Published: May 31, 2008 09:25 pm            

Southeast teacher sets sail for research

This time, Kathryn Kornberg was the student.

Kornberg, an earth systems science teacher at Southeast High School, spent a week aboard the ship Nancy Foster as part of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research cruise last month. The ship cruised along Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary about 18 nautical miles off the coast of Georgia as a team of educators and scientists studied the surrounding habitat.

“It just surpassed my expectations,” Kornberg said. “When you go on something like that, you never know how you’re going to be received in the scientific community. The scientists and all of the people on the ship were very welcoming, more than happy to talk with us and answered all of our questions no matter how many we asked. You don’t get that every day.”

And in turn, Kornberg shared the information learned on the trip with her science students.

Kornberg and three other teachers participated in the last of two legs of the research cruise. During the second leg, scientists captured and surgically implanted acoustic tags in red snapper, gag grouper and scamper grouper. The tags emit “pings” that allow the fish to be tracked by receivers that were placed in locations around the reef. Scientists also prepared for monitoring invertebrate life inside Gray’s Reef. Divers established permanent monitoring stations that will allow them to return to the same location to track changes in invertebrate populations over time.

Scientists continued mapping activities that began on the first leg of the mission. Goals for both legs of the cruise included promoting public understanding of the sanctuary and its resources through outreach and education activities.

“They’re sharing their information with us and being able to bring some of that back to enrich my own knowledge and have things to share with my kids was really my favorite part,” Kornberg said.

The experiences on the ship began daily at 8 a.m. as teachers talked to scientists about what they would be looking for that day. If the weather was good, scientists would launch boats for diving. While they dived, teachers performed a variety of tasks from helping prepare chevron traps to catch fish to entering data onto spreadsheet programs to writing the Web site log. After lunch, scientists would take another dive. At the end of the day, teachers received final reports from the scientists about what had been accomplished.

“Before I left, I thought it was going to be a lot of hurry up and wait and a lot of sitting around, but there was not much sitting around time at all,” Kornberg said. “We stayed busy pretty much the whole time.”

Kornberg also e-mailed information back to students on dry land. They kept journals and also wrote about how the reef formed, how old it was and other information about the trip.

“They were working on a journal the whole time I was gone which includes a daily log about what happened on the ship that day as far as what was important and why they did what they did,” Kornberg said.

Students definitely learned from their teacher’s trip.

“So after reading about Gray’s Reef and from Mrs. Kornberg teaching us, I learned that Gray’s Reef is a combination of marine and terrestrial sediments,” student Christina Blackwell said. “And from the pictures she took, they showed the different types of coral reef, and showed us the different steps it took to take data from the sea, and how they tracked fish.”

Student Whitney Hall was so impressed with the reef she hopes to one day go there.

“Learning about Gray’s Reef was very interesting,” Hall said. “I learned about many different species that live in or around the reef. From my research, it looks like it is very beautiful. I hope to go visit eventually.”

        

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