RE Log - Fall 2023

FALL 2023 Ransom Everglades LOG 21 They will debate difficult questions. They will study contemporary African film. And they will also have the freedom to delve into their own research interests. To Bienvenu, the promise of the course is not just intellectual but, in a sense, strategic. By the 2050s, “one in four people who inhabit our world will be an African,” and no one will be able to disregard the continent’s geopolitical significance. To arm our students with a lifelong curiosity about Africa is to invest in their ability to be part of that conversation. Knowing a species, inside and out If misconceptions about Africa are common, so, too, are misconceptions about sharks. Last October, the popular Instagram account @OnlyinDade posted a video of a hammerhead shark circling two unsuspecting beachgoers swimming in the water off South Beach. “Ignorance is bliss,” the caption read. But to RE’s resident shark scientists Kristine Stump and Heather Marshall, true ignorance lurks in content precisely like that post – content sensationalizing the dangers of sharks as nefarious human-eaters that we should avoid at any cost. “I think that people don’t understand that there is absolutely no shark species on the planet that purposefully includes humans as part of their diet,” explained Stump, a six-year faculty member at RE who earned her PhD in Marine Biology and Fisheries from the University of Miami. “People are always like, ‘My God, if I see a shark, what do I do?’ Take a picture. They have all five senses that we do, plus a couple extra. They know you’re there way before you do. If you see one, you’re lucky enough that it has come close enough to just check you out.” From Stump’s and Marshall’s vantage point, if students walk away from their new course, Biology and Ecology of Sharks, simply armed with the ability to “Well, actually…” the anti-shark fearmongerers who fill @OnlyinDade comment sections, they will consider the course a success. But they also have much higher aspirations. The course, a 300-level, one-semester STEM elective that is running for the first time this year, promises to give students a uniquely comprehensive understanding of some of the most intriguing creatures who live in RE’s (literal) backyard. Before coming to RE, Stump did her graduate work in shark ecology; Marshall, a friend and collaborator who did her own graduate work at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, studied shark anatomy and physiology. The new course combines both approaches, giving students a bifocal view of sharks themselves and the dangers they face. “We’ll talk about their reproduction, their growth, and then we’ll start getting into the topics that I focus on, like nursery habitats and migration patterns,” Stump explained. “We will even meld the two approaches together: how can you use physiological data and movement data to make better management decisions and policies?” The course builds off the success of Marine Field Research, a hugely popular STEM elective that has been co-taught by Stump, Kelly Jackson and Brooke Gintert – all of whom hold doctorates in marine biology or adjacent fields. Like that course, which has now been shortened to one semester to invite even more student participation, Biology and Ecology of Sharks has a practical and experiential focus. Students will go out on the boat frequently, encountering, observing and even tagging sharks. “We’ll also be sharing with them what it means to be a marine scientist and to be in the shark research field. When planning on working with sharks, how do you go about finding them and capturing them? What are some of the tags we use to go with the sampling we do?” Marshall said. Stump and Marshall can think of no other for-credit high school course on the Eastern seaboard that focuses on sharks in this way. It is an academic experience afforded by a unique confluence of STEM Department faculty member Luis Felipe teaches Advanced Machine Learning in the Fernandez STEM Center