Each summer we have been privileged to work with local students of all ages. We are also frequently able to give presentations and impromptu lab tours to hotel guests who stop by our suite/make shift lab area. In the final year of the study, 2001, three team members were able to give in depth presentations on this survey to a large general audience at a symposium held on Tortola by H. Lavity Stoutt Community College and Guana Island.
Pathfinders learning about marine life to earn a merit badge.
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High school students participating in a government sponsored summer education program work with us for a few days in 1998 during our preliminary investigation of the island. |
Here the students are learning about fiddler crabs (above) and sea grass beds (right). |
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Lianna Jarecki (left) in the hotel's museum talking to guest Juliette Kasbar and students from the BVI National Parks Trust about the wildlife on Guana Island. |
| Dawn Leonard (right with net) and her students from the National Parks Trust examining worms and crustaceans living in the ripple zone. |
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In the summer of 2001 three students were able to join us through funding provided by an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) supplement to our NSF grant, and a fourth student joined us through funding provided by the BVI Department of Environmental Health. Funding was combined with academic fellowships awarded through H. Lavity Stoutt Community College. Guana Island kindly donated meals and use of facilities.
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Kirsten Lettsome, studying the water chemistry at our sample sites and nutrient absorption by sponges, is here working with Don Cadien to better understand polychaete parasite load in the sponge Amphimedon compressa.
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Here, Shani Dasrath is studying the effect of fiddler crab population density on the numbers of mosquitoes hatching at salt ponds. She is being assisted by Aasha Flax, who can be seen above as a high school student four years earlier. Both are hoping that the academic fellowships will help them get accepted into universities either in the US or Great Britain. |
| Kirsten Lettsome and Shani Dasrath working up samples and discussing their projects with a visiting student participating in the BVI National Parks Trust summer program. |  |
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Rick Ware (standing) and Todd Zimmerman (sitting) discuss data with Shani Dasrath and Denise Jones. |
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Team members clockwise from from left, Kirk Fitzhugh, Joel Martin and Todd Zimmerman helping Aasha Flax (left) and Denise Jones (right) with their project to map and describe sandy beach bottom types to the fauna collected there. Here a giant sipunculan worm (the only one found in four years of sampling) has been collected with a "yabby pump".
Aasha and Denise were scuba certified before the team arrived in order to better participate in the study. Here they prepare to make a dive for an undescribed species of swimming brittle star. A single specimen of this small, fragile, and remarkable animal was found the previous year (2000), and only through very slow movement along the silty sand bottom at 70-75 feet did divers find more (in 2001).
