The smell of urea is always a weird one. But my lab girls were into it. The poor conference room looked like a massacre but hey, it was all in the name of science! This wasn’t a wholly unusual day at the Oceanography Camp for Girls (OCG), but it was definitely a memorable one.
OCG is absolutely the place to be, just passing its thirty-year anniversary, this camp has inspired and uplifted girls since the 90’s and remains one of the greatest teaching experiences I have ever had. No wonder I keep coming back, right? OCG is unique in a way that the other camps I have taught at don’t quite measure up to. Campers have to apply and sometimes jump through administrative hoops to get accepted. These girls WANT to be here. But that’s not all! This camp is solely built around science, especially experiential science. The University of South Florida’s St. Petersburg campus opens its doors to these girls and lets them become scientists for 3 magical and wonderful weeks.
The week starts with the girls getting to know each other; and us, the mentors, getting to know them. We talk about our experiences, what part of marine science we are passionate about, and of course what our favorite animals are. We go through the first week doing tons of amazing field trips and performing field research tasks like sediment sampling, quadrant observations, trawling, seine netting, and water quality testing.
The first field trip is typically to Ft. De Soto Park at the mouth of Tampa Bay, which centers around the biodiversity changes of three main habitats: mangroves, seagrass beds, and the beach. Each of these habitats shows a different subset of animals and even a different amount of each animal. The biodiversity of the different habitats suggests much about how each area helps the organism’s life cycle. There are three main stations at the mangrove and seagrass stations: plants, water quality, and fishing. These stations give the girls real hands-on experience gathering and calculating data in the field, and this data is then used to analyze the health of the areas for the last nearly 20 years! The beauty behind this is the girls get to be part of something bigger than themselves and help a data collection that has been occurring for years. Shell Key is more of a laid-back field trip that focuses on shells and local animals via kayaking to shell key itself, it’s a super fun break for the girls that allows them to just be girls for a day while also looking at the local shell populations. Lastly, the cruise. The cruise is definitely my favorite part of field trips as it immerses the girls in a real-life science vessel and gets them using equipment and techniques they may have never seen before. I mean, I did my first research cruise in my junior year of college! It’s amazing these girls get to experience this at the bright young age of 14!
Labs are, of course, my personal favorite part of the camp. The girls get separated into small groups and split off to be part of a lab experience with a variety of excellent scientists doing amazing things with their groups. I start scouting out my sharky girls from the get-go to see if I could find the most passionate girls to participate in my lab. My lab centered around shark tagging but this year we got to dissect some fresh blacktip sharks, hence the urea smell from earlier! Fresh sharks smell very strongly of urea and make for an interesting experience when chopping them up, especially when you’re in a fishbowl style conference room on the second floor of a university building! My first group was absolutely thrilled with the experience, they got thoroughly engaged in finding every single organ and part of the shark. One girl spent an hour trying to chip away to the brain! I was thrilled with my luck at how excited they were to see everything that makes a shark a shark! Our second day was spent learning the process of tagging the shark and analyzing the data. I was worried after their thrilling first day they would be underwhelmed with the main point of this lab, but to my surprise they were eager and curious about shark activity and how we learn about and protect sharks. This group truly was amazing, and it really gives me hope when going back to my day-to-day work as a high school marine science teacher that there’s more students out there just waiting to be shown that they can be a marine scientist too.
The rest of the week is spent with small activities like coral reef building and career day, but for me the other exciting part is seeing the results of the hard work the girls put in during their labs. The last camp day the girls work on a presentation and poster that depicts what they learned and researched in their lab. I love seeing what my girls come up with for this final project. This year they blew it out of the water! They made amazing conclusions and presented their work like pros! It just goes to show that this camp makes these girls so confident in themselves and their work.
OCG is a home away from home for me, it harkens back to why I do what I do and who I am inspired to be. I hope to be someone that helps lift girls like this and introduces them to the world of STEM; helping to mold the strong and smart ladies of tomorrow. The connections I made with girls I knew for just a couple of weeks is astounding, I will miss them all so much and I hope to see them again soon. I can’t wait to see what next year’s group brings.
https://www.usf.edu/marine-science/community-engagement/oceanography-camp-for-girls/
Personally my favorite but I still had to read it in my beautiful voice even tho you weren’t there. And I still have your drawing hung up on my wall