Academic News

Now that we have passed the first half of the spring semester the faculty are leading lectures, field activities, and

Photo by Cristina Liberati

discussions where the students are applying concepts and techniques learned throughout their time here. The students have shown their extreme creativity in assignments that they presented analyzing different types of environments or what they learned after the whale watching season. They had lectures on natural protected areas and on the impacts that globalization is posing to the environment. The students had the chance to see, analyze, and discuss implications of these topics after visiting the cannery in town and also the places where the power plant and the same cannery dispose their residual waters. Taking advantage of the lowest tides they collected data and samples on a sea grass field. From my view, I am very pleased to see what they are accomplishing and the creativity they use to show their results… and there is still more to come. Dr. Hector Perez Cortes M., Center Director

Student Reflections

We're all going crazy here in Mexico. Ya'll don't even know. With less than a month left here in Puerto San Carlos and exams approaching quickly, school is dominating our thoughts but we're still making time for fun. Soccer has become a

Photo by Haley Hart

new SFS pastime, including students and staff alike. We've now set our sights on local competition and plan soon to join in on games in the Plaza, where we will most certainly get our traseros kicked.

While classes are always interesting, lately we've been mixing things up a bit. Sacha, one of the interns, lead our final Sustainable Development class, exploring the environmental and social impacts of our consumer choices. Then, in Resource Management, student presentations on gender issues in fisheries made for an imaginative lecture. Students and staff participated in a game simulating gender roles in fisheries that had us on hands and knees, digging for “fish” in the form of rocks and shells. On Saturday we had our final Coastal Ecology field exercise. After a short panga ride, we waded through algal blooms to measure sea grass density and corresponding species diversity. It was wet and wild, as we extracted core and quadrant samples, taking breaks for water fights with the pangueros. We're all looking forward to our final camping trip this week, but we're also constantly reminded that soon we will be heading home and leaving our little piece of paradise behind. Anne Fitzgerald-Pittman, Hollins University and Haley Hart, Transylvania University

Last Tuesday morning, right after breakfast, the students all jumped into the pangas and went across the bay with our snorkels and wetsuits to go scalloping. We split into four different groups, each measuring the abundance found in different size quadrants. After a few moments of hesitation (because it was a pretty cold and cloudy morning) we jumped in. We collected five scallops from each quadrant observed, and took them back to the lab. We studied the ratio of the sizes of the scallops to how big their cayo (muscle) was, which is the part of the scallop typically sold in grocery stores. This was done to help better understand how the fishermen know which scallops to get, and which will bring them the most profit. The following day we had to prepare for our weekly social, with the theme “anything superhero.”  Needless to say the students were very creative. We had costumes ranging from: the Incredibles, to a super-pangero, and even the powerpuff girls were able to make an appearance. We finished off the night with a showing of none other than “Napoleon Dynamite,” and a feast of quesadillas. Jessica Decker, Concordia College and Tim Siok, Boston University

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