-deep in summer camps, National Marine Educators Association (NMEA) conference presentation prep and teacher workshops. It had been 20 years since I visited the Oregon Coast, and my week of West Coast marine education could not have been better!
I participated in the day camp, Sustainable Sea Solutions, which was aligned with National Sea Grant Focus Areas of Resilient Communities and Economies, Healthy Coastal Ecosystems, and Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture. Kicking off the camp was a Tsunami Quest, which I found fascinating and alien. The Tsunami Quest utilized the new Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building, engineered to withstand a 9.0+ magnitude earthquake and possible resulting tsunami.
Its roof has a store of tents, food, water and other supplies in case people are stranded on top of the roof for several days! Really a marvel of engineering with a GREAT view of the surrounding harbor. This activity was a great way to get the kids outside and moving on a beautiful and breezy Oregon morning.
A bevy of activities continued throughout the rest of the week, including several more Quests, such as the mystery of the yellow rope (more on this later), and a campus quest with Cait Goodwin of Oregon Sea Grant and me. That led to an afternoon Oregon Coast Aquarium tour with Charissa Stair, teacher programs director at the Aquarium. She graciously fit me in as she was heading out for the 2024 NMEA conference in Boston. It was a really nice day for a visit to the locally focused aquarium, which reminded me of DISL’s own Alabama Aquarium but with much colder water, wolf eels and PUFFINS!
Feeling out of my element some, the week did include the familiar Sea Grant Watershed Game: Coastal Model, which DHP helped beta-test, on more than one occasion.
I explored the harbor’s mudflats with Oregon Sea Grant Associate Director of Education Tracy Crews and Hatfield Visitor Center Coordinator Stacia Carpenter, where we donned knee-high boots and armed ourselves with yabby pumps to extract mud shrimp, clams, and worms for Hatfield’s lab flow-through water systems. These live critters and other Pacific coast organisms would later be used for a group’s class on animal adaptations.
After a morning of muck, in which I felt quite at home, due to my hundreds of trips to the salt marsh, Stacia took me on a tour of the Hatfield Visitors Center. There I watched visitors simulate piloting OSU’s new National Science Foundation-funded state-of-the-art research vessel, R/V Taani. After piloting the ship, visitors investigated a scale model of the ship.
The rest of the camp experience was great for me, and the kids! Whether tracking the “Yellow Rope,” a marine debris mystery Quest arising from the Oregon Oyster Farm’s use of yellow rope upriver to hang their farmed oysters. The camp visited the farm and had a nice presentation of oyster farming in Oregon.
We also collected marine debris on their sandy shores, with the camp culminating in an epic tide pooling experience at the Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area. It was a truly apt name for this site because it was outstanding in its beauty. This tide pooling trip was everything a Gulf Coast marine educator could possibly ask for, from the numerous sea stars, urchins and anemones to a tiny sea cucumber to massive gumboot chitons, all with sausage-like harbor seals lounging about on the rocks just offshore.
It really was an incredible morning with images that will be used in my teaching for many years to come. This included the first official “Yellow Rope” discovery I found at this site. As it turned out, an urchin used it to “hide” on the rocks.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and so to wrap up the week, the campers created their camp T-shirts and finished making recycled marine debris notebook sleeves. On the last day, small groups of campers presented their marine debris skits, presentations and/or songs, (“Say Nope to the Yellow Rope!” anyone?). After the camp concluded, I successfully dissected my first salmon and conducted a “Speedy Science” class using hermit crabs as our test subjects with a school group in late July. This was foreign to me because most of the schools in Mississippi and Alabama take June and July off!
Thanks again to SGEN for funding this opportunity. If there is more funding in the future for these kinds of SG programs, please consider it. It is an invaluable opportunity for both new and experienced educators (see Tina Miller-Way’s blog in 2023) alike, and for both visiting educators and hosts. Tracy and the Oregon Sea Grant crew (Lindsay Carroll, Mary Hope, Cloud Spengler, Cait, Jessie Crawford and Stacia), were superb hosts!
I cannot thank them enough for welcoming me into the group and teaching, not only the campers, our next generation of stewards, but also this Gulf Coast guy about a new coast. I learned a tremendous amount, which will impact my teaching for years to come. Oh, and did I mention it was 65° in July while doing all of this? What a week!