Exploring the Sea: Students Attend Scripps Marine Trip
November 5, 2018
From August 19th to the 25th, while the rest of Kent’s students were preparing to come back to campus, a few students were enjoying their last days of sum- mer in San Diego at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. Mr. Klingebiel, head of the science department, travelled with eight students–Cassidy Bromka ’18, Stella Klingebiel ’19, Jeffrey Liu ’19, Gia Orsino ’19, Lawrence Li ’19, Kate Dickson ’20, Peter Lu ’20, Ian Rotman-Lehman ’22–to the institute to work with Dr. Stuart Sandin, a coral reef ecologist, and Dr. Andy Nosal, a shark ecologist.
Scripps, the largest private and nonprofit biomedical research institute in the world, led the team in studying the interactions of the coral and sharks with their environment. The students worked with Sandin, who specializes in examining the long term health of reefs using digital tools, snorkeling in the reefs, observing sea turtles and the multitude of coral, and creating 3D maps of them.
One of the students, Stella Klingebiel, says that “it was really cool to see the beauty of the reefs and then go into the lab and using that to actually model it,” because you do not often see the other side of oceanography. Jeffrey Liu, on the other hand, said his favorite part of the trip was working with Dr. Nosal, catching and tagging leopard sharks. Nosal focuses on the local population of leopard sharks and led the students in a mark-recapture study, where they caught sharks, marked them, and released them back into the ocean. Then, when they catch a random sample of the population at the later time, they are able to estimate the total number of sharks, based on the number tagged.
However, it was not just work on the trip: multiple beach trips were included each day, and the team enjoyed time hanging out on the rooftop. Stella remarked, “ [the] great group of people that went on the trip made it so special for me, including the fact that there were new kids there.” This combination of learning and fun made for a successful trip.
