Another Year at OCG

Every summer, Oceanography Camp for Girls (OCG) brings together dozens of young women for three intensive weeks of hands-on marine science at the University of South Florida. This year I once again had the privilege of serving as a science mentor across all three weeks — seining in the field, leading lab rotations, running ecosystem simulations, coaching campers through their final presentations, and bringing a little Sharky energy along the way. Here’s what my role looked like, week by week.

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Week 1 (June 8–12): Into the Field at Ft. De Soto

Week 1 centered on getting campers into real coastal habitats as fast as possible, and I was out at Ft. De Soto for two full field days leading data collection stations.

Seining — I ran the seine net station, where campers waded in and hauled the net to see exactly what lives in the shallow nearshore waters of the Gulf. There is nothing quite like the moment the net comes up and everyone crowds in to see what’s inside — pinfish, pipefish, juvenile sheepshead, grass shrimp, the occasional blue crab. It is an instant reminder of how much life is tucked into these habitats that most people drive right past.

Here you can see these girls getting elbow deep in estuary water, seeing amazing new finds like scallops, eels, and me convincing a fisherman to hold and release the bonehead he caught, naturally after letting a couple girls touch it!

Sediments and Mangroves/Seagrass — On Friday I led two stations: sediment analysis and the mangroves/seagrass habitat survey. Campers got hands-on with what the substrate is made of and why it matters, and we talked through the ecological roles of mangroves and seagrass beds as nursery habitat, shoreline stabilizers, and carbon sinks. These are the foundational ecosystems that make everything else in the estuary possible.

Week 2 (June 15–19): Shark Labs, Food Webs, and Surviving to Turtlely Adulthood

Week 2 was packed with some of my favorite kinds of teaching — the kind where campers are physically in the middle of the concept and don’t realize how much they’re learning until it’s already happened.

Sharky Shenanigans Shark Lab — I ran my shark lab as part of the morning rotation, bringing real data and science-accurate content straight from the Sharky Shenanigans curriculum to campers in a hands-on format. [Add a sentence about what the lab covered — what data did campers work with, what did they figure out?]

Human Food Web — This one is always a crowd favorite. Campers each take on the role of a species in a local estuarine food web, and we use ropes to physically connect the producers, consumers, and decomposers into a web you can see and hold. Then we start pulling things out — a habitat loss here, a pollutant there — and campers feel the tension ripple through the ropes as the web destabilizes. It makes food web destruction visceral in a way that a diagram on a page never could.

Turtle Hurdle — Campers became sea turtle hatchlings trying to survive long enough to reach reproductive age — which for sea turtles means making it to at least seven years old. They ran the gauntlet of predators, disorienting lights, boat strikes, and ocean plastic, making choices at each stage and learning just how stacked the odds are against any individual turtle. The ones who “survived” had a different look on their face by the end of it. It hits differently when you’ve lived it, even just on a lawn.

Week 3 (June 22–26): Beach Profiles, Final Presentations, and Saying Goodbye

Week 3 is where everything comes together. The science wraps up, the presentations go up, and then you have to say goodbye to a group of young women who have genuinely changed over three weeks. It’s always a lot.

Sharky Shenanigans Shark Lab (Lab 2) — A second round of the shark lab for the rotating cohort. Same great science, new set of campers getting their first look at real shark data.

Caladesi Island Beach Profile Wrap Up — After campers collected beach profile transect data out at Caladesi Island, Mike and I helped them turn that raw data into actual graphed profiles. We’re talking real cross-sectional diagrams of the beach face — the kind you can lay side-by-side and actually see how the shoreline is shifting over time. Watching campers connect their field measurements to a graph that tells a story about coastal change is exactly the kind of moment that makes this work worth doing.

Coastal Clean Up — We also took the girls out to clean up the Clam Bayou preserve, and they absolutely showed out. This group collected a record-breaking amount of trash 430 lbs!!!— the kind of number that makes you proud and heartbroken at the same time. Proud because these young women showed up and did the work without complaint, and heartbroken because the need was that great. There is something powerful about putting gloves on, getting into the muck, and physically removing harm from a place you’ve just spent weeks learning to love. Stewardship stops being abstract real fast when you’re the one hauling the bags.

Final Presentations + Pizza + Compliment Circle — Thursday was the big one. I spent the day with my lab group helping them finalize their research presentation, organize their poster, and get everything set up for the evening presentation at the FWRI Auditorium. Before presentations, we closed out the day at FWRI and KRC with pizza and a compliment circle, which sounds simple but is one of those traditions that sneaks up on you. Hearing these young scientists affirm each other after three weeks together? It’s the right way to end camp. Finally, watching them stand up in front of an audience and present data they collected themselves — data that matters — is genuinely one of the best feelings in this job.

Why OCG Matters

OCG is one of those programs that reminds you exactly why you went into marine science education in the first place. These aren’t passive campers sitting through lectures — they’re out in the field seining, graphing real data, embodying food webs with ropes in their hands, coaching each other through poster presentations. They leave as scientists, even if they don’t use that word yet.

I’m grateful to have been part of all three weeks this year, and I’m already looking forward to bringing what I learned back into my own classroom and into the Estuary Ambassadors program at Parrish Community High School.

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