Aquariums are wonderful places to spend a summer day: if the weather is cool you can stay outdoors, if it’s hot there are indoor exhibits. Menacing sharks, beautifully-colored fish, gliding sea turtles, manta rays, sea snakes, sea horses, penguins and birds and river otters and performing orcas and porpoises all represent what is most beautiful and exciting about the waters of Planet Earth.

But they also represent a world that is disappearing quicker than we thought possible, and this is where aquariums hold a key to the future of water creatures.

Aquariums have realized that they must conduct research and they must also show us what is alive, what is dying and what we can do to balance it all. And so they tie their exhibits and their activities back to conservation, and tell us how we can help.

The South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston has two fun shows that deliver the green/blue message: their ongoing Sea Turtle Rescue Program and the new Penguin Planet exhibit.

The endangered sea turtles migrate annually to, and give birth along, beaches from Virginia to the Florida Keys, so there are many turtles of varying ages that run into trouble: bacterial and fungal infections, the shock from cold water, wounds from boat strikes and shark bites. The South Carolina Aquarium Turtle Hospital receives turtles that are found and its animal care staff administers whatever medical care they can to eventually get the turtles back into the ocean. But the really cool part of this program is that Aquarium visitors are able to go into the hospital; they can adopt injured turtles and can keep track of some of the rescued turtles with satellite tags.

Planet Penguin’s Magellanic penguins are typically found along coastal Southern Argentina and Chile. They are classified as “near threatened” and the South Carolina Aquarium exhibit helps visitors understand what threatens these two-foot tall birds and what can be done to ensure they don’t become full-fledged members of “threatened” species. Visitors will be able to tie in the penguins’ plight to ongoing interactive learning games and educational exhibits on climate changes in South Carolina. (Check out their penguins from anywhere on the aquarium’s live penguin cam.)

California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium has two unusual offerings: a live Laysan Albatross exhibit  and for children 8 – 13, an Underwater Explorers event.

The Laysan albatross lives on tiny Midway Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They fly hundreds of miles, sometimes even a thousand miles in search of food. All too often the shiny thing floating on the ocean surface not a squid or other sea food but instead a cigarette lighter or a bottle cap or other small bit of plastic. The albatross swoops down, swallows it and when her stomach is full she returns to Midway and regurgitates the food into her young; including the plastics. Scientists estimate that as many as 40% of Laysan chicks die from ingesting plastics. This may sound impossible but autopsies prove it. Even healthy Laysan chicks have at least one ounce of plastic in their stomach.

So what’s the green message of Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Laysan albatross exhibit? Properly disposing of plastics, but more importantly finding substitutes for plastic containers, helps wildlife. The live albatross exhibit shows their vulnerability.

The Underwater Explorers swim along the water’s surface and study the sea life below them. By wearing flotation suits and breathing from air (SCUBA) tanks participants are able to float and have a fish-eye view of Monterrey Bay’s Great Tidal Pool below. As the tides ebb and flow the water creatures come and go, so each trip is different and there is always something going on below the surface. Certified dive staff oversee the program.

The National Aquarium in Baltimore lives by a creed of conservation: “Everything we do ties back to a conservation message, telling people what they can do to help protect the environment.” And so this summer they’re exhibiting Jellies Invasion: Oceans Out of Balance. Visitors will learn about the role they’re playing in a changing ocean, where global warming is shifting territorial ranges and creating an over population of jellyfish that can be deadly to other species, especially fish needed for food.

You’ll see nine different species of these pre-historic creatures and learn how the jellies’ existence and increasing population are important environmental indicators.

(Photo credit: Penguin, South Carolina Aquarium; Laysan Albatross, Monterey Bay Aquarium)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

The best teachers inspire. Their grasp and excitement of a subject is contagious. Talking to Bertha Vazquez, Susan Vincent and Patrick Curley, you can’t come away without absorbing at least a sliver of their passion for the environment.

This month the National Environmental Education Foundation recognized Vazquez, Vincent and Curley for their innovative approaches to environmental education. Bertha Vazquez, a middle school teacher at a magnet school in Coral Gables, Fla., won the Richard C. Bartlett Education Award, named after the chairman of the Nature Conservancy of Texas. Patrick Curley, a middle and high-school teacher who works with at-risk students in Jacksonville, NC, and Susan Vincent, an earth and marine science teacher in East Harlem, NY, won certificates of merit.

“Kids have always related to the environment,” says Vazquez, who teaches at George Washington Carver Middle School in the Miami-Dade school system. “Teachers need to look for real-life connections that kids can relate to.”

Showing kids how caring for the environment affects them at home or in school is something they can understand, she says.

Vazquez, a biology major, says that today people feel the same about the environment as they did in the ‘70s. “The difference is,” she says, “that this time there’s a more practical side that people can relate to such as installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, driving a hybrid car or using cloth bags for grocery shopping.”

Vazquez, for instance, drives a Volkswagen that runs on biofuel made from chicken fat.

Vincent, who teaches earth science and marine science at the Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem, says she sees kids changing their habits. “We go to Central Park, walking from 110th street to 59th street. They can’t believe that people trash our parks. Despite the fact that our inner city students have had little experience with nature, once you turn them onto the environment, they become passionate.”

Vincent also has taken her students (see photo, above right) to such places as Orchard Beach in the Bronx. “They do clean-up projects where they take the train to the beach, pick up bags of trash, and see firsthand the effect that plastic trash has on marine animals. The kids see the trash and become indignant,” she says.

Vincent’s college prep public school is 100 percent minority girls. “They view the environment as the underdog and this resonates with them,” she says. The Young Women’s Leadership School is one of five urban all-girls public schools supported by the YWL Network.

Curley works with kids who have been taken from their regular high school because of behavioral or academic issues. This past year he was hired as an ENVISIONS coach for the entire Onslow County Schools. He brings students to a 66-acre pine forest at the county’s Learning Center where he teaches them to become “citizen scientists.” In this role, the kids learn how to monitor the local creek and track bird breeding.

In one of Curley’s projects, his students built a nature trail for the Izaak Walton League, one of the country’s first conservation organizations formed in 1922 to maintain America’s outdoors for future generations. The trail project included planting native plants and building and maintaining an oyster shell recycling station.