Alabama has an official State bird, an official tree, and even an official state vegetable. Now, it has an official State aquarium. The Dauphin Island Sea Lab is also marking its 50th anniversary.
The Dauphin Island Sea Lab sits on what once was the site of a Cold War military radar installation at the extreme southern tip of Alabama. Now thousands of students ranging from kindergarten to doctoral candidates come to the lab each year. They’re here to learn about the state of Alabama and the Gulf’s environment.
“I like to tell people we serve all 67 counties in the state of Alabama and we provide educational opportunities for our citizens ranging from kindergarten all the way to retirement,” said Sea Lab Executive Director John Valentine. “We have children in the K-12 program, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 of them come to the campus each year. Year-round, we have between 35 and 40 graduate students, who are in full time residence and they’re taking graduate courses here on the campus and then they’re also conducting their master’s or doctoral research here in the Gulf of Mexico and it’s frequently groundbreaking research that tells us something about the Gulf that we did not know before.”
One example of that research was a recent project to determine how many red snapper live in the Gulf. This was not only a political hot button issue. Snapper fishing is an enormous economic driver on the Gulf Coast.
“What the scientists from universities around the Gulf of Mexico came together with federal funding and worked on this study and so it was an ‘is not, is so’ story for a while. There aren’t enough fish,” Valentine said. “There are plenty of fish. And what these folks did was get out there and worked around the clock for a couple of years collecting snapper from all over the northern Gulf and looking at where they were found and what their densities were and how those densities changed over time.”
Scientists found that the Gulf has more red snapper than expected. It turns out that researchers were looking in the wrong spot. In the past, the waters away from artificial reefs had been dismissed as unoccupied space. The red snapper knew better.
“But, what they found out was while the number of fish in those live bottom areas was not as high as you would see on an artificial reef, the amount of area on that hard bottom covered was extensive and there were a lot of fish spread over there,” Valentine said.
“So, the numbers in a square yard of bottom weren’t as great as on artificial reefs, but when you summed up all that area, the numbers of red snapper out there were greater than they thought.”
The lab also played a major role in studying the effects of the 2010 oil spill on marine life. It’s now studying the algae blooms that have created dead zones in the Gulf off Louisiana and Florida.
“Well, it turns out we find it over here too. We just never were really looking for it and that’s something that we really think we need to get to the bottom of. We need to know a lot more about harmful algal blooms and what triggers those blooms,” Valentine said. “Right now, there’s the horrendous situation in South Florida that’s impacting just about every aspect of the citizens’ lives down there."
The Alabama Legislature recently recognized the Sea Lab’s work and its anniversary. One part of the center now has a new title.
"We’ll be celebrating our 50th anniversary at that point," Valentine said. "We’ll be rebranding the Estuarium as the Aquarium of Alabama thanks to Rep. Chip Brown and Sen. Davis Sessions. That was designated the official Aquarium of Alabama so we’re getting ready to do that. We’re looking to modernize the technology in that facility. That’ll take a little bit of work, but that’s something that we’re working on right now."
The Aquarium is intended to educate the public about not only the Gulf, but the aquatic environment of the entire state and how that comes together.
“That’s really our citizen education program and that’s where we reach out to the public and educate them about the remarkable resources that are in the state of Alabama at least in the coastal areas,” said Valentine. “I think people really are surprised by the amazing biological diversity that exists in Alabama in general, but all the more so down here in the Gulf Coast. You figure there is a little over 300 species of fish that are found throughout the state of Alabama. About half of them spend some part of their life down here in this area either in the delta or in the bay or in the offshore environment. I think people are amazed at what a giant mixing zone the estuary is in coastal Alabama."
The Sea Lab’s education efforts start at an early age. Tina Milller-Way chairs the lab’s Discovery Hall program for K-12 students.
“We also have a whole slate of summer programs where students, school-age children come down and join us during the summer and learn about the Gulf and do fun things outside riding on the boats, kayaking in the marsh, all the time learning about the marine environment and how to be better stewards of that,” Miller-Way said.
She said not all students become marine scientist. But, the lab works toward the main goal of stoking their curiosity and excitement about learning.
“We think that every child is born a scientist and born curious about nature and what’s around them and as we go through school, sometimes we forget that curiosity is the primary driver of learning and that’s important to us is just be curious, just observe and get excited about it,” Miller-Way said.
That excitement was evident in a nearby experiment in which research assistant Ben Belgrad was working with a group of graduate students. He standing ankle deep in a tank of water dosing oysters with crab urine.
“Oh, yeah! Definitely!” Belgrad said.
The idea isn’t to gross out the oysters. The point is, is see how baby shellfish react to predators like crabs. Belgrad says their shells grow thicker when enemies are nearby. And, thicker shells help the oysters survive.
“The problem that we’ve had with reef restoration is that they are so small when we put them out, just about everything can eat them and so what we’re doing is when they’re being grown in the hatchery, we toughen them up,” said Belgrad. “ We expose them to predator cues that naturally causes them to grow a stronger, harder shell. So that when we put them in the field, fewer predators can actually eat them so we have more to survive to reach adulthood."
Georgia Tech Ph. D student Sarah Roney is also working on the oyster project.
“I’m actually taking this work back to Georgia and helping Georgia’s oyster industry,” Roney said. "Georgia has a very up and coming oyster industry that we expect to be almost like Alabama’s hopefully in the next 10 to 15 years.”
While the Sea Lab works with students from coastal regions around the Southeast, its work and research touch everything in the region. In Alabama, the rivers, bays and ocean are all linked.
“And anything that happens in Montgomery or Birmingham ends up down here in a couple of weeks, so there’s no way to separate the Gulf of Mexico from the watershed that’s throughout the state of Alabama,” Valentine said.
And long as there are questions like these to solve, Valentine and his team at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab want to be there looking for the answers.
Editor's note--- Dauphin Island Sea Lab is a financial contributor to Alabama Public Radio
