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Sunday, October 16, 2005
Scientists, students in touch with area resources
By LINDA WALTON
News-Journal Correspondent
NEW SMYRNA BEACH — There is a cornucopia of inventiveness throughout Southeast Volusia on ways to save the environment, use the sun for electricity, provide tomorrow´s food supply and to impart to youngsters the importance of maintaining and protecting resources.
Education is being used to solve some of the environmental mysteries challenging local scientists and providing an opportunity for youngsters to see firsthand the delicate balance of man and nature.
CANAVERAL SEASHORE
Growing oysters on small underwater mats, placing tiny transmitters on baby gopher turtles and determining dialects in scrub jays are only a few of the scientific studies taking place at Canaveral National Seashore.
And, the University of Central Florida also is studying oyster reefs.
“We´ve noticed the edges are dying and they are trying to find out why,” said John Stiner, Canaveral´s resource management specialist.
They have been working on the oyster project for about five years and are considering reasons, such as boat wakes, water quality and the effect of predators on the outer areas of oyster beds.
Barnacles, which compete with oysters for a solid foundation on which to attach and diseases are among the other possibilities of reasons the oysters are dying.
It first was noticed by Ray Grizzle, a scientist with the University of New Hampshire, who looked at aerial photos and noticed the patches of white shells, which indicated dying oysters.
Now it´s down to trying to fix the problem and growing healthy ones.
“There is something exciting about the oyster reef restoration. The UCF team are putting mats out in the water and placing oysters, turned on their sides,” Stiner said.
The idea is for the oyster to attach to the mat and have the oyster larvae also settle there and prosper.
The importance of trying to solve the problem of the dying edges of oyster reefs is important in itself, but it also is a signal that more of the reef could die if a solution isn´t found, Stiner said.
Another highly important scientific project involves gopher turtles, many of which are dying.
Rich Siegel, of Townsend University, has been studying the gopher turtles that are contracting upper respiratory tract disease syndrome.
First, the turtles´ eyes get runny, then they become emaciated and die, Stiner said.
While no turtles have been discovered with the respiratory disease at the north end of the national park, turtles with symptoms have been found at the south end of Canaveral (Brevard County) and on NASA properties.
Siegel and his students have placed very tiny transmitters on baby gopher turtles to see how many would survive.
“They were on 20 babies and not one of them lived a year,” Stiner said.
So far, scientists haven´t found a cause or remedy for the gopher turtle disease that is killing them and, if it spreads, decimating the tortoise population, the balance of nature will be disrupted.
“If gopher turtles disappear, so will their burrows which a lot of others use. It would affect so many other animals,” Stiner said.
And another revelation to park officials from a specialized study of scrub jays is that they have dialects, just like people.
“The call they make if they see a hawk is different from the one when they see a snake or a four-legged intruder,” Stiner said.
Lots of other studies take place at Canaveral -- such as the Kevin Jordan´s Daytona Beach Community College´s marine biology program -- which is doing water quality monitoring in Mosquito Lagoon. The St. Johns Water Management District has been studying the sea grasses in order to maintain them as important nurseries for varieties of fish.
The studies involve scientists, universities and students, all intent on using the latest technological tools and knowledge of science to preserve the environment.
MARINE DISCOVERY CENTER
The next generation of marine scientists may well be coming from the student population studying the bounty and the problems in Mosquito Lagoon.
“It´s total immersion for four hours on the water,” biologist Bruce Jaildagian said. He is captain of the Marine Discovery boat, along with former New Smyrna Beach High School marine science instructor, Chad Truxall, who now works full-time with the center.
The boat stops on a sandbar and the students, who come from Volusia County Schools, get to work with nets, catching various species of fish and studying mollusks, crabs, lobsters and sea grasses.
They take water samples, which are tested for the Florida Marine Resources Council. Water salinity is checked under microscopes on board the boat, as well as testing for any impurities.
“We are lucky to be protected by the National Seashore. A lot less runoff goes into the lagoon because of the park. It is definitely more pristine here because of them,” Jaildagian said.
The older students also confront problems such as tumors that are showing up on sea turtles causing vascular growths externally and internally.
“When it gets to their eyes, they can´t see to eat,” Jaildagian said.
The same symptoms first showed up in Hawaii and then in the Indian River Lagoon, starting in the 1980s.
“We thought it may have been pesticide runoff that was causing this but now, it is occurring in many countries,” he said.
These and other marine problems of the future may well be solved by any one of the budding young scientists who found the indoctrination to the field of marine science on the discovery center´s boat and in its hands-on classrooms.
And it is a wide field of potential contenders.
The center has seen children from kindergarten to senior high ages, from schools here as well as from Deltona, Lake Mary, Sanford, DeLand, Ormond Beach and from all over the United States.
“During the summer, kids visit grandparents here and many come through the program,” Truxall said. “We also had a student from the Reunion Islands off Africa last summer. It was his first trip to America.”
“When we finish a trip and we look at each other, the reward is seeing the kids light up,” Jaildagian said.
MARICULTURE
Biologist Michael McMaster has perfected the process of breeding and growing a prime species of fish -- the pompano -- a high-value marine fin fish.
The quarter century plus of efforts by McMaster and his partners have included breeding and raising pompano in the Dominican Republic and the Florida Keys and, for the past several years, in Oak Hill.
The intent has been to provide a top notch fin fish for consumers.
“It is common knowledge that the world fish catch has leveled off and, at the same time, fish consumption is rising,” said McMaster, who operates Mariculture Technologies International, Inc., raising pompano in tanks in Oak Hill.
What is happening, according to McMaster, is that catch fisheries are having to fish deeper and farther away from home base and, in many cases, are filling the demand with new species of fish, previously not considered edible or marketable.
The pompano are raised in running saltwater tanks at McMaster´s aquaculture/mariculture complex.
“Over the 30 years, we have perfected the process and out of approximately 50 tropical marine species that our group has tested, we find the pompano to be one of the easiest to manipulate and most predictable,” he said.
The adult pompano broodstock come from Sebastian Inlet north and, while a thriving net fishery for these fish once existed before the 1995 statewide gill net ban, they now must be caught on hook and line.
Although the initial stocking of the broodstock is wild fish, replenishment comes from selected farm-raised fish.
Genetic enhancement is part of the process as are “down” times for the fish and spawning time and careful temperature control.
The larval pompano emerge from the egg about 24 hours after fertilization. The growth time to become a one-pound market-ready fish is nine months.
McMaster also raises brine shrimp, some of which are used to feed the fish; large quantities of the live brine shrimp are shipped out to businesses selling fish food.
The land-based mariculture business is expensive, and McMaster and his partners someday would like to see Florida allow to more economically and profitably farm the fish in large floating sea cages, of which neither state nor federal laws allow.
“This dilemma has been the major block in developing commercial pompano farms in Florida,” McMastersaid.
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