Support RI Environmental Education

Have you been wanting to spruce up your car, but not quite sure what to add to it? You can help support environmental education for the children of Rhode Island while adding that little extra bling to the exterior of your car. I am very excited to get my plate when they come out, and you can sign up for yours now, too.

For more information and to order your new license plate, visit http://community.savebay.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?&pid=522&srcid=522

Colt State Park, Spring Tide!

Colt State Park in beautiful Bristol has a great salt marsh and salt pond to take students to explore in. There is ample marsh to walk through (and even a single path from use that people are able to stick to as to not disrupt the rest of the marsh) as well as plenty of shallow water to use seine nets, dip nets, viewers, and waders in.

However, this shallow salt pond isn't so shallow during a spring tide! Spring tides are extremely high high tides and low low tides, and occur due to the cycle of the moon around the earth. Gravity pulls the water on the earth toward the moon, so the highest of the high tides will coincide with when a full moon is visible at night. In Rhode Island, this timing happened to be yesterday.

We put our 7th grade students from the Community Preparatory School into rubber boots, gave them all sorts of equipment to explore the water with, and when they got in the water at 9 am (high tide was at about 7:45) it was up to the rim of their boots! Luckily, yesterday was more like a summer day than a late September day, so students wound up trudging through the water up to their knees -- with the brackish water spilling in right over the top of their boots! They had a great attitude, and their rewards were the bountiful green and fiddler crabs they found, as well as the shrimp, silversides, and killifish they scooped up in the seine net.

Many thanks to Richard Benjamin, who often runs sunset series "Taking better Bay photographs" with us, who took the picture above. To find out about upcoming sunset series trips, visit http://www.savebay.org/education_sunsetseries.asp

And for information on the photographer visit http://www.providenceri.com/richardbenjamin/richben.html

Up the Seekonk River

The purpose of today's MET High School's program was to observe the waterfront of an "Urban River," to look at how the land is used around the water. The students observed the many uses of the Port, looked at waterside restaurants, hotels, parks and marinas. They observed the occupations that would put people outside to work on the water (boat crew, construction workers, people fishing, etc.) but were definitely surprised as we headed up the River at the sight of dead fish floating by the boat.

"They're all dead. That stuff's nasty!"

And indeed, as we left from the Providence Bay Center and headed north, past the Port of Providence, and up the Seekonk River, we saw more and more dead fish. There were seagulls and cormorants at the surface eating them, splashing around, happy for their easy free lunch.

In order to investigate why the fish might have been dying, we used our YSI off the side of the boat to measure the Temperature (which was still about 72 degrees F surface to bottom), the Salinity (21 parts per thousand at surface and 28 ppt at bottom), and the Dissolved Oxygen, which may have been the problem for the animals. Animals that live under water need to breathe oxygen in, just like we need to. Most underwater animals have gills in order to do this, instead of the lungs to breathe air like we have. The air that we breathe in is about 21% (or 21 parts per hundred) oxygen, and that makes terrestrial animals, such as humans, very happy. However, underwater creatures are much more efficient at using their oxygen. They are happy when their water has more than 5 mg/L (or 5 parts per million) of oxygen to breathe. The readings up the Seekonk River were much lower that that- 0.85 mg/L of oxygen. This is a lethal limit for most sea animals, so they either need to find another place to live quickly, or suffocate from not enough oxygen.

There are several combining factors why the oxygen levels could have been low. Most of the oxygen in the water comes from plants, or phytoplankton. Phytoplankton like to live near the water's surface so they have access to plenty of sunlight, so usually the surface of the water contains the most oxygen. When we have sampled recently for plankton, we have come up with next to none, so there may not be very much oxygen being produced right now due to the low levels of plankton. In addition, the water in the Bay is just about at its peak temperature right now (maybe 1-2 weeks past), and warmer water holds less oxygen in it. Lastly, when organisms die and sink to the bottom, bacteria eats away at it for decomposition to occur, but this process uses oxygen as well. This is another reason why the oxygen levels at the bottom are normally lower than the rest of the water column.

It is a strange sight to see, since normally fish kills happen in Narragansett Bay in July or August, when the air temperature and the water temperatures are both very high and the water is not mixing. It was sad for the students to see, but it was an important lesson on how animals rely on clean healthy water to live in, and how drastic it is when the conditions are not right.

For more information on Narragansett Bay oxygen levels, visit http://omp.gso.uri.edu/doee/science/physical/choxy3.htm

For more information on how to book our "urban rivers" program, visit http://www.savebay.org/education_shipboardoutings.asp

Rocky Hill School

It's back-to-school time! And for me as an Educator, that means the transition from camp programming back to regular school programs. It is sometimes hard to change from the laid back, all-day-camp, exploratory style of teaching to a slightly more rigid 1/2/(however many) hour program. And although there is a transition that must occur, I am very lucky that my first back-to-school was with the Rocky Hill School in East Greenwich.

The Rocky Hill School sits right on the Potowomut River, near Greenwich Bay, and the possibilities of marine programming there are endless! There is a beautiful salt marsh, a sandy beach that is perfect for seining (above picture), a dock to measure water quality off of, and lots of marsh grasses to conduct birdwatching activities. The school invites Save the Bay to their site each year to conduct programming for their 6th graders as part of their EnviroWeek.

As any person who has lived in Rhode Island knows, the weater can be quite finicky in September. Although I suppose that's the case with any month in New England, really. But we were lucky to have a perfect summer day. It may have even been too hot for some; temperatures got near 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and muggy moisture was in the air. I, however, fully enjoyed it, as I hold on to summer weather for as long as I possibly can.

But if summer has to end, this day was the perfect way to get the school year started, not only for the 6th graders, and for Katie, Moe (shown below) and I as Educators!

For more information on the Rocky Hill School (and to see pictures of their entire beautiful site), visit http://www.rockyhill.org/

For more information on booking a similar program with Save the Bay, visit http://www.savebay.org/education_coastalfieldtrips.asp