Diving Into Marine Ecology
By Sean Beckett, Program Director, with excerpts from Marine Ecology students
NBNC’s first Marine Ecology course participants are back from their week-long research trip to Bermuda with lots of stories to share! Twelve students from four local high schools spent the spring semester studying tropical fish identification, coral reef ecology, oceanography, and marine conservation, in anticipation of a culminating excursion to collect fish biodiversity data for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation in July. Brian Slopey, who recently retired after 30-plusyears as a science teacher at U-32, has been teaching Marine Ecology for the last 16 years. When Slopey sought a new home for the course at NBNC it was a perfect match — we had just been brainstorming new opportunities to connect high school students with nature! Thanks to generous financial support from the greater NBNC community, we were proud to offer this experience on a need-blind basis, allowing many students to access a life-changing opportunity that would have otherwise been out of reach. Read on for highlights from the trip blog.
July 8, 2025
Did you know that phytoplankton produce 50% of the Earth’s oxygen?! Once we finished up our plankton lecture, we walked down to the dock and boarded a boat to do a plankton tow. It was beautiful cruising along the channel with the sun setting in front of us. Once we threw the net out the back of the boat, we sailed back to shore and back to the lab. In the lab, we used microscopes to identify the dozens of different zooplankton species we had collected. We even collected an adorable jelly!
July 9, 2025
We arrived at the first snorkel site at 11 am. After some safety lectures, we jumped in the water. The reefs were massive, sprawling on seemingly forever. The coral stretched so high that in some areas it was impossible to swim past. There were large populations of Sergeant Majors throughout the reefs. They would come investigate what we were doing. There were groups of Spotlight and Queen Parrotfish grazing on the abundant coral. After an hour, we headed to the second site … Bermuda Chubs and parrotfish frequented the cliffs. Trumpetfish hid within the branching corals. When we were gathering around the boat to leave, Sergeant Majors and Bermuda Chubs were circling close to us, almost within arm’s reach.
July 10, 2025
As we arrived at the beach, the sun was setting over the ocean, with a bright orange moon sitting above the rocks out in the water. After the class entered the water, we departed as a group towards the rocks in the distance. The longer the swim went on, the darker it got, with more students turning on their bright underwater lights and the beach dipping farther into the dark. In the dark ocean, lots of creatures came out of hiding like grunts and squirrelfish. As we continued, we saw a handful of Spiny Lobster, a barracuda, an octopus, and a whole load of needlefish, who took quite the liking to our lights as they would jump out of the water and swim right up to us, some even hitting us. It will definitely be a snorkel that is remembered for a long time.
The 2026 Marine Ecology high school travel course begins in January — learn more here.
