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Forward mentions that in recent years, the Marine Lab has added a policy orientation to its research orientation. That's obvious in a "Green by Design" course led by zoology professor Daniel Rittschof. The impetus behind the course, says Rittschof, "is the idea that any educated person should have at least minimal understanding of environments and stewardship issues." His eclectic research interests include antifoulants; he has several patents for the substances, which keep sea creatures from attaching to ship hulls and are environmentally benign.
Rittschof is advising Boon Shan Quek on her runoff-ponds study. "Boon's Singapore home is one where all the estuaries are now fresh-water reservoirs and many are essentially very large parking-lot runoff ponds," he says. "Knowing the toxicology of the ponds is of interest to both of us."
At the Marine Lab, Rittschof is well-known for leading students on two-and-a-half-hour nighttime walks, during which they wade into a shallow estuary looking for crabs, fish, and snails. He guarantees between twenty-five and thirty-five things they can hold in their hands and at least a million individuals to look at. "The trips are multipurpose," he says. "I learn how each student deals with stress, how curious they are, how afraid they are, their sense of humor—and I just generally get to know them as people. After twenty-six years, those trips are still fun for me." Most students, he adds, aren't notably in touch with nature. "For example, last semester in my freshman seminar, eighteen out of eighteen students—sixteen of whom live where robins live—could not identify a robin."
It's late September, and the students are outlining their end-of-term class projects. One plans to perform a cost-benefit analysis of offshore drilling along the North Carolina coast. Another envisions proposing an organic garden that would help feed the Marine Lab population. Spillias, who is in the class, wants to explore low-impact transportation between Duke's main campus and the Marine Lab.
"Green by Design" is taught, appropriately, in the Marine Lab's Repass Ocean Conservation Center. Dedicated in the fall of 2006, it's the first building constructed at the Marine Lab in thirty years and its first "green building." The center uses geothermal pumps for heating and cooling, solar panels for hot water, and photovoltaic rooftop panels to convert sunlight into electricity. It's built of recycled wood and local materials, such as yellow Southern pine and Atlantic white cedar. And it's outfitted with other eco-features, including natural daylight in all spaces, fresh-air ventilation, deep overhangs to provide shade, a landscape of native grasses, permeable sidewalks, and a zinc roof designed to last 100 years.
In the more conventional architectural space of one of the Marine Lab's teaching labs, William Kirby-Smith Ph.D. '70, a marine ecologist, is getting his students ready for a field trip. He loads them into a small skiff, which he pilots out to Shackleford Banks. Shackleford is a barrier island: It erodes on its ocean side, and it accretes on its inland side. "Every time I go out, I get totally wet and totally dirty," Kirby-Smith says.
He and the students wade into the shallow water and collect starfish, snails, fiddle crabs, hermit crabs, and blue crabs, all of which they'll bring back to the lab. The term "crabby person" has marine-life resonance, he says, since "crabs tend to be aggressive predators." He adds that "students will figure that out," perhaps by receiving an unexpected but memorable pinch. This is, he says, the "post-Flipper generation" of students, for whom environmental stewardship has become a personal and social imperative.
Kirby-Smith also notes a gender skewing. Most of those students are women, a reversal from a decade or so ago. He jokes that he's become attuned to a human behavior pattern: His male students like to plunk the animals into a tank and watch them fight each other; his female students hope the animals will get along swimmingly.
Using a catamaran and the lab's fifty-foot research vessel, the Susan Hudson, two other professors—Larry Crowder, Stephen Toth Professor of marine biology, and research scientist David Johnston—set sail with students in a "Marine Megafauna" course. Based in Durham, the course centers on large sea life—giant squid, bony fish, sharks, sea turtles, seabirds, and marine mammals. During the students' Marine Lab weekend, though, the course makes a fleeting shift of focus from large sea life to large land life: The first stop is Shackleford, to search out those elusive wild horses.
Crowder is a proselytizer for the oceans as well as a researcher. He has written about the damaging effects of pollution and overfishing. The oceans' problems, he observes, are symptoms of a management approach that no longer works: We manage one resource at a time, separately focusing on fishing or offshore oil drilling, without considering the effects of one activity on another. And we tend to treat one part of the system—coral reefs, kelp forests—rather than the whole.
Crowder points out that Shackleford is one of only a handful of national parks in a seashore area. He also tells the students that Princeton University's Daniel Rubenstein, who earned his Ph.D. from Duke in 1977, was the key biologist in figuring out the optimum size for maintaining the viability of Shackleford's herd of horses. The students and their professors manage some horse sightings. They also manage to get themselves rain-drenched and, in some cases, to connect in unfortunate ways with the prickly plants that line the trails.
With all of that, it's a welcome retreat to the boat to observe an onboard dredging operation. The students sift through, and pass around, the scooped-up sea creatures: urchins, tiny squid, gag groupers, blue fish, Atlantic spade fish, hermit crabs, spider crabs, brittle stars.
Apart from the equine attractions of Shackleford, the Beaufort Inlet reliably produces dolphin delights; the area is a rich feeding ground for the animals. Johnston says their graceful behavior and "hydro-dynamically designed" faces—that is, their apparent smiles—make dolphins irresistible to humans. He originally came to the Marine Lab as a Ph.D. student to study with Andrew Read, Rachel Carson Associate Professor of marine conservation biology, who has long explored the human impact on marine mammals and sea turtles. He also worked with Richard Barber, now the Harvey Smith Professor Emeritus of biological oceanography, who has led expeditions to the Equatorial Pacific, the Arabian Sea, and the Southern Ocean around Antarctica to study the ties between climate and oceanic processes. "Students come here and, on any given day, can sit down for lunch with the people who have changed how we see the ocean," Johnston says. "It's pretty cool."
Bottlenose dolphins earn an entry in a field guide to dolphin- and whale-watching; Johnston was the co-author. The book describes the bottlenose as "a cosmopolitan species" distributed globally in temperate and tropical waters, which spend 95 percent of their time underwater; it also calls them "extremely social" and "active and agile at the surface." Today's dolphins are actively bowing on the water's surface, even as Johnston, a committed surfer, is contemplating the choppy seas longingly.
On past trips, Johnston has run across students who had never before been on a boat or seen a marine mammal. "It's amazing to be able to incorporate field techniques into your teaching," he says. "The balance of nature is misunderstood. Nature is dynamic; it is ever-evolving. There's so much variability in the ocean environment that we can ask a question once, get an answer, ask the same question a second time, and get a different answer."
Dockside two afternoons a week, English professor Tom Ferraro is exploring what literature has to say about the ocean environment—and about humans caught up in the ocean environment. Ferraro, who happens to be an avid swimmer, is visiting from the Durham campus this fall. His course, taught in the Marine Lab's boathouse lounge, is called "Under Ocean's Spell." It immerses students in works ranging from Peter Hoeg's Arctic Ocean mystery Smilla's Sense of Snow to Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny. As he tells students in his course description, "you're likely to be surprised out of your gourd (er, shell)" by the many literary associations with the sea, and "at the Marine Lab certain special lessons involve not only science and policy but English—and especially the intersections between."
This afternoon, Ferraro's students are arriving right from a Marine Lab ice-cream social, and he worries aloud that they're "ready to crash from the sugar intake." Today's subject is Herman Melville's story of the contest for authority on the high seas, Billy Budd.
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