Under the Sea #222

Mary Cerullo:

looked at me, dove down into the water and he came up and threw this big glob of green seaweed in my lap and I'm going, I wonder what's the right etiquette?

Leigh Peake:

So I All of our work echoes that in trying to broaden how do kids think about what it means to be a scientist? It's not necessarily somebody in a white lab coat with a beaker.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Mean radio show number 222 under the Sea, airing for the first time on Sunday, December 20, 2015. Have you ever explored the ocean floor? Many of us, even long time coastal dwellers, have had little experience with the creatures who roam the depths of the sea. Today we speak with Mary Cerulo, Associate Director of Friends of Casca Bay and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute Chief Education Officer Lee Peek about Maine waters and how humans can better coexist with their water bound neighbors. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

giving back one of my favorite things to do is interview people who are very passionate about the work that they are engaged in.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And one such individual is here with me today. This is Mary Cerulo, who's an award winning author of 21 nonfiction children's books on the ocean, as well as a handbook for teachers on using children's literature

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

in the science classroom.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Her latest book is Shark Expedition. Mary is the associate director of Friends of Casca Bay and has over 40 years experience as a science translator. As such, she has interpreted marine issues

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

for the general public and for marine user groups through the New England Aquarium, the Maine New Hampshire Sea Grant College

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Program, the Great Bay New Hampshire National

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Estuarine Research Reserve, and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Impressive?

Mary Cerullo:

Well, you know, it's a very eclectic, incestuous world of marine science and marine education.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, but still, it's interesting that you have more than just a Maine reach. You also have New Hampshire, New England. And I know that we've talked with people before who have been on the show and they've talked about this whole the Gulf of Maine and how large it is. So it's not just Maine, it's encompassing a much larger area.

Mary Cerullo:

It's called Through Nova Scotia. Yes. And it's all one amazing, very threatened ecosystem warming faster than 99% of the rest of the world's oceans, which is amazing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And why is that?

Mary Cerullo:

It has to do with changes in the current patterns and I think that's primarily it. But they're also investigating why, because cold water does come down from the north and filter into it. But there's only a few entrances, exits into the Gulf of Maine from the ocean side. Way out in Georges bank used to be dry land during the glacial period. They found woolly mammoth bones out there a couple hundred miles out to sea. It's really a fascinating ecosystem.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Now, you live in North Yarmouth, but you are closely associated with the Friends of Casco Bay.

Mary Cerullo:

And my office looks out over the harbor in Portland, South Portland, and it's a very inspirational view because you see all sorts of boats going by and people using the bay in all sorts of different ways. I think one of the things that makes Casco Bay so fascinating is it's beautiful, but there's lots of industry going on. My office overlooks the tanker port that connects to a pipeline that takes oil all the way up into Montreal. And you see the ferry boats go by the windjammers. There's always something going on and it's a truly vibrant bay.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why did you get interested in this particular part of the much bigger ocean. What's your draw to Casca Bay?

Mary Cerullo:

I think it's because, well, when we were thinking of places that had quality of life, we were either thinking of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, or Portland, Maine. My husband had just graduated law school, and so we ended up here. And I worked with an underwater photographer from this area, Bill Kurtzinger, who used to a National Geographic contract photographer. And he's always said it's way more interesting diving in cold water because, first of all, you can hardly see more than a few feet ahead. And that's because it's rich in food plankton versus the tropics, where you can see 100ft in front of you. So if you can master this environment, you see all sorts of things that pop out of the kelp beds or that are hidden at the bottom of the water that you normally can't even detect. So there's a sense of mystery in our waters here. And also because they're so cold, cold water holds more oxygen and carbon dioxide, which supports the whole food web in the ocean. So there's an abundance of life here, even if it's not as colorful as what you see in the tropics. But any chance I get, I like to go to the tropics, too. I used to teach teacher courses and we'd go to St. Thomas during school vacation week and, you know, have to explore the habitats there. And I came up with the concept of, you know, sitting around, we're saying, well, how are we going to explain this to our principals back home? So I came up with the concept of city fish. Country fish, which is the city fish, are the ones that live in the coral reefs, where it's really compact, lots of niches like apartment buildings. It was an area that's active day and night versus the country fish that kind of live close to the bottom, are very attuned to the seasons. And like I like to say, they wear L.L. bean colors, you know, kind of mottled brown and gray to match their habitat. So it works for me. And what's been fun is trying to come up with these analogies to try to explain to people different aspects of the marine environment. So by day, I do that at Friends at Casco Bay, trying to explain threats to, you know, our Casco Bay from, you know, nutrient pollution and ocean acidification. And on the weekends, I do it on a kid level, which is, you know, really fun things like, you know, why you should be friends with sharks, or what if you were trying to find the giant squid kind of thing. And it allows me the opportunity to kind of be a Walter Mitty, like, to put myself in different environments that I'll never get to, like looking for the giant squid or going down in a submarine. But I did go dive with sharks one time, and that was amazing. I highly recommend it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, as you're talking about this, it's

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

making me think about. We just got back from the Caribbean, my family and I. I've never, ever been snorkeling ever, in my many years of being on this planet. And it opens up a whole new world. At first I thought I was going to drown. So I had to get past that. That whole thing in the mouth and be able to bre. That was really tough for me. But when you're looking down there, it's amazing. It's amazing what you see. And it's amazing, like how we were watching a stingray kind of burrow its way into the sand and watching that interaction between the stingray and then the two fish that were kind of around it. And it's something that you don't. I don't know. In all these years of walking around on hard soil, I couldn't even conceive of this other world that existed, even though I know it's been there. And I've lived in Maine all my life.

Mary Cerullo:

That's so perfect, because that is. I mean, people look at the surface of the ocean, looks fine. They don't actually have a chance to get down into it and just discover all the amazing things. When I was saying, I used to take teachers, and the first time that I did, I was snorkeling with them and I almost drowned because I kept going, look at that. When I pointed to everything, because I had worked at the New England Aquarium and I knew aquariums, but it's a whole different experience when you're surrounded by them and you get this. You really get to observe their behavior in a whole way in which you're actually a part of it and you're affecting it. Because, for example, my daughter scuba dives and she just sent me a little video. They were in Hawaii and a sea turtle came up to her and checked her out and swam away. So you become part of that ecosystem and it. I think it changes you in your whole appreciation for this other whole world. It's just wonderful and amazing and quite threatened. Where were you in the Caribbean?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We were off Grand Cayman.

Mary Cerullo:

So fun. So did you go to the Stingray City?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We went to Stingray City, which was also very interesting because I had my 14 year old with me. And she has never done any scuba diving and she's never done any sort of touching of wildlife. And it's amazing to see the people standing there with all these stingrays that seem to be quite acclimated to human beings. They come right up and you can touch them very gently.

Mary Cerullo:

That's so cool.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I mean, she was just amazed by this. And this is just a normal high school freshman I know.

Mary Cerullo:

And that's the age when I started getting interested in the ocean. When I was 13. People would say, what are you going to be when you grow up? And I'm going, I guess I ought to know. So I came up with the idea I'm going to be an oceanologist. And then it took me a year to realize no such word, it's notionographer. But by then I was hooked. But I was on a. I worked with another underwater photographer who I did Sharks books with, Jeff Rotman. And we went to Stingray City and we got there before the cruise ships did. We had two boys that we were photographing. He was photographing and their dad is a really a world famous diver too. And so they. The boys were 12 and 13 and they stuffed their dive vests with squid to attract the stingrays. Not needed. They went crazy. The stingrays, when they eat, they kind of suck the food into their mouths. These boys came up with these welts on their necks. They were quite excited to go back to school to show them off later in the week.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's a very interesting sort of kiss that you have there. Yes.

Mary Cerullo:

Got a hickey from a stinger. But we were there for hours and you could lift them up. They were totally charming. Swam up to you. That's a cool place to go. They started that because fishermen would go into that shallow lagoon and clean their catch. And the stingrays soon realized that this was free food. So they come in every day for that. And now they go from tourist boat to tourist boat, like trick or treaters. And you can see them hopping from one facility, you know, one boat to the other. And then around 4 o' clock they go out and they feed in deep water so it doesn't totally mess up their behavior.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think your point that, that we become part of the ecosystem is a really important one. And we, I think we tend to believe that we're very anthropocentric kind of peoples, you know, we believe that everything is centered around us and that creatures sort of exist maybe, I don't know, they're peripheral to us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But when you go scuba diving or

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

you're there with the stingrays, you real that these are creatures that have personalities. And it's not just a little neural network that's kind of causing them to move forward and back and towards food and away from predators. It's a very interesting and humbling thing to realize that we're coexisting with these very intelligent other creatures.

Mary Cerullo:

Absolutely. And one time I spent a week with dolphins at this place called the Dolphin Research center in Florida where they would offer courses. So from morning to night we studied dolphins, we dived with dolphins, we fed dolphins and observed dolphins. So I was sitting by myself with my feet dangling in the water in this little dock where there were a number of dolphins in a pen, quite a large enclosure. And this one dolphin came up to me, he was a three year old dolphin and he looked at me, dove down into the water and he came up and threw this big glob of green seaweed in my lap. And I'm going, I wonder what's the right etiquette? So I thought about it. So I threw it back. He threw it back at me. I'm throwing it back at him and I'm going, wow, interspecies communications. It's so cool. And then all of a sudden his mother comes up and pushes him away to the other side of the enclosure as if to say, you don't know this stranger. You can't play with strangers. I was so crushed. And then they told me later that this was the third calf she'd had and the first two had died. So it was like a helicopter mama dolphin. It was so weird. But that behavior, of the intricacies of their behavior and their relation to each other and to humans was amazing. They were next to a marina and dolphins like to imitate sounds. So there was this one dolphin that, that had picked up on the sound of the motorboats when they were leaving, he'd go just like that. Or they'd squeak like you. And they would move their mouths even though they don't need their. They don't have vocal cords so they make sounds through their blowholes. So they didn't really need to move their mouths. But it was just being polite because we did too, you know, that kind of thing. There's just so much that we don't understand about these animals, but there's a lot smarter than we think, including, you know, like the stingrays that come up to you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I love the idea that you are a science translator because I Think that this is, this is one of the great things about, I don't know, the last hundred, 200 years or so is all the naturalists that we've had going out into the world and discovering things and learning things and classifying things, but translating that into something that just we mere human, non scientists can understand is pretty big because it opens up the world in a much larger way.

Mary Cerullo:

And having been trained when I thought I was going to be an oceanographer, I majored in geology and biology and I was going to go to grad school. And then I got a job at the New England Aquarium. And I realized quickly that I was a dilettante and not going to get an advanced degree, but enough so that I can talk with scientists who are trained to talk to other scientists. So, you know, they have to use the big words like anthropomorphic. It just drives me crazy. It means man made, you know, anthropomorphic pollution or whatever. So they're really reticent about talking normal, but they get so enthused about if you really ask them about their work, they'll go on and on and on because it's a passion for every one of us. They're really fun to interview. I met a guy at Woods Hole who was studying copepods, which are these little tiny zooplankton animal plankton. They're really important on the ocean food chain. He explained to me that if a cheetah and a copepod were the same size and had a race, that the copepod would beat the cheetah. Trying to use those analogies to explain the importance or the coolness, different aspects of marine life is what I really enjoy. And also just to see scientists like Clyde Roper. He and I did a book together on giant squid and he's the world's expert on giant squid. Man's in his mid-70s, spent his entire career studying squid. And many different kinds of squid are named after him because of his inspiration to his graduate students. But he just gets so excited about giant squid. They actually went down in a submarine, a small two person sub, to look for giant squid at depth. And they wouldn't let him go down because they knew if he saw one, he'd get so excited he'd start thrashing around and probably crash the vessel. But those are the people that are just. If kids and adults could meet some of these people, they would just get so enthused about science too, and not think of it as one more boring subject to have to master.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, you brought some of your books

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

in with you, you brought in Shark Expedition and City Fish Country Fish and Giant Squid. And now we have Spencer, our audio engineer, audio producer over there, and we can't get him to stop reading the books. He's clearly very interested in the Giant squid book and he's already made it through the Shark Expedition book.

Mary Cerullo:

It is so fun. And you know what's neat is I have no artistic talent whatsoever, so I can do the words and I can think about what photos or images we want. But the way designers and artists conceptualize the books, it just, it's like a whole new book to me when I see how they put them together. For example, the Giant Squid book has a cover that's black and red. I never would have thought of a marine book as looking good with black and red cover, but it works. So it's really. That's a whole other aspect. So when I talk, sometimes I go into schools and I talk to kids about the publishing process. You know, first writing and writing and writing and writing, and then the layout, the design and the proof and all that kind of stuff to get it to fruition. That's been a really fun learning experience for me too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How have you brought some of your

Mary Cerullo:

broad

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

range of experiences with publishing and writing and doing the oceanography work? Even without a. An advanced degree, but certainly working within this field, how have you brought this back to Maine? As the associate director of Friends of Casco Bay, how does that work translate for you?

Mary Cerullo:

Most of the work that I do for Friends is explaining the science that we do. We're an advocacy group, but it's science based, so we collect a lot of data. We have wonderful volunteers who sample the water quality of the bay, the temperature, the dissolved oxygen, the pH. From April through October, along 35 sites around Casco Bay. We have a science staff that goes out on our research vessel and they sample year round from the surface to the bottom. We do other kinds of exploration of pesticides flowing into the bay or all sorts of other projects like eelgrass, puppies, population or disappearance so that that information doesn't ever just sit on a shelf. We use it to advance our advocacy by either getting the general public involved in issues or working with the legislature or working with regulators for the state or the national level. So all that requires translating the data into something that's meaningful. And like you said before, people think of themselves first, including me. So it really has to come back as, why does it matter to me? I'm trying to make a living. I'M trying to get my kids up in the morning and go to school. Why does this matter to me or to my kids? So that's part of the challenge. And one of the fun things about Friends is that it's a small enough organization. So when we start on a project, for example, we try to distill down a lot of our issues into a one page explanation, like an elevator speech. So that if people say, well, why, why is this important? That we can actually all say, first of all, the same approach, but also say it accurately, which is really important to keep your credibility. So we sit around, we brainstorm. I tell you, the editing that goes on in that office is more than goes on for me to make a whole book. But we just want to make sure that we get the information right and we try to tell stories to make it compelling. Because we've discovered that if you can break it down to one person's experience or how it's going to impact you, that just resonates so much better than sharing the data, which works if you're in a scientific forum. So we actually have to think about two different audiences at every time because we also want to maintain our credibility with scientists, especially since we're a non profit, we're not a research organization per se, and I think we've done that really well for over 25 years. But it also kind of sets us apart because we're a conservation organization first, but we're also very careful of when we take a stand. So sometimes it takes us longer to come to a position. But once we make that statement, you know, it's usually easier to convince the, the powers that be that we're standing on solid ground.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I like the fact that you call yourselves Friends of Casco Bay, as if they're sort of two living entities, which they really are. And you're a group of individuals that are passionate about this body of water which contains all these living entities and so thus becomes itself a living entity. I'm sure that was very purposeful as well.

Mary Cerullo:

Well, and it actually started as a grassroots organization with people who were concerned about the health of Casco Bay. There had been a report that came out that said Casco Bay was one of the most polluted estuaries in the nation. It was based on really small, small data, but it got people energized to start thinking we really have to protect this place because it appears pristine. Especially if you go to some places like the Mississippi Delta or parts of Florida. You can see problems from red tides and pollutants coming down through the bay, it's a lot harder to see it. And like you said, it's really harder to get into that cold water and really experience it yourself. So that organization was purposely started by Citizen Action. And even though we now have a staff, we have a Casco Bay keeper who patrols the bays, a spokesperson for the bay, it's still so much a volunteer organization we wouldn't exist without. This year we had 100 volunteers sampling the water, plus people doing beach cleanups, plus people doing storm drain stenciling, community events, talking to their neighbors about stopping using pesticides and fertilizers. So it's still very citizen oriented.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think it's interesting because believe it or not, I do swim in the main waters. Not for very long periods of time, but long enough. And I will sometimes open my eyes underwater, even though it's very salty. But having snorkeled and you have your mask in front of you and the water becomes almost like the air you would breathe. And once you do that, and once you see the water in that way, you can't imagine dumping something overboard. You can't imagine putting something into. Essentially, I don't know what could be considered the air that the fish are breathing or that you are swimming around in. But before you do that, it's almost like, oh, well, what's the big deal? You know, I'm out on my boat, you know, who cares? There's so much water out there, it's all got to get dispersed. And it's funny how things shift when you're actually in it.

Mary Cerullo:

And it's so true because, you know, they always had this expression, dilution is a solution to pollution because there's so much water. What am I little action going to do? And I think one of the recent conversations about climate change is that everybody can do something. And, you know, we use sewage treatment facilities, you know, we flush the toilet, we throw away our garbage. But if everybody can do one thing to change one small practice, tune up their car, pick up their dog poop, that kind of stuff, it all has a cumulative impact so that we're not going to change our whole lifestyles. But if people are aware of things that they're doing unintentionally that are impacting the marine environment, in my case, but also air and water, it really can make a difference. We've even, always, even on the staff, we're discovering new things that are impacting the ocean that we didn't even think about. Microbeads, which are these scrubs that are in cleansers and cosmetics. Well, research has found that they're getting into the ocean food chain because they go right through sewage treatment plants. We're just realizing that washing your fleece jacket, which you can't live without in Maine, is getting thousands of threads at each washing into the ocean food chain. So don't wash your fleece jacket very often. That kind of thing. Simple things. But if people know what to do, that's the thing I found about Mainers. They all want to do the right thing. That's why they're here. That's why they've made sacrifices. The weather, salaries. It's to have the quality of life in Maine, and a lot of that is tied to the ocean. So they want to do what they can do to protect it. So I think we come, fortunately, with the mindset that is very geared to protecting the environment. Where are there other parts in the country where they're there for jobs or warm weather or whatever? And if you're a transplant, sometimes you just want life to be the way it was from where you left. So you want that perfect lawn down to the water's edge? No, because everything that goes into your lawn or off your lawn goes into the water. And I think people here are more sensitive to that. But we always can use a knock on the head and a reminder that there's a lot more that we can do. But we find that people work better with a positive attitude than guilt. We have enough guilt in our personal lives.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You know, that point is so important because I do believe there's a lot of people who feel very passionate about the environment and about, quote, saving the planet. And as a doctor, I have not ever found guilt to be particularly motivating to any of my patients, ever. There's never a time where I've sat down to the patient and said, you know, that you're killing your children's lungs by smoking in front of them. That never engenders any sort of relationship or any sort of possibility, positive change on their part. However, if you can go into something with a bit of information and sort of some sort of sense that we're really all in this together and we're all human, and we're all really trying to do the best we can and have a positive attitude about it. I think people do want to change, and I think people do want to feel like they're doing something that's moving us all forward collectively.

Mary Cerullo:

And we also have a saying, think local, act local. Because when you look at the whole. The whole climate Change thing, for example, and the world impact, you just shut down. I mean, there's nothing I can do. But here in Maine, one of our big sources of carbon dioxide in the ocean, which makes the water more acidic, is from nitrogen, which is in sewage, it's in fertilizers, it's in air deposition. So stop putting fertilizer in your lawn. Simple, you know, and it really has an impact. So there are things that we can do locally. But I find my whole life has been geared to protecting the environment. And if I think too long, I just go, well, glad I'm getting on, I can't handle this anymore. But if I think I take it in small little pieces locally, I have a lot better perspective.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I think after listening to this conversation that people are going to be interested in the books that you've written, especially if they have small children or larger children like our buddy Spencer over here. How can people learn more about the books that you're writing? And also how can people learn more about Friends of Casco Bay?

Mary Cerullo:

Oh, okay. Well, Friends at Casco Bay has a great website called cascobay.org one word. Casco Bay. And we also will be announcing on our website our annual meeting and our volunteer recognition event which is in late January. And anybody's invited to that, it's free so they can get more information on that and if they want to find out about my books. And sometimes I go to schools, although not very much because I have a full time job. I have a website which is some really smart 20 somethings made up for me one afternoon. It's called maryamsarullo.com so it's C, E, R, U, L, L, O or I think my bio is on our website too, so you can see how to spell the name. But it's fun having those two different lives, I have to say, one for kids, one for adults. And they, they each have their own perks and challenges.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, you've really inspired me to go out and learn more about the ocean and to try to do what I can to keep the ocean clean. The ocean where I live and the ocean where I travel to. So I appreciate your coming in and talking with me today about this. We've been speaking with Mary Cirillo who is an award winning author of 21

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

nonfiction children's books on the ocean and

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

also the associate director of Friends of Casco Bay. Thanks for the work that you do.

Mary Cerullo:

Thank you. Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting for me, having lived in Maine for many years now, to see the evolution that the Gulf of Maine Research Institute has undergone.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Lee Peek has been part of this evolution.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

She is the Chief Education Officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

She does extensive work with K12 teachers

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

and students across Maine in order to

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

nurture scientific literacy in the next generation of Mainers.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Lee lives in South Berwick. Thanks so much for coming in.

Leigh Peake:

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I love that you are the Chief Education Officer. I love that we have these now. We have had chief Financial officers and chief Executive officers, but you've got this really important title, what does it Mean?

Leigh Peake:

It's a great question. A lot of people ask me why does a marine research institute have an education division to start out with? And I think part of it is that the Gulf of Maine Research is institute has a long standing commitment to the problems that we're working on are multi generational in nature and so it's partly our job to prepare the generation that's going to inherit the problems and challenges from us. And so that's part of why education is such a core part of the mission.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Now, you bring in a lot of children over the course of a year. I know my kids have been to the Gulf of Humane Research Institute, and it seems like there's always something new to talk about. What are some of the favorite things that you've seen happen there?

Leigh Peake:

So the highlight of our days at GMRI is when groups of 50 or 60 fifth and sixth graders come through the building. And one of the most exciting things we've seen is an evolution in the underlying dispositions of those kids. They're getting more sophisticated, they're asking more sophisticated questions. They're highly sensitive to issues of climate. And we love seeing that evolution over time and love being a part of it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah. I'm thinking back to my early association with places that we would call, I guess, aquariums, more like. And we were just like, oh, like there's the pretty starfish and, you know, here's an octopus and here's. But what you're talking about really is science in a much. On a much broader scale.

Leigh Peake:

Absolutely. I mean, the content that we deliver right now in the Cohen center for Interactive Learning is essentially called complex systems, because the Gulf of Maine ecosystem is a complex system. So kids investigate how to Cod, herring, copepod, lobsters, and most importantly, people intersect in the Gulf of Maine. And it reflects the work that our scientists are doing right there in the building to understand how those can key species are intersecting and are changing over time, especially with the changes in climate.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How far does the Gulf of Maine actually reach? It's a pretty big area.

Leigh Peake:

Exactly. So the Gulf of Maine stretches all the way from Cape Cod up to Nova Scotia. And so I like to tease my Massachusetts friends that when they're swimming in the Cape Cod Bay, they're actually swimming in the Gulf of Maine. And you've probably heard a lot of the news that we're warming 99% faster than the other oceans on the planet. So we've turned into a little bit of opportunity to investigate what does that really look like and to involve kids in investigating what that looks like.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So how do you involve the kids?

Leigh Peake:

So we have two big education programs, and I'm going to talk about, especially our citizen science program, where we actually have kids out in the field investigating invasive species in Maine. And so they're looking at things like green crabs, but. But they're also looking at freshwater invasive species as well as plant species in the forests and fields. And underlying that is getting kids to understand that the scientific process has ways of thinking that are inherent to it that give us A way of thinking about the problems that we face every day. The second program is the one we offer in the Cohen center, which is Lab Venture. And again, we're really focused on how do kids explore the scientific process and get an idea about what that looks like and feels like so they can begin to apply that in their own lives.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It was at one point not that cool to be into science. Now, this was several decades ago as a female going into a scientific profession. It just wasn't. I don't know, it wasn't something that kids really gravitated towards. But now it seems like you can go into science and you're just as highly regarded as someone who goes into athletics. Say, why do you think that that transition has happened?

Leigh Peake:

That's a great question. I think it has become much more popularized to be a little more nerdy, especially for girls. There's been a big shift. So we see makerspaces, we see popular television. That's whether for little kids or older kids, that is focused on science and scientific investigation. We see TV shows where the nerds are the heroes. So you think of something like numbers, that television show where the mathematician is the hero. I think there's a lot that's changed in popular culture that's allowed kids to sort of come out of the closet as nerds and really embracing science.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's funny because you're talking about these. What's happening right now. What was going on back when I was growing up was we had Slim Goodbody. He was all about the healthiness back in The, I don't know, 70s, I guess. And then we had Bill Nye, the science guy. He came along. I think he actually lives in Maine somewhere. So we have these. We have these iconic figures that have populated children's television for quite some time. But you're right now it seems like it's just everywhere. And it's not. It's kind of a given that girls would just be as likely to go into science as boys would.

Leigh Peake:

I think another big factor is if you think about the kinds of things that have focused on popularizing forensic science as another factor where, you know, it's not that you. We try to. All of our work echoes that in trying to broaden. How do kids think about what it means to be a scientist? It's not necessarily somebody in a white lab coat with a beaker and that you can be out on the ocean doing science, or you can be in the woods, or you can be doing all the things you love and still be doing science and. And I think all of that adds up to kids really embracing it a lot more strongly.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I'm thinking about my 14 year old, she's almost 15, and she loves medical detective shows. She loves House, and she loves all the shows that she loves bone. She loves all the shows you're talking about that are forensic oriented, which is kind of funny because we think of it, maybe that's a little gruesome. Maybe some of these shows, they shouldn't really be that appealing, but somehow they are.

[Unidentified voice]:

Yeah.

Leigh Peake:

And I wouldn't underestimate the gruesome factor. We just did a video of one of our scientists, Dr. Wal Golay, who does extracts a bone from the ear of a tuna that lays down the evidence of that tuna's life, how old it is, the conditions it grew up under. And it's a fairly gruesome process to extract the bone. And we have kids out on the back lawn looking at that every day. And the cool factor is very high when we split open the tuna head.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Now, why did you get into this? You spent, you said, I think, 17, 18 years in publishing.

Leigh Peake:

Yeah. So my life really has been committed to education in various capacities for my whole career. And one of the things that I like best about publishing was the opportunity to get voices out into the marketplace of people who are doing great work with kids and teachers. The job at Gulf of Maine Research Institute gave me an opportunity to get my hands a little bit dirty, actually doing the work hands on with kids and teachers. And that's been absolutely fantastic. I'm not a marine scientist, so it's also been a huge learning opportunity for me to learn a new area. And most of all, there's an amazing team at gmri and we really do operate as a team. That's been to inherit these amazing programs and colleagues has been a wonderful experience.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've had people on the show from the Bigelow Lab, and of course we have great laboratories, the Jackson Lab up in Bar Harbor. Do you work together with these other institutions?

Leigh Peake:

We do, especially our research scientists collaborate with pretty much everyone around the state who's thinking about or working on the Gulf of Maine ecosystem, including at University of Maine and even down into New Hampshire and Massachusetts. I would say one of the key things for GMRI is that we have an interdisciplinary team. So we're looking at it from all aspects, biology, physics, the economic resources of the Gulf of Maine and how market prices drive what fishermen are delivering onto the dock. All of those factors. And I would say in the education programs we're trying to replicate that and show science as an interdisciplinary activity. School systems tend to artificially divide it into chemistry, physics, bio. But in reality, the real world is multidisciplinary and the problems are multidisciplinary. So collaboration is a key part of everything that we do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting that from the beginning you've embraced this translation aspect of science. I know that when I went up to visit the Jackson Lab, they were saying that this had been something that was relatively new, new over the last maybe 10 years. That's translating bench science into something that could be more readily understood by perhaps non scientists. But you've been doing this for a long time. Why was that important from the beginning?

Leigh Peake:

It's a great question. I would say one of our fundamental beliefs at GMRI is that the problems that we will all be facing over the coming generations have at their heart something where scientific evidence can help us make decisions and make choices about it. And that it's our job to find ways to communicate that science out in ways that suit the consumer and the learner. And that has sort of revved up everything we do to think about how do we help fishermen understand what's going on in the Gulf of Maine? How do we help the next generation of kids understand that? And how do we help everyone think about using evidence and scientific information as part of the decision making process?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You partnered with local purveyors of food to work on sustainable seafood. And the people from St. Joseph's actually wanted me to know about this, that you have been working with them to make sure that their seafood is sustainably harvested. Where did that come from?

Leigh Peake:

So it's one of my favorite parts of the work we do at gmri. A huge percentage of the seafood that's eaten is eaten in restaurants and eaten not in your home. And so one of the things that we try to do is drive the joy for underutilized species by working with culinary partners and other sorts of organizational institutional partners so that people are eating fish that we can fish plentifully and try to drive market demand for those fish so that fishermen are more inclined to fish for them and bring them into the dock and get a higher price for them at the dock. So part of it is seeing what we eat as well as what we fish as all part of the whole ecosystem.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And have you been able to introspect kids in eating more of these sort of different and diverse fishes?

Leigh Peake:

Such a great question. At the college level, we see colleges, college kids demanding, as part of their demand for local foods and healthy foods, demanding Sustainable fish and demanding local fish. So our programs do work with some of the colleges to make sure that what they put on the plate in the colleges is traceable fish and sustainable fish. We just had the first, first public school system in Chicopee, Massachusetts sign up so that the public school system will also be serving Gulf of Maine responsibly harvested fish. So I think, as with so many things, the change is coming from the kids themselves.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Now, why Chickpea, Massachusetts?

Leigh Peake:

I actually don't know the history of why in Chickpea. We'll have to ask Jen Levin, who's head of our Sustainable Seafood division, about why it was Chickadee.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, it has been interesting for me to watch maybe not the fish so much, but the demand, even at the younger grades, for things like organic foods grown locally, school gardens. And this was something that was unheard of maybe 20 years ago, but now it's caught on. So it seems as though the sustainably harvested fish is going to be similar.

Leigh Peake:

I hope so. I mean, I hope that kids, having grown up with parents who have a different kind of appreciation than my parents did for local foods and sustainable foods and for the ecosystem around us, that these kids will continue their whole lives to demand that they understand where their food came from and that it's being collected in a way that it can be collected for generations to come. So I think there's a really good future for anyone who can trace the origins of the food and trace it from being picked up in the ocean all the way to the dock.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What does the future hold for the children who are getting educational services at gmri?

Leigh Peake:

Well, as many people have heard, we've just received quite a bit of funding from both NASA and NOAA to completely reimagine the Cohen center for Interactive Learning. And it's an incredible, incredibly exciting and slightly terrifying moment to think about delivering on those goods. But there's three big pieces to that. One is renovating the content that kids experience when they walk through the Cohen Center. So it's a much more current, state of the art technology. The content will be focused more squarely on climate and climate change and looking at weather and climate. Climate and NOAA also invested in us to bring adults into the space to have learning experiences around sea level rise and storm surge in Portland Harbor. So it's a big stretch for us having adults in the Cohen center and thinking about how to design content for that. So we're really excited about that opportunity. We also will have a new technology backbone in the Cohen center that'll allow us to deliver content out into science and technology centers and classrooms around the state and in fact, anywhere in the country over broadband. And finally, it's allowing us to design curriculum materials and interactive technologies that can be used by teachers in the classroom, before the visit, when they come, and after they leave. And that kind of connection to the classroom is so important to be able to extend the experience from the Cohen center out to a multi day investigation back in the classroom. So it's really exciting times.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've spoken to any number of children who have told me that they are specifically interested in becoming oceanographers. There's some interesting draw, even when we're young, to the ocean and the science of it. What do you think that's all about?

Leigh Peake:

It's amazing. We see that all the time that kids, especially as they come up around age 10 to 14, are fascinated by the ocean. I think the ocean is still one of the most mysterious places. There's so much we can't see there and so much going on under the surface, literally that kids are drawn to that mystery and drawn to the enormity of the ocean. So we see kids from inland and western Maine still showing up at our door saying, I really want to be a marine biologist. And so we're wondering, wow, how did that happen and how can we help that? I think it's the mystery of it that has fascinated people for ages.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You know, Lee, what is your connection to Maine initially?

Leigh Peake:

Yeah, I grew up in Virginia and Maine was this mythical place up north filled with moose and we weren't sure what else, but it wasn't necessarily a place you were thinking supposed to go and then had the opportunity to take a job in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And I thought, okay, if I can live in this mythical place, wouldn't that be amazing? And so I did and set down some roots in South Berwick and I've loved it ever since. And I think the mythology lives, you know, about all that is Maine and the diversity of everything that you can find and be in Maine. It's amazing. It's an amazing place.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I agree. And having lived in this mythical place for many, many years, I think there still continues to be some interesting energy that floats about even as we're existing as normal humans walking the earth. I think the ocean is actually a big part of it.

Leigh Peake:

I think so too. And Maine has a very unusual education ecosystem in the sense that it's highly local, controlled. So teachers have a lot of control in their classroom. Across the country, teachers are being stripped of their professional responsibility and freedom to do what they think is right in their classroom. That's not true here in Maine. We still invest a lot in our teachers. We made an investment in broadband technology to schools and public libraries. And that's an amazing infrastructure that we're able to use at the Cohen center, coming off of the Cohen center technology, and simply the opportunity to work at population scale in Maine. So in my past, I've tried to work in places like New York City and la and attempting to move those systems was nearly impossible. And yet here in Maine, we can look at the whole system and talk to the operators within that system, and it's an amazing opportunity.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As an educator, what do you personally hope to see happen at gmri, say, over the next five years?

Leigh Peake:

I think the most important thing to me is that we're moving more squarely into helping kids look at the scientific evidence around ecosystem change and climate change and make decisions for themselves about what they see in that evidence. And moving into that public use of evidence and scientific understanding is also a key part for us. I think that when we look out ahead, we're trying to prepare kids for jobs that don't even exist yet. And so it emphasizes the need to build in kids a set of skills around critical thinking and being a critical consumer of information, being both producers and consumers of science, even if you're just a citizen. All of that, I think, is on our horizon to keep moving the needle on all of those fronts. We also imagine a world where every single child in Maine at some point in their career has an experience with GMRI and GMRI science. Maybe even once a year they're having an experience with that science. That would be amazing. And I think finally, we also imagine doing a lot more work with teachers and helping teachers understand how they can use all the resources that we're bringing bringing to the table in order to change how they're teaching math and science.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Lee, what's the GMRI website so that people can learn more?

Leigh Peake:

We're@gmri.org we also are on Twitter and Facebook for GMRI and there's a lot more information there for those who are interested.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We in the past interviewed Alan Lishness, who was previously at gmri, and he had interesting things to say. So people can also go back and listen to that podcast. But for now, I think this has been a fascinating conversation. We've been speaking with Lee Peek, who is the Chief Education Officer at the

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Thanks so much for coming in today.

Leigh Peake:

Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

been listening to Lovemain radio show number 222 under the Sea. Our guests have included Mary Cerulo and Lee Peek. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

have heard about them here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our under the Sea show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.

[Unidentified voice]:

I saw her today she's in the family waiting in the back of my mind I thought what if that child had been mine Just give it time. I think of things that we said while we were laying in bed and wonder had I been able to redo what things have been fine Just give it time oh, just give it time. I can take back the words I hurt you, you. I know mistakes were made let's give it space and time. I did my number today and as I put it away I found a pair of new socks in the basket all balled up with mine Just give it time oh, just give it time. I can't take back the word I hurt you. I know mistakes were made let's give it space and time Sam, I got you. I know mistakes were made I'll give you this. I know mistakes were made. I'll give you this. I made mistake.