Transcription of Under the Sea #222
Lisa: One of my favorite things to do is interview people who are very passionate about the work that they are engaged in. One such individual is here with me today. This is Mary Cerullo who’s an award winning author of 21 non-fiction children’s books on the ocean, as well as a handbook for teachers on using children’s literature in the science classroom. Her latest book is “Shark Expedition.”
Mary is the Associate Director of Friends of Casco Bay and has over 40 years’ experience as a science translator. As such she has interpreted marine issues for the general public and for marine user groups through the New England Aquarium, the Maine New Hampshire Sea Grant College Program, the Great Bay New Hampshire National Estuarine Research Reserve, and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Impressive.
Mary: Well you know, it’s a very eclectic incestuous world of marine science and marine education.
Lisa: Well but still it’s interesting that you have more than just a Maine reach. You also have New Hampshire, New England. I know that we’ve talked with people before who have been on the show, and they’ve talked about this whole, the Gulf of Maine and how large it is, so it’s not just Maine. It’s encompassing a much larger area.
Mary: Right, Cape Cod through Nova Scotia. Yes, and it’s all one amazing very threatened ecosystem, warming faster than 99% of the rest of the world’s oceans which is amazing.
Lisa: Why is that?
Mary: It has to do with changes in the current patterns. I think that’s primary, but they’re also investigating why, because cold water does come down from the north and filter into it, but there’s only a few entrances and exits into the Gulf of Maine from the ocean side. Way out in Georgia’s bank used to be dry land during the glacial period. They found woolly mammoth bones out there, a couple of hundred miles out to sea. It’s really a fascinating ecosystem.
Lisa: Now you live in North Yarmouth, but you are closely associated with the Friends of Casco Bay.
Mary: And my office looks out over the harbor in Portland, South Portland, and it’s a very inspirational view because you see all sorts of boats going by and people using the bay in all sorts of different ways. I think one of the things that makes Casco Bay so fascinating is it’s beautiful but there’s lots of industry going on. My office overlooks the tacker port that connects to a pipeline that takes oil all the way up into Montreal. You see the ferry boats go by, the windjammers, there’s always something going on. It’s a truly vibrant bay.
Lisa: Why did you get interested in this particular part of the much bigger ocean? What’s your draw to Casco Bay?
Mary: I think it’s because well when we were thinking of places that had quality of life we were thinking of Portsmouth, New Hampshire or Portland, Maine. My husband had just graduated law school and so we ended up here. I worked with an underwater photographer from this area, Bill Curtsinger, who used to be a National Geographic contract photographer. He’s always said it’s way more interesting diving in cold water because first of all you can hardly see more than a few feet ahead.
That’s because it’s rich in food, plankton, versus the tropics where you can see 100 feet in front of you. If you can master this environment you see all sorts of things that are hidden at the bottom of the water that you normally can’t even detect. There’s a sense of mystery in our waters here. Also because they’re so cold, cold water holds more oxygen and carbon dioxide which supports the whole food web in the ocean. So there’s an abundance of life here, even if it’s not as colorful as what you see in the tropics.
But any chance I get I like to go to the tropics too. I used to teach teacher courses and we’d go to St. Tomas during school vacation weekend, have to explore the habitats there. I came up with a concept of … Sitting around we were saying, “Well, how are we going to explain this to our principals back home,” so I came up with the concept of city fish country fish which is the city fish are the ones that live on the coral reefs where it’s really compact, lots of niches, like apartment buildings, was an area that’s active day and night, versus the country fish that kind of live close to the bottom, are very attuned to the seasons and I like to say they wear ebene colors, kind of muddled brown and gray to match their habitat.
It works for me. What’s been fun is trying to come up with these analogies to try to explain to people different aspects of the marine environment. By day I do that at Friends of Casco Bay trying to explain threats to our Casco Bay from nutrient pollution and ocean acidification and on the weekends I do it on the kid level which is really fun things like why you should be friends with sharks, or what if you were trying to find the giant squid, that kind of thing. It allows me the opportunity to kind of be a Walter Mitty, like to put myself in different environments that I’ll never get to, like looking for the giant squid or going down in a submarine. But I did go dive with sharks one time and that was amazing. I highly recommend it.
Lisa: Well as you’re talking about this it’s making me think about we just got back from the Caribbean, my family and I. I have never ever been snorkeling ever in my many years of being on this planet, and it opens up a whole new world. At first I thought I was going to drown so I had to get past that. That whole thing in the mouth and be able to breathe, that was really tough for me. But when you’re looking down there it’s amazing, it’s amazing what you see.
It’s amazing like how we were watching a stingray burrow its way into the sand, and watching the interaction between the stingray and then the two fish that were around it. It’s something that you don’t, I don’t know, in all these years of walking around on hard soil I couldn’t even conceive of this other world that existed, even though I know it’s been there and I’ve lived in Maine all my life.
Mary: That’s so perfect because that is. I mean people look at the surface of the ocean, looks fine. They don’t actually have a chance to get down into it and just discover all the amazing things. When I say I used to take teachers and the first time that I did I was snorkeling with them and I almost drowned because I’m going … because I pointed to everything because I had worked at the New England Aquarium and I knew aquariums, but it’s a whole different experience when you’re surrounded by them and you get this, you really get to observe their behavior in a whole way in which you’re actually a part of it and you’re affecting it.
Because for example, my daughter scuba dives. She just sent me a little video. They were in Hawaii and a sea turtle came up to her and checked her out and swam away. You become part of that ecosystem and I think it changes you in your whole appreciation for this other whole world that’s just wonderful and amazing and quite threatened. Where were you in the Caribbean?
Lisa: We were off Grand Cayman.
Mary: Oh, so fun. So did you go to the Stingray City?
Lisa: We went to Stingray City which was also very interesting because I had my 14-year-old with me, and she has never done any scuba diving and she’s never done any sort of touching of wild life. It’s amazing to see the people standing there with all these stingrays that seemed to be quite acclimated to human beings.
Mary: Oh they are.
Lisa: They come right up and you can touch them very gently.
Mary: It’s so cool.
Lisa: I mean she was just amazed by this. This is just a normal high school freshman.
Mary: I know. That’s the age when I started getting interested in the ocean when I was 13. People would say what are you going to be when you grow up and I’m going, “I guess I ought to know,” so I came up with the idea I’m going to be an oceanologist. Then it took me a year to realize no such word, it’s an oceanographer, but by then I was hooked.
I worked with another underwater photographer who I did the sharks books with, Jeff Rodman. We went to Stingray City. We got there before the cruise ships did. We had two boys that he was photographing. Their dad is really a world famous diver too. The boys were 12 and 13 and they stuffed their dive vest with squid to attract the stingrays. Not needed. They went crazy. The stingrays when they eat they kind of suck the food into their mouths. These boys came up with these welts on their necks. They were quite excited to go back to school to show them off later in the week.
Lisa: That’s a very interesting sort of kids that you have there.
Mary: “I got a hicky from a stingray.” But we were there for hours. You could lift them up. They were totally charming. They’d swim up to you. That’s a cool place to go. They started that because fishermen would go into that shallow lagoon and clean their catch. The stingrays soon realized that this was free food so they come in every day for that, and now they go from tourist boat to tourist boat, trick or treaters, and you can see them hopping from one boat to the other. Then around 4:00 they go out and they feed up in deep water, so it doesn’t totally mess up their behavior.
Lisa: I think your point that we become part of the ecosystem is a really important one. I think we tend to believe that we’re anthropocentric kind of peoples, we believe that everything is centered around us and the creatures exist maybe, I don’t know, they’re peripheral to us. But when you go scuba diving or you are there with the stingrays you realize that these are creatures that have personalities, and it’s not just a little neural network that’s causing them to move forward and back and towards food and away from predators. It’s a very interesting and humbling thing to realize that we’re coexisting with these very intelligent other creatures.
Mary: Absolutely. One time I spent a week with dolphins at this place called the Dolphin Research Center in Florida where they would offer courses. So from morning to night we studied dolphins, we dived with dolphins, we fed dolphins and observed dolphins. I was sitting by myself with my feet dangling in the water in this little dock where there were a number of dolphins in a pen, quite a large enclosure.
One dolphin came up to me. He was a three-year-old dolphin. He looked at me, dove down into the water and he came up and threw this big glob of green seaweed at my lap, and I’m going, “Oh, I wonder what’s the right etiquette.” So I thought about it so I threw it back. He threw it back at me, I’m throwing it back at him. I’m kind of, “Oh, wow, interspecies communication is so cool.”
Then all of a sudden his mother comes up and pushes him away to the other side of the enclosure as if to say, “You don’t know this stranger. You can’t play with strangers.” I was so crushed. Then they told me later that this was the third calf she’d had and the first two had died, so it was like a helicopter mama dolphin. It was so weird. But that behavior of the intricacies of their behavior and their relation to each other and to humans was amazing.
They were next to a marina. Dolphins like to imitate sounds so there was this one dolphin that had picked up on the sound of the motor boats when they were leaving it’d go … Just like that, or they’d squeak like you. They would move their mouths even though they don’t need their … They don’t have vocal cords and they make sounds through their blowholes, so it didn’t really need to move their mouths, but it was just being polite because we did too. There’s just so much that we don’t understand about these animals, but they are a lot smarter than we think, including the stingrays that come up to you.
Lisa: I love the idea that you are a science translator. Because I think that this is one of the great things about I don’t know the last 100, 200 years or so, is all the naturalists that we’ve had going out into the world and discovering things and learning things and classifying things. But translating that into something that just we mere human non-scientists can understand is pretty big because it opens up the world in a much larger way.
Mary: Having been trained when I thought I was going to be an oceanographer I majored in geology and biology and I was going to go to grad school. Then I got a job at the New England Aquarium and I realized quickly that I was dilettante and not going to get an advanced degree, but enough so that I can talk with scientists who are trained to talk to other scientists. They have to use the big words like anthropomorphic. It just drives me crazy. It means manmade. Anthropomorphic pollution or whatever. They’re really reticent about talking normal.
But I think it’s so enthused about if you really ask them about their work they’ll go on and on and on because it’s a passion for everyone and it’s really fun to interview. I met a guy at Woods Hole who was studying copepods which are these little tiny zooplankton, animal plankton. They’re really important on the ocean food chain. He explained to me that if a cheetah and a copepod were the same size and had a race that the copepod would beat the cheetah. Trying to use those analogies to explain the importance or the coolness of different aspects of marine life is what I really enjoy, and also just to see scientists like Clyde Roper.
He and I did a book together on giant squid. He’s the world’s expert on giant squid. The man’s in his mid-70s, spent his entire career studying squid. Many different kinds of squids are named after him because of his inspiration to his graduate students. But he just gets so excited about giant squid.
They actually went down in a submarine, a small two-person sub to look for giant squid at depth. They wouldn’t let him go down because they knew if he saw one he’d get so excited he’d start thrashing around and probably crush the vessel. But those are the people that are just … If kids and adults could meet some of these people, they would get just so enthused about science too and not think of it as one more boring subject to have to master.
Lisa: Well you brought some of your books in with you. You brought in “Shark Expedition,” and “City Fish, Country Fish,” and “Giant Squid.” Now we have Spencer, our audio engineer, audio producer over there. We can get him to stop reading the books. He’s clearly very interested in the “Giant Squid” book and he’s already made it through the “Shark Expedition” book.
Spencer: “Shark Expedition,” “Giant Squid” is really compelling.
Mary: It is so fun. You know what’s neat, is I have no artistic talent whatsoever. I can do the words and I can think about what photos or images we want, but the way designers and artists conceptualize the books, it’s just, it’s like a whole new book to me when I see how they put them together. For example, the “Giant Squid” book has a cover that’s black and red. I never would’ve thought of a marine book as looking good with a black and red cover, but it works. It’s really, it’s a whole another aspect.
Sometimes I go into schools and I talk to kids about the publishing process, first writing and writing and writing and writing and then the layout, the design, and the proof and all that kind of stuff to get it to fruition. That’s been really a fun learning experience for me too.
Lisa: How have you brought some of your broad range of experiences with publishing and writing and doing the oceanography work even without an advanced degree, but it’s certainly working within this field. How have you brought this back to Maine as the associate director of Friends of Casco Bay? How does that work translate for you?
Mary: Most of the work that I do for Friends is explaining the science that we do. We’re an advocacy group but it’s science based. We collect a lot of data. We have wonderful volunteers who sample the water quality of the bay, the temperature, the dissolved oxygen, the pH from April through October along 35 sites around Casco Bay. We have a science staff that goes out on a research vessel and they sample year round from the surface to the bottom. We do other kinds of exploration of pesticides flowing into the bay or all sorts of other projects like eelgrass population or disappearance.
So that information doesn’t ever just sit on a shelf. We use it to advance our advocacy by either getting the general public involved in issues or working with the legislature or working with regulators for the state or the national level. All that requires translating the data into something that’s meaningful, and like you said before, people think of themselves first, including me, so it really has to come back as why does it matter to me, I’m trying to make a living, I’m trying to get my kids up in the morning and go to school. Why does this matter to me or to my kids? That’s part of the challenge.
One of the fun things about Friends is that it’s a small enough organization. When we started on a project, for example, we tried to distill down a lot of our issues into a one-page explanation like a elevator speech so that if people say, “Well, why, why is this important,” that we can actually all say first of all the same approach but also say it accurately, it’s just really important to keep your credibility.
We sit around. We brainstorm. I tell you, the editing that goes on in that office is more than goes on for me to make a whole book. We just want to make sure that we get the information right and we try to tell stories to make it compelling, because we’ve discovered that if you can break it down to one person’s experience or how it’s going to impact you that just resonates so much better than sharing the data, which works if you’re into scientific form.
We actually have to think about two different audiences at every time because we also want to maintain our credibility with scientists, especially since we’re a nonprofit, we’re not a research organization per se. I think we’ve done that really well for over 25 years. But it also sets us apart because we’re a conservation organization first, but we’re also very careful of when we take a stand. Sometimes it takes us longer to come to a position, but once we make that statement it’s usually easier to convince the powers to be that we’re standing on solid ground.
Lisa: I like the fact that you call yourselves Friends of Casco Bay, as if they’re sort of two living entities, which they really are. You’re a group of individuals that are passionate about this body of water which contains all these living entities and so thus becomes itself a living entity. I’m sure that was very purposeful as well.
Mary: Well and it actually started as a grassroots organization with people who were concerned about the health of Casco Bay. There had been a report that came out that said Casco Bay was one of the most polluted estuaries in the nation. It’s based on really small, small data, but it got people energized to start thinking we really have to protect this place, because it appears pristine especially if you go to some places like the Mississippi Delta or parts of Florida you can see problems from red tides and pollutants coming down through the bay. It’s a lot harder to see it, and like you said, it’s really harder to get into that cold water and really experience it yourself.
That organization was purposely started by citizen action. Even though we now have a staff we have a Casco Bay keeper who patrols the bay, posing as the spokesperson for the bay. It’s still so much a volunteer organization. We wouldn’t exist without. This year we had 100 volunteers sampling the water, plus people doing beach clean ups, plus people doing storm drain stenciling, community events, talking to their neighbors about stopping using pesticides and fertilizers, so it’s still very citizen oriented.
Lisa: I think it’s interesting because believe it or not I do swim in the Maine waters, not for very long periods of time but long enough. I will sometimes open my eyes underwater even though it’s very salty. But having snorkeled and you have your mask in front of you and you’re actually, the water becomes almost like the air you would breathe. Once you do that and once you see the water in that way you can’t imagine dumping something overboard, you can’t imagine putting something into essentially, I don’t know, what can be considered the air that the fish are breathing or that you are swimming around in. But before you do that it’s almost like, “Oh well, what’s the big deal. You know, I’m out on my boat, you know, who cares. There’s so much water out there. It’s all going to get dispersed.” It’s funny how things shift when you’re actually in it.
Mary: It’s so true because they always have this expression dilution is a solution to pollution because there’s so much water. What is my little action going to do? I think one of the recent conversations about climate change is that everybody can do something. We use sewer treatment facilities. We flush the toilet. We throw away our garbage. But if everybody can do one thing to change one small practice, tune up their car, pick up their dog poop, that kind of stuff, it all has a cumulative impact. We’re not going to change our whole lifestyles, but if people are aware of things that they’re doing unintentionally that are impacting the marine environment in my case but also air and water it really can make a difference.
We’ve even always even on the staff we’re discovering new things that are impacting the ocean that we didn’t even think about. Microbeads which are these scrubs that are in cleansers and cosmetics, well research has found that they’re getting into the ocean food chain because they go right through sewage treatment plants. We’re just realizing that washing your fleece jacket, which you can’t live without in Maine, is getting thousands of threads at each washing into the ocean food chain. So don’t wash your fleece jacket very often, that kind of thing, simple things, but if people know what to do. That’s the thing I found about Mainers, they all want to do the right thing. That’s why they’re here. That’s why they’ve made sacrifices, the weather, salaries, it’s to have the quality of life in Maine. A lot of that is tied to the ocean. They want to do what they can do to protect it.
I think we come fortunately with a mindset that is very geared to protecting the environment where there are other parts in the country where they’re there for jobs or warm weather or whatever. If you’re a transplant sometimes you just want life to be the way it was from where you left, so you want that perfect lawn down to the water’s edge. No, because everything that goes into your lawn or off your lawn goes into the water. I think people here are more sensitive to that, but we always can use a knock on the head and a reminder that there’s a lot more that we can do. But we find that people work better with a positive attitude than guilt. We have enough guilt in our personal lives.
Lisa: That point is so important because I do believe there’s a lot of people who feel very passionate about the environment and about “saving the planet.” As a doctor I have not ever found guilt to be particularly motivating to any of my patients ever. There’s never a time where I’ve sat down with a patient and said, “You know that you’re killing your children’s lungs by smoking in front of them.” That never engenders any sort of relationship or any sort of positive change on their part.
However, if you can go into something with a bit of information and some sort of sense that we’re really all in this together and we’re all human and we’re all really trying to do the best we can and have a positive attitude about it I think people do want to change, and I think people do want to feel like they’re doing something that’s moving us all forward collectively.
Mary: We also have saying, “Think local, act local,” because when you look at the whole climate change thing for example and the world impact you just shut down, I mean there’s nothing I can do. But here in Maine one of our big sources of carbon dioxide in the ocean which makes the water more acidic is from nitrogen which is in sewage, it’s in fertilizers, it’s in air deposition, so stop putting fertilizer in your lawn, simple. It really has an impact.
There are things that we can do locally but I find my whole life has been geared to protecting the environment. If I think too long I just go, “Well, glad I’m getting on. I can’t handle this anymore.” But if I take it small little pieces locally I have a lot better perspective.
Lisa: I think after listening to this conversation that people are going to be interested in the books that you’ve written, especially if they have small children or larger children like our buddy Spencer over there.
Mary: Thank you Spencer.
Lisa: How can people learn more about the books that you’re writing and also how can people learn more about Friends of Casco Bay?
Mary: Well, Friends of Casco Bay has a great website called cascobay.org, one word cascobay. Also we’ll be announcing on our website our annual meeting and our volunteer recognition event which is in late January. Anybody is invited to that. It’s free. They can get more information on that.
If they want to find out about my books and sometimes I go to schools although not very much because I have a full time job, I have a website which some really smart 20-somethings made up for me one afternoon. It’s called marymcerullo.com. It’s C-E-R-U-L-L-O. I think my bio is on our website too, so you can see how to spell the name. But it’s fun having those two different lives I have to say, one for kids, one for adults. They each have their own perks and challenges.
Lisa: Well you’ve really inspired me to go out and learn more about the ocean, and to try to do what I can to keep the ocean clean, the ocean where I live and the ocean where I travel to, so I appreciate you coming in and talking with me today about this. We’ve been speaking with Mary Cerullo who is an award winning author of 21 non-fiction children’s books on the ocean and also the Associate Director of Friends of Casco Bay. Thanks for the work that you do.
Mary: Oh thank you Lisa.
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Lisa: It’s interesting for me having lived in Maine for many years now to see the evolution that the Gulf of Maine Research Institute has undergone. Leigh Peake has been part of this evolution. She is the Chief Education Officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. She does extensive work with k-12 teachers and students across Maine in order to nurture scientific literacy in the next generation of Mainers. Leigh lives in South Berwick. Thanks so much for coming in.
Leigh: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: I love that you are the chief education officer. I love that we have these now. We have had chief financial officers and chief executive officers, but you’ve got this really important tittle. What does it mean?
Leigh: It’s a great question. A lot of people ask me why does the Marine Research Institute have an education division to start out with, and I think part of it is that the Gulf of Maine Research Institute has a long standing commitment to the problems that we’re working on are multigenerational in nature. So it’s partly our job to prepare the generation that’s going to inherit the problems and challenges from us, so that’s part of why education is such a core part of the mission.
Lisa: Now you bring in a lot of children over the course of a year. I know my kids have been to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. It seems like there’s always something new to talk about. What are some of the favorite things that you’ve seen happen there?
Leigh: The highlight of our days at GMRI is when groups of 50 or 60 fifth and sixth graders come through the building. One of the most exciting things we’ve seen is an evolution in the underlying dispositions of those kids. They’re getting more sophisticated, they’re asking more sophisticated questions, they’re highly sensitive to issues of climate. We love seeing that evolution overtime and love being a part of it.
Lisa: I’m thinking back to my early association with places that we would call I guess aquariums more like and we were just like, “Oh, like there’s a pretty starfish, and, you know, here’s an octopus and here is,” but what you’re talking about really is science on a much broader scale.
Leigh: Absolutely. I mean the content that we deliver right now in the Cohen Center for Interactive Learning is essentially called Complex Systems because the Gulf of Maine ecosystem is a complex system. Kids investigate how do cod, herring, copepod, lobsters, and most importantly people intersect in the Gulf of Maine. It reflects the work that our scientists are doing right there in the building to understand how those key species are intersecting and are changing overtime especially with the changes in climate.
Lisa: How far does the Gulf of Maine actually reach? It’s a pretty big area.
Leigh: Exactly. The Gulf of Maine stretches all the way from Cape Cod up to Nova Scotia. I like to tease my Massachusetts friends that when they’re swimming in the Cape Cod Bay they’re actually swimming in the Gulf of Maine. You’ve probably heard a lot of news that we’re warming 99% faster than the other oceans on the planet, so we’ve turned into a little bit of a opportunity to investigate what does that really look like and to involve kids in investigating what that looks like.
Lisa: How do you involve the kids?
Leigh: We have two big education programs and I’m going to talk about especially our Citizen Science program where we actually have kids out in the field investigating invasive species in Maine. They’re looking at things like green crabs, but they’re also looking at fresh water invasive species, as well as plant species in the forests and fields. Underlying that is getting kids to understand that the scientific process has ways of thinking that are inherent to it that give us a way of thinking about the problems that we face every day.
The second program is the one we offer in the Cohen Center which is LabVenture, and again, we’re really focused on how do kids explore the scientific process and get an idea about what that looks like and feels like so they can begin to apply that in their own lives.
Lisa: It was at one point not that cool to be into science. Now this was several decades ago. As a female going into a scientific profession it just wasn’t, I don’t know, it wasn’t something that kids really gravitated towards. But now it seems like you can go into and you’re just as highly regarded as someone who goes into athletics say. Why do you think that that transition has happened?
Leigh: It’s a great question. I think it has become much more popularized to be a little more nerdy, especially for girls there’s been a big shift. We see makerspaces. We see popular television whether for little kids or older kids that it’s focused on science and scientific investigation. We see TV shows where the nerds are the heroes, so we think of something like numbers that television show where the mathematician is the hero. I think there’s a lot that’s changed in popular culture that’s allowed kids to come out of the closet as nerds and really embracing science.
Lisa: It’s funny because you’re talking about these, the what’s happening right now. What was going on back when I was growing up was we had slim good body. It was all about the healthiness back in the, I don’t know, the 70s I guess. Then we had Bill Nye The Science Guy. He came along. I think he actually lives in Maine somewhere.
We have these iconic figures that have populated children’s television for quite some time. But you’re right, now it seems like it’s just everywhere, and it’s a given that girls would just be as likely to go into science as boys would.
Leigh: I think another big factor is if you think about the kinds of things that are focused on popularizing forensic science is another factor where it’s not that you … All of our work echoes that and trying to broaden how do kids think about what it means to be a scientist, it’s not necessarily somebody in a white lab coat with a beaker, and that that you can be out on the ocean doing science or you can be in the woods or you can be doing all the things you love and still be doing science. I think all of that adds up to kids really embracing it a lot more strongly.
Lisa: I’m thinking about my 14-year-old, she’s almost 15, and she loves medical detective shows. She loves House. She does. She loves all the shows. She loves Bones. She loves all the shows you’re talking about that are forensic oriented, which is kind of funny because we think of it maybe that’s a little gruesome, maybe some of these shows, they shouldn’t really be that appealing but somehow they are.
Leigh: Yeah, and I wouldn’t underestimate the gruesome factor. We just did a video of one of our scientist Dr. Walt Golet who extracts a bone from the ear of a tuna that lays down the evidence of that tuna’s life, how old it is, the conditions it grew up under. It’s fairly gruesome process to extract the bone. We have kids out on the back lawn looking at that every day and the cool factor is very high when we split open the tuna head.
Lisa: Now why did you get into this? You spent you said I think 17, 18 years in publishing.
Leigh: Yeah, so my life really has been committed to education in various capacities for my whole career, and one of the things that I liked best about publishing was the opportunity to get voices out into the marketplace of people who were doing great work with kids and teachers. The job at Gulf of Maine Research Institute gave me an opportunity to get my hands a little bit dirty actually doing the work hands on with kids and teachers. That’s been absolutely fantastic. I’m not a marine scientist, so it’s also been a huge learning opportunity for me to learn a new area. Most of all there’s an amazing team at GMRI and we really do operate as a team. To inherit these amazing programs and colleagues has been a wonderful experience.
Lisa: We’ve had people on the show from the Bigelow Lab and of course we have great laboratories, the Jackson Lab up in Bar Harbor. Do you work together with these other institutions?
Leigh: We do, especially our research scientists collaborate with pretty much everyone around the state who’s thinking about or working on the Gulf of Maine ecosystem, including at University of Maine and even down into New Hampshire, Massachusetts. I would say one of the key things for GMRI is that we have an interdisciplinary team, so we’re looking at it from all aspects, biology, physics, the economic resources of the Gulf of Maine and how market prices drive what fishermen are delivering onto the dock, all of those factors.
I would say in education programs we’re trying replicate that and show science as an interdisciplinary activity. School systems tend to artificially divide it into chemistry, physics, bio, but in reality the real world is multidisciplinary and the problems are multidisciplinary, so collaboration is a key part of everything that we do.
Lisa: It’s interesting that from the beginning you’ve embraced this translation aspect of science. I know that when I went up to visit the Jackson Lab they were saying that this had been something that was relatively new over the last maybe 10 years, this translating bench science into something that could be more readily understood by perhaps non-scientists. But you’ve been doing this for a long time. Why was that important from the beginning?
Leigh: It’s a great question. I would say one of our fundamental beliefs at GMRI is that the problems that we will all be facing over the coming generations have at their heart something where scientific evidence can help us make decisions and make choices about it, and that it’s our job to find ways to communicate that science out in ways that suit the consumer and the learner. That has revved up everything we do to think about how do we help fishermen to understand what’s going on in the Gulf of Maine, how do we help the next generation of kids understand that, and how do we help everyone think about using evidence and scientific information as part of the decision making process.
Lisa: You’ve partnered with local purveyors of food to work on sustainable seafood. The people from Saint Joseph actually wanted me to know about this, that you have been working with them to make sure that their seafood is sustainably harvested. Where did that come from?
Leigh: It’s one of my favorite parts of the work we do at GMRI. A huge percentage of the seafood that’s eaten is eaten in restaurants and eaten not in your home. One of the things that we try to do is drive the joy for underutilized species by working with culinary partners and other sorts of organizational institutional partners so that people are eating fish that we can fish plentifully and try to drive market demand for those fish so that fishermen are more inclined to fish for them and bring them into the dock and get a higher price for them at the dock. Part of it is seeing what we eat as well as what we fish as all part of the whole ecosystem.
Lisa: Have you been able to interest kids in eating more of these sort of different and diverse fishes?
Leigh: It’s such a great question. At the college level we see college kids demanding as part of their demand for local foods and healthy foods demanding sustainable fish and demanding local fish. Our programs do work with some of the colleges to make sure that what they put on the plate in the colleges is traceable fish and sustainable fish. We just had the first public school system in Chicopee, Massachusetts sign up so that the public school system will also be serving Gulf of Maine responsibly harvested fish. I think as with so many things the change is coming from the kids themselves.
Lisa: Now why Chicopee, Massachusetts?
Leigh: I actually don’t know the history why Chicopee. We’ll have to ask Jen Levin who’s head of our sustainable seafood division about why it was Chicopee.
Lisa: It has been interesting for me to watch maybe not the fish so much but the demand even at younger grades for things like organic foods, grown locally, school gardens. This was something that was unheard of maybe 20 years ago, but now it’s caught on. It seems as the sustainably harvested fish is going to be similar.
Leigh: I hope so. I mean, I hope that kids having grown up with parents who have a different kind of appreciation than my parents did for local foods and sustainable foods and for the ecosystem around us, that these kids will continue their whole lives to demand that they understand where their food came from and that it’s being collected in a way that it can be collected for generations to come. I think there’s a really good future for anyone who can trace the origins of the food and trace it from being picked up in the ocean all the way to the dock.
Lisa: What does the future hold for the children who are getting educational services at GMRI?
Leigh: Well as many people have heard we’ve just received quite a bit a funding from both NASA and NOAA to completely reimagine the Cohen Center for Interactive Learning. It’s an incredibly exciting and slightly terrifying moment to think about delivering on those goods. But there’s three big pieces to that. One is renovating the content that kids experience when they walk through the Cohen Center, so it’s a much more current state-of-the-art technology. The content will be focused more squarely on climate and climate change and looking at weather and climate.
NOAA also invested in us to bring adults into this space to have learning experiences around sea level rise and storm surge in Portland harbor. That’s a big stretch for us, having adults in the Cohen Center and thinking about how to design content for that, so we’re really excited about that opportunity.
We also will have a new technology backbone in the Cohen Center that allow us to deliver content out into science and technology centers and classrooms around the state, and in fact, anywhere in the country over broadband. Finally, it’s allowing us to design curriculum materials and interactive technologies that can be used by teachers in the classroom before the visit when they come and after they leave. That kind of connection to the classroom is so important to be able to extend the experience from the Cohen Center out to a multiday investigation back in the classroom. It’s really exciting times.
Lisa: I’ve spoken to any number of children who have told me that they are specifically interested in becoming oceanographers. There’s some interesting draw even when we’re young to the ocean and the science of it. What do you think that’s all about?
Leigh: It’s amazing. We see that all the time, that kids especially as they come up around age 10 to 14 are fascinated by the ocean. I think the ocean is still one of the most mysterious places. There’s so much we can’t see there and so much going on under the surface literally that kids are drawn to that mystery and drawn to the enormity of the ocean. We see kids from inland and western Maine still showing up at our doors saying they really want to be a marine biologist, and so we’re wondering, “Wow, how did that happen and how can we help that?” I think it’s the mystery of it that has fascinated people for ages.
Lisa: Leigh what is your connection to Maine initially?
Leigh: Yeah, I grew up in Virginia and Maine was this mythical place up north filled with moose, and we didn’t, weren’t sure what else. But it wasn’t necessarily the place you were supposed to go. Then I had the opportunity to take a job in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and I thought, “Okay, if I can live in this mythical place wouldn’t that be amazing.” So I did and set down some roots in South Berwick and I’ve loved it ever since. I think the mythology lives, about all that is Maine and the diversity of everything that you can find and be in Maine. It’s amazing. It’s an amazing place.
Lisa: I agree. Having lived in this mythical place for many, many years I think there still continues to be some interesting energy that floats about even as we’re existing as normal humans walking the earth. I think the ocean is actually a big part of it.
Leigh: I think so too. Maine has a very unusual education ecosystem in the sense that it’s highly local controlled, teachers have a lot of control in their classroom. Across the country teachers are being strict of their professional responsibility and freedom to do what they think is right in their classroom. That’s not true here in Maine. We still invest a lot in our teachers.
We made an investment in broadband technology to schools and public libraries and that’s amazing infrastructure that we’re able to use at the Cohen Center, coming off of the Cohen Center technology. Simply the opportunity to work at population scale in Maine. In my past I’ve tried to work in places like New York City and LA and attempting to move those systems was nearly impossible, and yet here in Maine we can look at the whole system and talk to the operators within that system. It’s an amazing opportunity as an educator.
Lisa: What do you personally hope to see happen at GMRI say over the next five years?
Leigh: I think the most important thing to me is that we’re moving more squarely into helping kids look at the scientific evidence around ecosystem change and climate change and make decisions for themselves about what they see in that evidence, and moving into that public use of evidence and scientific understanding is also a key part for us.
I think that when we look out ahead we’re trying to prepare kids for jobs that don’t even exist yet. So it emphasizes the need to build in kids a set of skills around critical thinking and being a critical consumer of information, being both producers and consumers of science even if you’re just a citizen. All of that I think is on our horizon to keep moving the needle on all of those fronts.
We also imagine a world where every single child in Maine at some point in their career has an experience with GMRI and GMRI science, maybe even once a year they’re having an experience with that science, that would be amazing. I think finally we also imagine doing a lot more work with teachers and helping teachers understand how they can use all the resources that we’re bringing to the table in order to change how they’re teaching math and science.
Lisa: Leigh what’s the GMRI website so that people can learn more?
Leigh: We’re at gmri.org. We also are on Twitter and Facebook for GMRI and there’s a lot more information there.
Lisa: For those who are interested we in the past interviewed Alan Lishness who was previously at GMRI and he had interesting things to say, so people can also go back and listen to that podcast, but for now I think this has been a fascinating conversation. We’ve been speaking with Leigh Peake who is the Chief Education Officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Leigh: Thank you so much for having me.