Motion of the ocean

The highlight of being evicted by American college freshmen on a springbreak shark course was my bed in our new lodgings that hung from the ceiling in a corner of the sitting room. Octagonally shaped, four industrial-strength chains suspend it as a paper mache bird with tasteful glitter accents looks on.



When not housing seven female biologists, the apartment is rented out to vacationing Americans and my bed is without a doubt a clumsy, oversized sex swing for the boozy, sun-burned holiday makers.

The volunteers' role for the course is one of support for the staff. We help out with the students' kick-ass sea trip as bait cutters and throwers, counter balance in the boats, hand holders, shark handelers, sous chefs, where ever we're needed.

Yesterday I helped out with blacktip baiting and lemon feeding. The latter I did little more than set an anchor and make rude jokes with the staff at the back while the students fed the lemons in a mangrove-lined channel.

I was pulled away from the calm of the channel and Jim, Jon and I started baiting for blacktips. While the steady high winds and equally large seas on the east side of North Bimini made this a difficult and queasy stomach inducing task we were quickly rewarded with 18 blacktips. One was even so kind to jump clear out of the water giving us a quick glimpse of its beautiful body.

I switched boats to help out with the blacktips. The Twin Vee is no Cadillac of the ocean, but she is significantly more comfortable than the 17' skiff I rode in on the way back. How I didn't spew is still a great mystery.

BBFS Project Talk

BBFS' Prinipal Investigator and doctoral student Kristine Stump is examining the effects of nursery habitat loss on juvenile lemon sharks around North and South Bimini Islands in the Bahamas.

Officially in a Marine Protected Area since 1999, this protection lacks clout. The boundaries have yet to be established and defined never mind enforced by a

Without question, a fine location, but Stump's research is heavily tied to a foreign invader on North Bimini, Bimini Bay Resort. Scaled back since its inception, great tracts of mangrove-fringed habitat for the juvenile lemon sharks has still been bulldozed to make way for the resort's condos and estate homes. All of Stump's research questions focus on changes the resort may have induced in areas such as abundance, first year mortality, prey assemblages, yearly growth, multi-year survivalship, habitat use and home range.

Stump is attempting to quantify these changes through PIT tags and telemetry. She is also using agent based modeling as a projection tool for shark survival.

Her work on nurseries is important because she has a unique opportunity for before and after comparisons from the impact of the resort. Her findings could also serve for the basis of protecting other threatened nursery areas both in Bimini and further afield. Concurrent research is also being conducted on comparative DNA analysis.