Working vacation

Lawrence High educator spends week exploring coral reefs in Bahamas

By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
   Lawrence High School chemistry teacher Joan Reilly spent a week this summer on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas — but it wasn’t just a vacation for the educator.
   Ms. Reilly spent her time snorkeling among the coral reefs and surveying their health. The veteran teacher was one of 17 volunteers — a handful of teachers, some students, an engineer, an attorney, a dentist and an artist — who embarked on the expedition between June 30 and July 7.
   Ms. Reilly, who has taught at LHS for 26 years, said she became aware of the coral reef survey — sponsored by the nonprofit Earthwatch Institute — through a press release in the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) magazine.
   ”It sounded like fun and it sounded like I would learn something,” she said. “It seems like the whole basis of the Earthwatch Institute is worth getting involved in.”
   The Earthwatch Institute is an international, nonprofit organization that brings science to life for people concerned about the earth’s future, according to its Web site, www.earthwatch.org. It supports scientific field research by offering volunteers a chance to join research teams around the world.
   For the first couple days at the Gerace Research Center on San Salvador Island, the volunteers learned about the different types of coral and algae that live on coral reefs. They also learned how to collect data, Ms. Reilly said.
   After the volunteers were divided into smaller groups of about six people, they traveled to one of three reef sites selected by scientist John Rollino. There, they spent the next few days diving in the shallow water to collect data. They identified hard and soft coral, algae, sponge and rock at the intersections of a grid they tossed onto a section of reef.
   ”Coral is alive,” Ms. Reilly said. “It is a living animal. The reef is made up of dead coral. Coral that dies becomes part of the reef, and (living) coral attaches itself to the reef.”
   The volunteer researchers also taped off an area of coral and measured every 10 centimeters for the algae study. Algae are simple, living aquatic organisms.
   When coral dies from environmental factors (such as climate change or coastal development) or the reef is over-fished, “algae takes over,” she said. “The coral has nowhere to reproduce. The space is taken over by the algae, which put up settlements.”
   Ms. Reilly said she didn’t know there were so many different types of coral. She learned there are over 2,500 types that have been identified, plus 5,000 species of reef fish.
   The coral reef is the oldest ecosystem on earth, dating more than 100 million years old, she said. Coral reefs can be found in Southeast Asia, Australia, the Indian Ocean, the Florida Keys, Japan, Fiji, Ecuador and East Africa, she added.
   Ms. Reilly said she was amazed at the medicinal uses of coral. One drug used to treat acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is based on a compound extracted from Caribbean reef sponge, she said. About 6,000 unique chemical compounds have been isolated from marine organisms that live in or depend on coral reefs for survival, she said.
   ”If we kill the coral, we won’t have the opportunity to do research on their chemical compounds,” Ms. Reilly said. “If something isn’t done to protect the coral, we might lose it. It’s good that there are groups like Earthwatch around to make people aware and to support research.”
   Still, despite the education the educator was receiving on the trip, it wasn’t all work for volunteers, she said.
   ”We took a day to go sightseeing. We toured the island and visited the lighthouse. We visited a bat cave,” she said with a shudder.
   The group viewed the remnants of houses on the island built by Loyalists — colonists who were loyal to King George III — who fled the fledgling United States after the American Revolution, she said. Many of the blacks who live on the island are descendants of slaves brought by the Loyalists, she added.
   Now that the trip is over, Ms. Reilly said she is working on lesson plans for her classes when school resumes next month. She said she wants to incorporate what she learned on the expedition into her lesson plans — possibly the chemical and medicinal aspects of coral and coral reefs, or the impact of global warming and water pollution.
   ”Students certainly are more attentive and interested in experiences people have had, rather than reading about it in a book,” Ms. Reilly said. “You can relay that enthusiasm to students, so they hopefully get concerned about the coral reefs.”
   ”There is an anonymous proverb that says, ‘We should think of our resources not as having been left to us by our parents, but as being loaned to us by our children,’” she said.