Project SOAR found its way when a group of us landed at Midway Atoll within the newly created Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.
Accompanying us was Fred. Fred had snuck into my suitcase when I was visiting Paula Vertikoff's Kindergarten classroom in Dublin, Ohio. According to the kids, the little monkey had been a part of their classroom for the entire year even though they'd never seen him. Apparently, Fred would make a mess. Kids would come to school, see something missing or disturbed, and Fred would get the blame.......
At about the same time, I was gathering questions from kids ----- questions they wanted me to investigate while on Midway. Paula's kids wanted to know if monkeys lived in the islands. If you take a look at Fred's photo at the top of my blog, you can clearly see that Fred found at least one, his new friend, Coco.
But other kindergarteners asked other kinds of questions that led to deep thinking about what we are all doing to the ocean. As we walked around the islands, plastic was everywhere. So too were hundreds and hundreds of albatross, dead from ingesting plastic toys, bottle caps, toothbrushes, lighters, and pieces of broken buckets and buoys.
The sands of Midway were also filled with plastic. Plastic gone micro. Tiny fragments of blue, red, and lavender plastic mingled with beautiful fragments of coral and shells. What food webs will these toxic plastic pieces enter.
One child at another school asked many questions about plastics. She had gone to the Papahanaumokuakea website and studied the issues related to plastics in the North Pacific. Evelyn knew more than I about the ocean plastic problems and when I visited Midway I felt a strong sense of responsibility to be her eyes and ears.........She had asked me if we could form a research organization to help the albatross and other ocean life.
Standing on the beaches and watching the albatrosses live and die, fly and lay their bodies down, I could imagine young people wishing each of the birds could soar.........I could sense a past, my own childhood when plastics were first entering the oceans. Now that my generation has filled the seas with plastic wastes, it is well beyond time to clean up and it is definitely time to find new ways to eliminate or greatly reduce our use of plastics.
SOAR --- Save Our Albatross/Research ---- is a way to help young people reduce plastic use in their schools, homes, and communities. SOAR was publicly launched in Honolulu when student leaders from each of the Hawaiian Islands met to find service projects for their schools in the coming years. Challenges to eliminate use of bottled water, increasing the recycling of plastic bags, and other ideas are being initiated. On the mainland, Breidablik Elementary students met the challenge of SOAR during their summer break, promising to cleanup the beach and stream near their school that is within the Jump Off Joe Creek Watershed.
No matter where you live, you can join SOAR by removing plastic debris from your watershed so that it does not float on downstream to the sea.
Each year, adult albatross fly out to find food for their young. They search mainly from flying fish eggs and squid. Too often, they find plastic that looks like food. In just one year, they bring back 5 tons of plastic. They soar widely, flying more than a million miles in a lifetime. Albatross fly to the mainland. They fly north and west. We can hope our efforts will lead to cleaner seas in the future. When Evelyn is my age let's have a clean ocean.
Ron Hirschi Marrowstone Island, July 2009
27 July 2009
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X310 Plastic Ocean Activity
It's me, Fred, the Monkey.
If you look closely, you can see I wear X310's leg band around my neck. It's to remind me of her. She was a Laysan Albatross. She was born in March 2008 and lived on Pihemanu, one of the most remote atolls on earth, now part of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.
You can wonder about Pihemanu and about X310. She didn't live very long, dying in June 2008. Her parents flew thousands and thousands of miles finding food for her. But x310, like lots of baby albatrosses died before she got to soar the seas. Some albatrosses fly three million miles during their life. Like X310's parents, their sea is a new challenge in food finding because of our actions on land.
Adult albatrosses fly more than a thousand miles just to get a single meal for their babies. But the ocean is full of plastic. And if you read my buddy, Ron's blog and website, you learn about plastic in the sea. It is everywhere and babies like X310 die because they eat so much plastic, they can not get it out of their stomachs.
Where's all this plastic come from?
Where does it go?
Here is a simple activity:
Get up from your chair and walk around the classroom or wherever you are sitting.
Write down each thing around you that is made of plastic.
Everybody compare lists and make a total of the plastic products.
Now, the hard part of this activity:
Can you find alternatives for the things you use, alternatives not made of plastic?
Maybe start with drinking water from a fountain or glass or reuseable container?
Maybe start a really good recycling project?
Maybe make some art from recycled plastic?
Learn more on links here on this site and others.
Talk about times with no plastic.
X310 would have appreciated if people, just a few years ago had decided to make a plastic-free world for you....
You and X310.
Learn how you can SOAR with FRED by arranging a visit with Fred and his ocean teaching kit by emailing his banana provider at whalemail@waypoint.com
FEEDING A BABY ALBATROSS OCEAN ACTIVITY
What you need:
Pint size plastic beverage container with wide mouth (about 1.5 inches) ---This approximates the size of a baby albatross stomach and esophagus.
Important to have the lid too.
Enough plastic items (bottle caps, toothbrush, legos, fishing line, small chunks of nylon rope, markers, pens, more bottle caps and even a few more bottle caps since they are pretty much the most common marine debris.
Talk with your audience of kids of any age about ocean debris and the way adult albatrosses fly out a few hundred or even a thousand miles to find flying fish eggs and squid for the little ones. They return to Pihe Manu or up on the Northeast shore of Kauai, find their young one among thousands of others and begin to feed by regurgitating "food".......
As you talk about this, have the kids place one or two pieces of the plastic into the bottle.
Replace cap with each addition of plastic. Shake gently to mimic bird moving around the nesting area a bit.
Remove cap. Shake gently to mimic the bird trying to dislodge "food" that can not be digested. In a perfect ocean, this would be squid beaks, fish bones, or other natural pieces of food.
Add more plastic, repeating above until no plastic falls out of the bottle when cap is removed (bill is opened) and the bird tries and tries, but can not toss up the mass of debris. See how much and how many different kinds of plastic can be added. Does the rope tangle with the legos and bottle caps. Do five bottle caps cause a blockage in the esophagus???
In nature, the upchucked mass is like an owl pellet and is known as a bolus. Natural foods slip freely through the esophagus and more feeding can continue. Most times, a baby albatross will toss up one bolus before leaving the nesting island. Unfortunately, thousands die because plastic blocks the stomach completely.
Your feeding the baby albatross activity can lead to a lot of discussion of plastics we use, discard, then find their way into the ocean and into the mouth of a baby albatross.
If you want to have a Baby Albatross Feeding Kit, complete with some plastic items that actually came from once living albatross at Pihe Manu, Papahanaumokuakea, be in touch.
Pint size plastic beverage container with wide mouth (about 1.5 inches) ---This approximates the size of a baby albatross stomach and esophagus.
Important to have the lid too.
Enough plastic items (bottle caps, toothbrush, legos, fishing line, small chunks of nylon rope, markers, pens, more bottle caps and even a few more bottle caps since they are pretty much the most common marine debris.
Talk with your audience of kids of any age about ocean debris and the way adult albatrosses fly out a few hundred or even a thousand miles to find flying fish eggs and squid for the little ones. They return to Pihe Manu or up on the Northeast shore of Kauai, find their young one among thousands of others and begin to feed by regurgitating "food".......
As you talk about this, have the kids place one or two pieces of the plastic into the bottle.
Replace cap with each addition of plastic. Shake gently to mimic bird moving around the nesting area a bit.
Remove cap. Shake gently to mimic the bird trying to dislodge "food" that can not be digested. In a perfect ocean, this would be squid beaks, fish bones, or other natural pieces of food.
Add more plastic, repeating above until no plastic falls out of the bottle when cap is removed (bill is opened) and the bird tries and tries, but can not toss up the mass of debris. See how much and how many different kinds of plastic can be added. Does the rope tangle with the legos and bottle caps. Do five bottle caps cause a blockage in the esophagus???
In nature, the upchucked mass is like an owl pellet and is known as a bolus. Natural foods slip freely through the esophagus and more feeding can continue. Most times, a baby albatross will toss up one bolus before leaving the nesting island. Unfortunately, thousands die because plastic blocks the stomach completely.
Your feeding the baby albatross activity can lead to a lot of discussion of plastics we use, discard, then find their way into the ocean and into the mouth of a baby albatross.
If you want to have a Baby Albatross Feeding Kit, complete with some plastic items that actually came from once living albatross at Pihe Manu, Papahanaumokuakea, be in touch.
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1 comment:
I am an avid scuba diver. With that said I love the worlds oceans. I have been in the Monterey Bay, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Yucatan, and the Carribbean. With my many experiences I have the love of the worlds oceans and natural environment. We all stem from the tree of life, Nature.
Kristen McDowel
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