Please join us in saying goodbye and thank you to our wonderful interns Brie, Brian, Alexa & Brittany. We wish them great success in their future endeavors, and hope that their experiences at the  National Marine Life Center have been beneficial to their education and career goals. They will all be greatly missed.

As National Volunteer Week draws to a close, I would like to thank and recognize everyone who volunteers at the National Marine Life Center.  They clean, they feed, they clean some more.  They weigh, measure, test, and enter data.  They sort, file, organize.  They build, saw, nail, affix, paint.  They cut, glue, create, color, read, teach.  They write, market, fundraise, and govern.  NMLC’s amazing volunteer corps are essential to accomplishing our mission, and we are grateful for their service.

Top 10
In 2010, 34 program volunteers contributed over 1,506 hours!  The following contributed the highest number of hours.
Wendy – 205.25
Ann Marie – 263.25
Paula – 147.5
Len – 145.5
Linda – 145
Bob – 81
Elizabeth – 80
Jim – 70.5
Kaley – 64.5
Lisa – 49.25

Student Interns
16 students attending schools from Florida to Maine interned with us over the past year.  Thank you to Matt, Sean, Robert, Lianna, Amanda, Dory, Frank, Corissa, Trina, Jenn, George, Dan, Dan, Jay, Kaitlin, Casey.  Many more helped with short-term community service or service learning projects.  Thank you especially to Jackie, Lauren, Margaret, Adrienne, and Aubrey.  We thoroughly enjoy working with these students, and hope their experience will help in their future endeavors.

Schools included:  University of Tampa, Cornell University, University of New England at Biddeford, Unity College, Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Bridgewater University, Cape Cod Community College, Cape Cod Academy, Sturgis Charter Public School, and Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical High School.

Board
Board members are often the “unsung heroes” of a non-profit organization, and ours are no exception.  Our trustees are responsible for overall governance of the National Marine Life Center, as well as big-picture strategic planning, fiduciary oversight, and resource development (i.e., fundraising).  These duties are enough to keep anyone busy, especially since most have full-time jobs and all have full-time lives outside NMLC.  However many also roll up their sleeves and pitch in programmatically and with special events.  I’d like to extend a special thank you to Jeff Luce, Rob Brennan, Judy Honan, Barb Schneider, Linda Burke, Kevin Farr, Lee McGraw, Bill Reich, Dr. Mike Ryer, and Joy Surprenant.  We truly appreciate your leadership.

Thank You, Awesome Volunteers!

The flat walls were the easy part.  We could use an entire sheet of FRP and piece them together with special fittings in between.  The corner behind the water heater was the trickiest!  Pipes coming through the wall made it especially difficult.

Steps included measuring and cutting each FRP panel (if necessary), applying FRP adhesive, placing on the wall, rolling to eliminate bubbles, and affixing trip.  Then repeat as needed!

We think the results are great!

Sea Turtle filter system and filter media at the NMLC

We are one step closer to getting the first two pools up and running in the Sea Turtle Ward. The 1,850 pounds of filter media needed to run our filtration system arrived at the new animal hospital yesterday. This filter media will be used to fill the two large sand filters which are a vital part of the turtle life support system. Each tank in the new hospital will have its own filtration system. This allows the water in each system to remain separate and maintain quarantine between pools. Each system will have a mechanical, biological, and chemical filtration component to clean the water. The sand filters provide the mechanical filtration component by removing particulate matter from the water. The sand filters for our first two pools each require 650lbs of silica sand and 275lbs of pea gravel to run properly.

Volunteer Matt Shaffer loads the donated pea gravel at Cape Cod Aggregates

We would like to send a big thank you out to Cape Cod Aggregates who donated the 550lbs of pea gravel for the system, and to the volunteers who helped get the filter media to the NMLC and up to the mezzanine level of the hospital where the filtration systems are located. Thank you to Wendy Wyman and Matthew Shaffer for the donation of their time and use of their vehicles to haul the media. We would also like to thank Josh Shubert, Tyler DeHay, and Kaitlyn Crowley for assisting with the heavy lifting upon arrival at the NMLC. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Volunteers Josh Shubert & Tyler DeHay haul filter media into the new marine animal hospital

To maximize flexibility with the new sea turtle pools that will be the first to come on-line, we’ve also designed a haulout platform because seals don’t swim all the time and need to rest periodically.  We’ve also designed a jump net to prevent seals from getting out of the pools.  Many thanks to volunteer Wendy W. helping install these features!

The Upper Cape Tech’s Horticulture and Landscape shop is new program that prepares students for many job opportunities, both in and out of doors. Horticulture deals with fruit and vegetable plants, foliage plants, flowers, trees, shrubs, and turf. In Landscape Contracting students learn the art and science of planning, constructing, and managing landscape spaces. Students study plant materials, planting design, plant maintenance, business management, soils, plant nutrition and pest control.

We are so grateful to these students, as well as to their instructors Joshua Greeley and David Consalvi, for improving NMLC’s “curb appeal”!  Thank you!

Feel free to contact Adele with questions about NMLC, volunteering, and just about anything else!  Her phone number is 508-743-9888 x303 and her e-mail address is araphael@nmlc.org.

Welcome Adele!

How time flies when you’re helping turtles! It’s difficult for me to believe that it’s already mid-July, and yet I feel that in the 1 1/2 months I’ve been here, I feel we’ve accomplished a lot.

The center is now bustling with activity, as people bring their kids in to the Discovery Center for Fins and Flippers on Tuesdays and Wednesday and Marine Animal Medical Mystery Wednesdays. The interns and I had a lot of fun with turtle week, and we’ve been getting pretty creative and involved in planning the crafts each week. I feel as if I get as excited about some of the crafts as much as the kids do! Additionally, we have a good number of volunteers who have just started, and who are making the craft prep workload much lighter for us interns. Thanks guys!

Kids Working on Thermometer Turtles

We have also been busy getting ready for the numerous festivals that take place in July. This past weekend, the interns divided up to attend two festivals; the Sandwich Street Fair and the Swan Festival in Wareham. The Barnstable County Fair, the biggest event of the summer, should be a fantastic time! Starting nest weekend, we will have a table set up in the big tent from 12-10pm until Tuesday. In additional to getting a lovely marine animal tattoo (fake, of course!) and getting to see some of the cool whale specimens at our table, come enjoy the music, food, and (best of all) the RIDES! Can you tell I’m excited?! It will be a great time for all.

In heavier news, it is bothersome to me that the oil in the Gulf spill has yet to be capped, and that the test of a new method if being delayed for another day. Why must we keep waiting? Thousands upon thousands of gallons of oil is still escaping everyday, harming our ecosystems… in my opinion we are not moving fast enough. I also just recently read an Associated Press article about how the first Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle eggs evacuated from the Gulf were released in the Atlantic. The article stated:

“…the newborn Kemp’s ridley sea turtles did well after their release.

About 700 sea turtle nests — each containing about 100 eggs — are being trucked from oiled shores along the Gulf to Cape Canaveral, where they’re kept at a climate-controlled facility. The turtles are being released into the Atlantic as they hatch.

Scientists feared that a generation of the imperiled species would die if they hatched and swam into the oil.”

It is comforting to know that so many turtles were saved, but one wonders what the implications may be for future generations of turtles, which have always nested on the same beach, are relocated to a different environment. It seems only time will tell.

In turtle news at NMLC, Patty’s shell is slowly re-growing! Yesterday, Roger’s removed a good deal of dead tissue, and underneath was a dark pigment of shell starting to return. This is very exciting news, and though Patty’s shell now looks very pink and raw, it is nice to know she’s on the rebound. Catch 22 is as feisty as ever, and the interns seem to enjoy his natural sunlight basking treatment (AKA tanning time) as much as he does.

Summer is in full swing at NMLC, but I’ll be sure to send another update soon!

-Dory

Kids Working on Thermometer Turtles

Today at the National Marine Life Center we started our summer programs. We kicked it off with our first week, Turtle Week, which I had the privilege of being in charge of setting up and running. Today, with the help of my fellow interns and volunteers, we started with Fins and Flippers, which included story time with two stories, the first one was read by Dory Estrada and the second one was read by me, Frank Reske III, and an arts and craft which was mainly taken care of by interns Lianna Montgomery and Corissa Bubenick and volunteer Elizabeth St. Germaine. The stories that we read today were Turtle in the Sea by Jim Arnosky and Do you know where Sea Turtles go? By Paul Lowery. For today’s Art and Craft we did Sea Turtle Thermometers. For these you would take a foam turtle and draw any design with any color on its back then a thermometer and a magnet are glued to it so it can be hung up on your fridge. But that’s just the beginning! Later this week on Wednesday, we will have Marine Animal Mystery which is where we will take you through a mock turtle rescue and rehabilitation, showing you what it takes to help an injured or sick sea turtle. Then on Thursday we have another Fins and Flippers. Thursday’s Stories include Tammy Turtle: A Tale of Saving Sea Turtles by Suzanne Tate and Carolina’s Story: Sea Turtles Get Sick Too! By Donna Rathmell. The arts and craft is Magic Color Scratch Turtles, which you scratch with a stick to reveal a rainbow of colors. So as you can see a lot is ahead so come on down and join the fun!

And if you can’t make it to this week’s excitement, don’t worry; we also have many other weeks this summer with many other different creatures, including, but not limited to, sharks, manatees, whales, dolphins, seals, and many more. To find out more please stop by our Discovery Center and pick up a summer program. So don’t miss out. Programs run July through August, so stop in and visit us.

Frank Reske III

Education Intern

Walking into the doors of NMLC, I had little idea of what to expect. As a marine biology major, I applied to the center wanting not only to garner a better understanding of some aspects of this vast field of science, but I was also keen to know more about sea turtles and other marine life that the center takes care of.

Turtles, at times, seem almost human-like in their characteristics. Catch 22 and Patty serve as patients from whom we have so much to learn about their medical mysteries. I admire Dr. Williams, or any veterinarian that matter, for being able to tell what is wrong with an animal just by observation. It’s much more difficult when a patient cannot explain their symptoms, and it is left up to guesswork to see what is going on internally. For instance Catch could not tell us “Jeez guys, I’m not feeling too well with this staple in my abdomen!”  Learning to prepare x-rays and take proper observations was key to understanding this problem.

Shortly after I arrived here, I began contemplating why we do what we do. I mean, why do we spend so much time, use so much equipment on resources, testing water quality, taking x-rays, weight, charts, medicating when the chances of numerous turtles surviving in the wild become slimmer and slimmer with ever-present threats to their environment and ecosystem? But after I went to my first release, I knew. It is by no means a waste; what we do here at NMLC is important to the balance of marine life.

We become attached to these animals to a certain extent. Yes, it is unavoidable. Even though it is hard to resist, we talk to the turtles. They obviously have no idea what we are saying (or do they?) but is a comfort to see one of those tiny little heads looking at you with those beady little eyes and feel like they understand every word. My own philosophy is that that we want these beautiful creatures to thrive in their natural environment. In an ever-changing world, nature is more fragile than ever. It seems fewer and fewer people take the time to stop and realize just how beautiful and precious the wild is, and how wrong of us it is to be dismembering so much of it for our own human advantage. The simplicity of nature is humbling… how creatures have existed in balance to their surrounding for millions of years is remarkable, and it’s time we all work to try and keep this balance… nothing on earth is more important.

The Gulf oil spill is truly a tragedy. Yesterday, while watching the news and a portion of President Obama’s address about the crisis, I was truly alarmed to think that we will be feeling the effects of this disaster for a long, long time to come. There are thousands of species of marine animals that exist in the Gulf, but now so many are in peril, and the fragile web of their ecosystem is on the brink of disaster. It pains me to think about what Tampa Bay may look like in two months time when I return to school. Perhaps oil may have spread there as well…however, I am glad our government is taking the necessary action to clean up this monstrosity, and hopefully see to it that a disaster of this magnitude will never happen again.

The little things we do at NMLC are all for the bigger picture: educating the public so they are more aware of the vital need to protect marine species; proper care and rehabilitation of the in-residence patients; building a larger animal hospital so we can expand our care facilities… all these things make a huge difference in the long-run to protect all marine life.

It seems I’m thinking beyond the dry reading in my Bio 204 book, and am putting concepts into action in the real world. And this, I guess, is what internships are all about.

Until next time!

~Dory

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