The Newsletter of the Texas Marine Education Association
Dolphin Talk
June 2008

Fall TMEA Workshop

SAVE THE DATE: Put September 27-28 on Your Calendar! Watch for the announcement on our list-serve as soon as the agenda is finalized for the September 27-28 workshop to be held in the Port Aransas area. Check back this summer @ http://statweb.org/TMEA/ for more workshop information and the registration form.

Nominations Needed

Step up! TMEA needs your officer nominations for 2008-2009. We need nominations for the offices of President-Elect and Treasurer, which are two-year terms. The President-Elect becomes the President at the end of the first year. Nominate yourself, or if you want to nominate some one, please ask them if they wish to serve before you send the nomination in. Please email nominations to Jill Veatch, TMEA Secretary, jill15@swbell.net. She will forward them to the nominations committee and the ballot will be included in the September Dolphin Talk.

Divers

A few spots are left for "Down Under, Out Yonder" coral reef workshop and SCUBA trip to the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary 19-23 July 2008. DUOY 2008 is available to all K-12 educators, aquarium/zoo/museum educators and college entry biology instructors who are Scuba certified with documented sufficient dive experience. For information contact franklin j VIOLA at  franklin@gulfmex.org

NMEA in Savannah Photos Needed!

If you are attending the conference, please send a few photos and reminisces to Nathan to share in the Dolphin Talk. nveatch@swbell.net

CAST is November 6-8th in Fort Worth. TMEA will make a strong presence again this year with a great fossil fieldtrip led by Mark Stamp and a full complement of workshops in the TMEA Strand. Get your hotel rooms early.

Inside This Issue                                              Page Highlights of Corals to Classrooms Workshop....................... 2 Kemp’s Ridley Turtle Nests in Galveston............................... 4 Garbology 101........................................................................ 5 NMEA/TMEA Officer Information........................................ 7 Membership Application......................................................... 8

Marolyn Smith (left) observes a Loggerhead turtle stranded in Florida and now recuperating at the turtle barn. A big thank you to Kelly Drinnin (above) and Shelley DuPuy of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary for hosting the workshop!

Israel Taylor (above) demonstrates a completed coral polyp. The green dots represent zooxanthellae!

Corals to Classrooms:

A Workshop Celebrating International Year of the Reef 2008!

Sponsored by Texas Marine Education Association

Hosted by Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary

The April 26-27th Corals to Classrooms Workshop in Galveston was well attended by 33 participants, 19 of whom are new members to TMEA. We were so glad to have teachers all the way from Port Neches to Lewiston join us. We welcome all our new members and hope to see you again soon.

A big thank you to Kelly Drinnin and Shelley DuPuy of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary for hosting the workshop!

	“Vanna” Drinnen shows off the highest grossing item (a ship’s clock) in the auction to Michael Jacoby as Steve Alexander consults his bank balance. President Mark Stamp won the bid!
	Mark Stamp lends encouragement to Marolyn Smith as she outbids everyone for the opportunity to ride with Tony Amos on one of his turtle patrols.
	Coral polyps “feed” during Saturday morning’s activities.
	A Play-Doh coral colony.

Saturday morning began with plastic glove polyp, Lego reef building and watershed activities that were followed by a visit to the NOAA turtle barn to see the Kemp’s Ridley and Loggerhead turtles. After a build your own lunch, members participated in coral spawning, coral reef monitoring and coral coring lectures and activities. On Saturday evening $850 was raised at our Annual Scholarship Auction. Thanks to all who contributed to making this one of our best auctions ever! Thanks to Rick Tinnin (left) for his great job as auctioneer! Amid approaching rain clouds on Sunday morning, the group investigated the shores at the start of the Houston Ship Channel under the guidance of Drs. Steve Alexander and Rick Tinnin. Participants observed many of the usual marsh and shore inhabitants, but the outstanding find was a small squid. Thanks to Mark Stamp, Cindy Ross, Rick Tinnin, Jack Clason, and Nathan Veatch for their assistance in putting on the workshop. A big thanks to Cindy Ross for arranging the GREAT motel package and to Jill Veatch for handling the workshop registration.

Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. Check out their web page for “cool stuff.” Take the ‘Education’ button. http://flowergarden.noaa.gov/

Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Nests on Galveston Beach

Article by Nathan Veatch ~ Photos by Steve Alexander

On Thursday, May 1, 2008, a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle came ashore on the beach in front of the seawall near 39^th Street. She was noticed by a county employee who notified local biologists. They responded quickly and were able to intervene in the nesting process.

Dubbed “Ila,” this Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle had come ashore, crossed a rock groin, and proceeded to dig a nest and deposited 109 eggs. The eggs were collected and were transported to the Padre Island National Seashore where they will be incubated until they hatch and then released.

It was determined from Ila’s tags that she was one of the 1992 “Head Start” sea turtles who were reared and tagged at the Galveston NOAA Sea Turtle Facility as part of an attempt to save this endangered species. She is one of only a few of these “Head Start” turtles to have returned to nest on the Texas coast.

Ila was taken to the NOAA Sea Turtle Facility where she was examined and fitted with a satellite-tracking device.

If you wish to track where Ila has traveled since her release, take the following link: http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/

v    Scroll down and select “TAMUG Kemp’s Ridley Nesters 2007-2008.  

v    Click on Ila (RRV383).

v    On the terms of use page, click on “I accept” and submit.

v    View a map of Ila’s journey.

TMEA members Steve Alexander,  Jack Clason, and Mel Measeles are sea turtle patrol volunteers as are eight other Galveston Bay Area Master Naturalists. Dr. Steve Alexander has been very active in the Galveston Bay Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists and has worked with the Friends of Galveston Island State Park where he shares his vast knowledge to the delight of Master Naturalists, park visitors and school children. This is the second year Steve has volunteered to do a Turtle Patrol, walking five miles up and down East beach in Galveston, in a program sponsored by Texas A & M Galveston.     After release, Ila heads for the water  (left)

GARBOLOGY 101

by Diane Humes

Humans are tool-using animals. Humans have created trash for 2 million years. The evidence of human presence is unequivocal from the first waste flakes of a stone tool made by early Homo sapiens, to the 10,000 + objects currently in low earth orbit.

            Archaeologists study artifacts left behind by ancient civilizations to try to learn what ancient cultures were like. Dr. William Rathje and his students from the University of Arizona study modern garbage. Beginning as an anthropology class exercise in human behavior, since 1973 nearly 750 students have undertaken the task of digging through 14 tons of garbage. They have catalogued, weighed, sorted and counted objects from 15,000 household samples and 15 landfills in the U. S., Canada, and Mexico. This thirty-year study became the Garbage Project, a comprehensive study of “fresh artifacts,” yielding surprising information about the household waste stream and the modern landfill and insights into our modern culture.

            The Garbage Project has found that some “facts” turn out to be false and some human behaviors are counter-intuitive. For example, during times of meat and sugar shortages, the amounts of those items actually increased in the garbage, contrary to expectations. People seemed to be hoarding, which led to increased spoilage, not increased use. People were also found to expand the amount of trash discarded commensurate with the size of the trash can. When the city of Phoenix switched to larger 90-gallon trash containers to facilitate mechanized trash collection and save labor costs, the amount of trash in the landfill increased by one third, although the population decreased by 25%.

            Our methods of dealing with garbage, no matter how modern, are variations of the four ways human civilizations have used for thousands of years – dumping it, burning it, recycling it, and minimizing the volume of material goods, now called “source reduction.” When humans gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for sedentary civilization, garbage accumulation eventually reached a crisis. Although we have been taught that cities arose as a consequence of human settlements and farming, the archaeologist, Gordon R. Wiley argues (only partly in jest) that people “may have been propelled along the path to civilization by the need for a degree of organization sufficiently sophisticated, and a class structure suitably stratified, to make possible the disposal of mounting piles of debris.”

            The modern sanitary landfill originated after 1900 when the connection between illness and open dumps was realized. The procedure consists simply of covering each day’s supply of garbage with about six inches of relatively inert material that won’t decompose – usually soil, but crushed glass and plastic foam have been used. During WWII this was the disposal method preferred by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for all military installations. After the war, millions of soldiers were familiar with sanitary landfills and thousands were trained in their operation. Sanitary landfills were seen as preferable to incinerators and it was thought that they could be built to convert wetlands and other marginal land into useful and productive property. By 1945, one hundred American cities had sanitary landfills; by 1960, there were fourteen hundred.

            Today, the ecological values of wetlands are better known, as are the risks associated with liquids leaching out of landfills into the water table. Landfill sites are carefully selected to avoid groundwater and surface water contamination. Some places like Long Island and Florida are considered completely unsuitable. However, there is still plenty of room in the U.S. for landfills. By one calculation, even at the current rate of garbage production, all American trash for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill space 120 feet deep and 44 miles square – less than 0.1 percent of U.S. surface area.

            A modern sanitary landfill usually begins as a huge hole – 25 to 50 feet deep. If excavated, the soil is saved for covering the trash, but the next step involves installing a bottom lining made from several feet of dense clay and plastic liners to contain liquids. The idea is to make sure that what goes into the landfill, stays in the landfill. Older landfills – 2/3 of all of them – do not have liners. Then gravel or sand is added to a depth of several feet. Garbage is added in an organized fashion to ensure safe access by trucks and equipment and proper rainfall runoff. Pipes are laid throughout to collect liquids and methane gas, which will be generated for about 20 years even after a landfill is closed and capped. Leachate is either piped back into the landfill or directed to the sewage treatment plant. A landfill is designed to have a calculated size and working life span.  An 80-acre landfill will serve a community of 500,000 for about 20 years at a cost of $33 million to operate and $8 million when it is closed.

            After excavating trash down as far as 80 feet, the Garbage Project found that trash in a landfill, even organics and food waste, does NOT decompose. Newspapers are perfectly readable from 1930, hot dogs and heads of lettuce appear untouched after 30 years, bags of lawn clippings are pristine in the middle of the landfill. Other findings are also counter to our expectations. We expect that plastic bottles, disposable diapers, food waste with packaging, and yard waste must be over-filling our landfills. But, in fact, plastic accounts for less than 1% of the volume in a landfill; it is highly compressible and is “light-weighted” by the manufacturers. Disposable diapers account for only 2% of the contents of a landfill, despite that 16 billion are used each year in America. Food waste and packaging account for less than 1% and combined with yard waste takes up 7% of a landfill. The category occupying the highest volume in a landfill is paper, filling up 40% of volume, with newspapers alone occupying 13%. The next largest category is construction debris with 12%.  So, if we wish to reduce the amount of waste being buried for future archaeologists, the most dramatic action would be to remove paper and construction debris from the waste stream.

            As with the sanitary landfill, all other methods of dealing with solid waste – incineration, recycling, and source reduction – have good and bad points that need to be carefully considered. And, all methods are probably needed to tackle our solid waste issues. We are always trying to solve multiple problems with a single solution; landfills used to create land, incineration to generate power, recycling to make money. But, just getting rid of the garbage is a worthy goal like police, fire, or public health, even if it is expensive. It’s not exciting, but sure is important.

Source: Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001. “GARBOLOGY 101” author Diane Humes shares another article with us. Look for the continuation of this article in the next Dolphin Talk.

Visit our website http://statweb.org/TMEA/ and take links to: The National Marine Educators Association (NMEA)http://WWW.marine-ed.org/ and to The Bridge http://www.vims.edu/bridge/

TMEA is an affiliate of NMEA and many of our members attend the conferences held in July. The next NMEA conference will be held July 21-25, 2008 • Savannah, Georgia. With lectures from world-renowned experts, fieldtrips with the host chapter to the best places, and socials that give you an opportunity to enjoy new and old friends, this NMEA experience is not to be missed! Take the button on the TMEA web page to find out more about the Savannah conference.

TMEA 2007/2008 Officers

NDo you have marine-related news or classroom activities that you are willing to share with other marine educators? Would you like to make comments or suggestions for improving the Dolphin Talk  or TMEA? This is a joint effort, let us hear from you!N

Please keep your membership current! Provide the following information and send with appropriate dues money to:

Luz Tellez, TMEA Treasurer

         607 Beckman

         Alice, TX 78332

Membership Form TMEA and/or NMEA

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Your TMEA membership includes a quarterly newsletter, Dolphin Talk, meetings throughout the year, including an annual meeting at C.A.S.T., plus opportunities for tours, field trips, and workshops.

Your NMEA membership includes a subscription to Current, The Journal of Marine Education, a quarterly newsletter, and a national conference.

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Make check out to TMEA  for TMEA membership only. A separate check made out to NMEA will be forwarded if national membership is desired. Mail with this form to:               
Luz Tellez, TMEA Treasurer, 607 Beckman, Alice, TX  78332

If the date on your address label is highlighted, it is time to mail in your dues!

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