The South Bristol School, with a grant from the Edward A. Myers Marine Conservation Fund, recently bought and is slowly stocking a saltwater aquarium.
The aquarium already hosts barnacles, green crabs, hermit crabs, a pair of small lobsters, lumpfish, starfish, whelks and other sea creatures.
The tank serves as an educational tool for South Bristol students, providing lessons in marine biology, chemistry, geography and math.
The students also learn about the food chain – a startling education for some young students, who didn’t immediately understand why sea urchins and other prey, in the aquarium one Friday afternoon, didn’t greet them Monday morning.
South Bristol School Principal Scott White sees the early education as a positive, despite the temporary trauma. “Would you rather learn about the food chain from a book, or would you rather learn about the food chain from watching it happen?” he asked.
The school’s pursuit of the aquarium began with a grant.
South Bristol School (SBS) receives $1000 annually from the Edward A. Myers Marine Conservation Fund. During White’s tenure, the grants have paid for a composting project, the construction of a greenhouse and a study to determine the feasibility of a windmill on school property.
The school used $2000 from two years of grants, along with leftover funds from the windmill study, to buy the aquarium from Freeport-based Aussie Aquariums of Maine.
White wrote the grants every year until 2011, when two students, eighth grader Elizabeth Gilbert and seventh grader Julianna Preston, took over.
Aussie Aquariums co-owner Stephen Wood maintains the tank. He visits monthly to change the water and monitor the chemistry of the tank. Wood also supplied some of its early inhabitants – crabs and the doomed sea urchins – after a diving expedition off Bar Harbor.
For other aquarium residents, the school applied for and received a Dept. of Marine Resources permit and enlisted Clay Gilbert, a commercial fisherman, member of the South Bristol School Committee and father to two SBS students, to land the lobsters and other creatures.
The students also helped stock the aquarium, bringing crabs and other small animals back from nature walks.
The project has sparked community interest to the extent the school has been forced to turn away prospective tenants of the aquarium. “You have to slowly integrate different species,” White explained.
The students feed the aquarium’s inhabitants herring, clams and mussels. Mealtime provides an opportunity to “witness Darwinism at work,” White said, as the species attempt to out-maneuver one another for sustenance.
In the first days after the introduction of the lobsters, the crustaceans “dug a substantial amount of the sand up” to the point of crumbling Wood’s elaborate rock wall.
“That’s a real lesson in how ocean life really works,” White said.
The students (and White) learned another lesson after welcoming two sculpins to the tank. The spiny, ugly fish, frequent guests in lobster traps, “ate everything,” White said, prompting corrective action. “We removed them and placed them back in their natural habitat.”
The aquarium serves as an “ongoing, every day science class” and also as a part of the curriculum. The students track the dates of feedings and the amounts and types of food and monitor the water temperature, as well as ammonia, pH, and salinity levels.
The classes subsequently use the data to form and test various hypotheses. For example, the students might hypothesize that an increase in food will result in higher levels of ammonia, a waste product.
Jordan Farrin, a seventh grader, and Ayla Liss, a sixth grader, serve as the unofficial student overseers of the tank.
“We’re just interested in the sea life and we care about it,” Liss explained.
Farrin and Liss have prior experience with marine life – Farrin aboard a lobster boat, Liss alongside her mother at a marine biology camp.
Liss lists the lumpfish as her favorite creature. “It just looks very funny,” she said, and she likes how the tiny fish, also known as a lumpsucker, sticks to the side of the tank “and doesn’t float away.”
Farrin prefers the starfish. “They cling to everything,” she said, and when they climb the sides of the tank, “you can see all their little feet.”
Farrin said she’s learning “how different things live” and “what they do” on a daily basis, while Liss enjoys watching the organisms feed. “Crabs are aggressive. They are scavengers,” she said. “If there are other crabs, they have to fight for it [food].”
The girls might end up listing their aquarium duties on a resume someday. “I’m definitely going to be a marine biologist,” Liss said.
White hopes the aquarium will help bring the ocean to all the students, not just those who, because of the occupations or pastimes of their parents, relatives and friends, already experience marine life on a regular basis.
“Our kids drive by the bay all the time,” White said. “It’s important to bring that to them if they haven’t had the opportunity.”
The next step, White hopes, will be to install a webcam to broadcast a live feed of the tank on the school’s website.
“To recreate a climate and a habitat that’s right down the road and bring it here is pretty cool,” White said. “The kids love it.”
