Education Matters: Sarasota Bay—A Living, Learning Laboratory

By Ryan G. Van Cleave

Sarasota Bay—technically a subtropical coastal lagoon—is the biggest, deepest bay between Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor. Its boundaries extend from Bradenton and Bradenton Beach to Sarasota, Lido Key, and Longboat Key, and it’s one of twenty-eight estuaries in the US named by Congress as an estuary of “significant national significance.” 

Most, though, simply know it as the beautiful stretch of water adjacent to Marina Jack’s, past the piers outside the Van Wezel, or off the Italian marble deck of the Ca d’Zan. 

What most don’t realize is that those same waters are teeming with scientific potential. Few know that as well as former Mote scientist and current Associate Professor of Biology at New College, Professor Jayne Gardiner. “I used to work right across the bay and had many field projects underway,” she notes. But she started teaching part-time at New College and fell in love with the caliber of students. When a full-time job became available in 2014, she immediately applied. “The students there are just so keen to learn. Eagerness like that makes things exciting for a teacher.”

What Gardiner realizes is that the Sarasota Bay serves as a living laboratory situated right there in New College’s backyard. “Or maybe it’s the front yard,” she says with a laugh, since the college does kind of face the bay. That means the students have firsthand knowledge of marine issues. When we experienced the recent red tide issue, they witnessed dead animals washing up on the shore. When algae blooms happen, they know about them.

It’s well documented that an effective way to engage students in science is to do place-based research, meaning to explore issues pertinent to one’s immediate geography. Enter Sarasota Bay and its challenges and opportunities. With her science classes being no larger than 24—and lab classes often being much smaller than that—she’s able to gather an entire class and take them out in the back and participate in ongoing research.

“I’m able to design lessons that are inquiry-based,” she says, “which are so much better than going to a lab textbook, carrying on a canned experiment with an expected outcome. I take them out in the bay and ask questions about what’s happening locally. They’re able to then design their own educational experiences.”

One of the happiest accidents—scientifically speaking—came about as a result of red tide. A senior had a thesis project going where she examined at the bay’s nursery habitat for blacktip sharks. Surprisingly, nobody had yet done a lot in terms of looking at sharks and rays in the bay, so that information remained relatively unknown. Since students often build on the research of former projects, another student did a thesis project on those same sharks with an eye toward where they’re spending time—evidence suggests it’s the northern part of the bay. 

But then red tide comes and kills all the tagged sharks, so the student was no longer getting data on how sharks were using the habitat. “Her initial impression was that this was game over,” says Gardiner. “But then we pivoted. She continued to do monthly sampling to see what species were still present, and then document the dramatic decrease in sharks and rays during the red tide event.”

Gardiner also serves as Director of Pritzker Marine Biology Research Center—New College’s own marine research center that houses a wide range of local organisms, from fish to invertebrates to plants. When Gardiner teaches in that building’s classroom, if she’s talking about how fish swim by discussing specific dorsal fin movements, she can just point and say, “Look right there.” But as convenient and helpful as that is, it’s not the same as doing hands-on research on the water.

That’s why New College has their own research boat. It’s broad, far wider than most, which provides a stable platform that’s very useful for doing calm shore-water activities. “I can take a big group out at one time—16, which is the size of a lab class,” explains Gardiner. “But I usually split the class in half. Once you factor in having animals on the deck, it can get a bit crowded.” 

New College students help with some of Gardiner’s own research as well, which examines the nursery habitats of coastal sharks, as well as investigates their sensory biology. “In just about any species that anyone has looked at, evidence suggests that the same animals are coming back over and over again to the same place to give birth to their young. For some species in areas outside of Sarasota Bay, the females are coming to the same areas in which they were born themselves. It’s incredibly cool.”

But HOW are they finding their way back to those same spots? That’s the question at the heart of that research. There’s evidence that sea turtles use of the Earth’s magnetic fields to navigate over long distances, but the same level of evidence doesn’t exist for fish and sharks. Gardiner was recently able to demonstrate that sharks use smell cues over the short range, but the long-range cues are still unknown. Gardiner says, “I’m building a case for this area being a very good spot to study these things.”

The value of having a nearby body of water can’t be overstated, she explains. At many colleges and universities, marine research happens at a field station, which is often quite far from the main campus. For example, the University of Florida’s marine lab is in St. Augustine—75+ miles from the main campus in Gainesville. At most schools with a distance situation such as this, it can mean that students interested in marine science choose to undertake an entire semester at the lab because commuting for individual classes just isn’t viable. At New College, though, anyone can take marine science and have hands-on experiences in the aquarium-filled classroom at the Pritzker or right out on the bay.

“The Sarasota Bay is incredibly important to our community,” says Gardiner. “And not just for its large economic impact and recreational value.”

FOR MORE INFORMATIONon New College of Florida, please visit www.ncf.edu or call 941.487.5000.