I attended The Island School as a student in the fall of my junior year in 2011 and I’m lucky to be back this spring as an intern with the Sea Turtle Research and Conservation team. It’s truly amazing to be back at a place that had such an impact on my education and overall growth as an individual. No matter where I walk on campus I’m flooded with memorable experiences, lessons I learned, and friends I made while at The Island School. The reason my Island School experience was so memorable is the same reason I found myself applying to be an intern for this spring. The unique nature of this place fosters an exceptional learning and professional environment that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else in the world. Not to mention the ability to learn and experience rich Bahamian culture through the organization’s efforts to connect with the greater community. It was especially cool to arrive on campus and see how the organization has already grown over the past few years to include Hallig House, CSD, and the new intern housing under construction. I’m excited to see what the next several months will bring.” -James Murray

Hello! My name is Chris Daniell, Shark Intern and IS alum, and thank you for reading my blog post!

Being a student at the Island School was the most amazing experience of my life. I was here in the fall of 2010, and I spent the majority of 2011 trying to return. And here I am, living on Eleuthera, and living the dream.

The three months I spent as an Island School student were the best of my life. I loved every aspect of life here, from the more environmentally conscious nature of life, learning new things and meeting new people, and exploring the island of Eleuthera. However, my favorite part of The Island School experience was the connection to the ocean. My life has been dominated by a love for two things: science and the creatures that inhabit the world’s oceans. The Island School gave me my first hands-on experience with marine science, and gave me the opportunity to work with marine biologists. I was placed in the flats research program measuring the metabolic responses of bonefish under the various stressors forced upon them by global climate change. I loved every moment of it. This was the defining experience of my time as an Island School student. However, I have always harbored a fascination for sharks and their relatives. Naturally then, being a part of the sharks program at CEI is a dream come true.

I have spent the last month assisting in all aspects of the shark research program. My first experience was with the nurse shark mating aggregations project. Every summer, nurse sharks enter the creeks nearby to mate. During this window of opportunity, the sharks team set out to record as much as we could. Every day, a couple of us would bike to a nearby creek and record all sighting of nurse sharks, or their behavior. On a few occasions, we would bring the entire team out with a large net and to catch and tag a few of them. Another program I am involved with is the ongoing study of baby lemon sharks. For this we go out into the field and catch juvenile lemons and other creek animals in a large seine net to monitor the population of the sharks in the creeks as well as their prey. Once a week, a few people head out to the creeks by boat to catch the sharks that eat the baby lemon sharks themselves. The third project is the long line stress physiology project. The goal of this project is to record the behavior and blood chemistry of a shark that has been caught on a long line hook. Cameras record the shark when its hooked, and an accelerometer measures its movements. Blood samples are also taken to record stress levels.

The experience has been a truly amazing one, and I feel incredibly lucky to be able to be here. The days go by too quickly, just as they did in 2010. The work is hard, but I am following one of the most important lessons I learned as a student here:

“Do just that labour that marries your heart to your right hand” – Derek Walcott

H. Hoell

There is always something to work on around the boathouse. I clean the bottoms of boats, assist with motor repair, drive boats for research teams, and perform various other tasks. After five weeks of working in the boathouse I have developed my skills in boat repair and scuba diving. This internship has definitely been a worthwhile learning experience!

At the moment we produce working fuel but don’t really know what quality it is. It’s easy to make biodiesel that seems to work well but has contaminants in it which relatively quickly destroy engines, are hazardous to the brewer and user, and which can actually be worse for the environment than petrodiesel. So having a clue about the quality of one’s product, as well as its various byproducts, is quite important! There are a lot of tests to which commercial biodiesel producers have to submit their product, but they generally require extremely costly equipment or highly trained analytical chemists, and- at least at the moment-  cannot be carried out here on Eleuthera. Over the next few weeks I will therefore research different tests we can reasonably do for every batch of diesel we produce and begin to use these tests on our feedstock oil and the diesel we make. This will allow us to ensure that our vehicles run smoothly and give us an idea of how the quality of our biodiesel varies from batch to batch, which in turn will allow us to improve our production process. So far I have worked only briefly with Marco (who runs the biodiesel lab) to do some basic tests on samples of the waste vegetable oil we will convert into fuel, but later this week he will hopefully show me the entire process. I will also look at a possible expansion of our biodiesel production facility in order to see how we could meet more of our fuel demand in the future.

I am originally from Austria but currently attend UNC-Chapel Hill, where I am about to enter my third year as a philosophy major focusing on the intersections of ethics and economics in the context of sustainable development. Communities trying to be (self-) sustainable in terms of food and energy are pretty fascinating to me, so I am excited to be here at CEI and see the subject of my academic studies in action. I am grateful to be given the chance to add a more practical/ technical aspect to my perspective on sustainable development, and looking forward to the coming weeks!

If you are not already aware, the aquaculture team (Marie, Tyler, and I) with the help of a lot of other awesome CEI people transferred our cobia to the offshore cage. For the past week or so we have been making daily dives on the cage to feed the cobia and check the overall integrity of our new shark-proof netting. We have also started some water quality testing to monitor the effect of our aquaculture cage on water quality – there is some concern that the waste produced by so many fish in such a small area might start effecting water quality and overall health of the surround ecosystem. Other than that I do maintenance jobs around the labs, like making a solar distiller to dry out sand cores as well as producing some sea salt for the kitchen.

Thanks for reading, I am having a blast down here and I am certain the Island School kids will too!

After my internship I decided to take the opportunity to come back to CEI as a research assistant. I still do some of the same things (data collection in the field), but I also gained many new responsibilities. I moved from a teaching assistant to a full-blown co-teacher for the lionfish research class. I am also conducting an independent project on the topic of my choosing to investigate something about the marine world that surrounds us here at CEI.

My name is Mike Piersiak and I came to CEI last semester as an intern with the Shark Research and Conservation Program. My main focus was to gain as much knowledge as I could regarding not only my specific area of interest (sharks), but also knowledge about the other research projects taking place here. Perhaps the biggest benefit of being an intern was learning about life as a field biologist outside the confines of a classroom and benefiting from the experienced staff members.

After my internship expired, I chose to stay on as a research assistant and assume more responsibilities than the more transient, short term ones I had as an intern. As I am hoping to perform a master’s thesis in the next year or so, I found that the role of a research assistant here is much more similar to that of a masters student in the responsibilities as well as the experience gained. I am no longer associated only with the shark program, but rather, I will be performing my own project as well as mentoring interns through their time here. Assuming more long-term responsibility as well as managing my own personal project are things that I know will benefit me when I begin applying to a masters program and writing my research proposal.

Aside from the academic benefits of my role as a research assistant, I also teach at The Island School as well as mentor interns throughout their time here. I am the co-advisor of the lemon shark research project and I teach a research class twice a week that includes field sampling, data analysis, and presentation of findings at the end of the semester. Mentoring interns involves helping develop a group project (which will be undertaken over the course of their time here), running weekly intern meetings, helping to acclimate them to the institute upon arrival, and overall well-being over the course of their stay here.

We are interning in Flats Ecology research at the Cape Eleuthera Institute and learning so much about the effects of global climate change on many flats species such as, Queen and Milk conch, Checkered pufferfish, Blue crabs, Lobster, Schoolmaster snapper, and soon to come Cobia and Bonefish. We are often in the field perfecting our methods of capture and we assist in designing and constructing experiments to run tests on these various species. For example, we are testing the metabolic rates of most of these marine organisms in a respirometer. Working in the wet lab we’re exposed to the other research projects that are also going on with Aquaponics, Aquaculture, and Shark research. With Flats research, everyday is a new challenge providing the best experiential learning environment.

-Lauren and Tori

Editors Note: Interested in interning at Cape Eleuthera Institute?  Applications are accepted year round for internships in the following fields: open ocean aquaculture, aquaponics, permaculture, and outdoor education.  To find out more information or to submit an application, click here.