Visit to the Cape Eleuthera Institute

Last week we visited the Island School. Like Jack said in his blog, the Island School is just like the High Mountain Institute in that it it has just under fifty 11^th graders going to class and learning about how to enjoy the natural surroundings. The Island School also has a few side things. One of these is the CEI or Cape Eleuthera Institute, which has two main parts: the aquaponics and the fish research.

The aquaponics section includes two life forms and five basic steps to its success.  The two life forms are fresh water tilapia and edible plants. The first step is raising tilapia from minuscule eggs to adulthood. There is a rectangular tank divided by nets into three sections. Each section has different size tilapia, from eggs to six inch long minnows. At six inches long, they are moved to larger tanks.

This is me next to the talapia tanks. You can see that the nets create separate spaces for the fish.

The next step is to flush water from the baby tilapia tank into the plant nursery where they start plants. Floating seeds are spread out on the water from the baby tilapia tank, which is poop filled and nutritional. Once the seeds sprout into the size of the average four-leafed clover, they are put into spun rock and onto racks in water that has come from the adult tilapia tanks.

Here I am standing next to the racks. You can see a CEI researcher working with the plants, which are shaded from the very strong Bahamian sun.

After that, the third step begins: rotating the water. Water is sent into the tilapia tank where it is filled with nutritional poop, then sent to the plants which strip it of nutrients and oxygenate it before returning the cleaned water to the tilapia. After running some water through the system four or five times, taking around 12 hours, the water is dumped into nearby mangroves, which is good for the mangrove because there are still bits of nutrients and the low salt content is good for the young mangroves. The fourth step is caring for everything, which includes feeding the fish, snipping the plants, and cleaning the tanks. The fifth step, my favorite, is eating of course. The full grown tilapias, the only ones eaten, are saved for special occasions, so I didn't taste any. The lettuce on the other hand, makes up 80% of the campus's salad, and I can tell you that it was delicious.

The research projects were also an interesting part of CEI. Next to the tilapia, there are many other fish. There are many tanks of bonefish, lemon sharks, lionfish with spiny lobster, stingrays, and minnows. Personally, I found the bonefish experiments to be the most interesting. There were five different tanks of bonefish, three for the sunscreen experiment and two for the zinc experiment. The sunscreen experiment wondered "When fishermen handle bone fish, does the presence of sunscreen affect them? If so, in what ways?" To solve this, CEI researchers handled bonefish with sunscreen on, handled them without sunscreen on and then had a third tank of bone fish that were not handled at all. They then looked for behavioral or bodily changes on the bonefish. I was not there to hear the outcome though. The zinc experiment was complete so one of the tanks was emptied while we were there. In this experiment, the researchers put zinc into one of the tanks and looked for similar reactions as in the first experiment. They discovered that zinc made bonefish skin fall off faster than usual.

Jack, Forest, and a CEI researcher cleaning the empty zinc experiment tank. Forest is a kid who lives at the Island School with his parents who teach there and we quickly made friends with him.

Jack standing in front of the other zinc experiment tank. You can see the bonefish behind him.

This is how the tanks where labeled.

The lemon sharks were there for tagging, weighing, measuring, and general research with a higher level of quality than can be done from a boat. They were not there for special experiments like the bonefish.  Jack wrote an entire blog on them as well.

This is a picture of lemon sharks through a portal in the side of the tank.

Lionfish are an evasive and poisonous species that doesn’t have a predator in the Bahamas. They are killing lots of fish so you can imagine the CEI's surprise when they discovered that the spiny lobster seemed to have benefited from the lionfish's arrival. They put the lionfish and spiny lobster together in the six tanks under 24 hour surveillance. They are trying to prove that spiny lobsters are actually the long-awaited lionfish predator of the Bahamas.

The lionfish with the spiny lobster. The lobster is in one of the tubes. It was out when I was unfortunately unarmed with the camera.

We did not have enough time to learn about everything we saw at the Cape Eleuthera Institute. For example, I never got to learn about the sting rays but it was fun and good practice trying to find them in the sand in the bottom of their tank. There was a small tank of minnows. I am guessing that it was probably live fish food to keep the fish active. Even though I had not learned about them, they were fun to scare by swinging a hand over the tank like an incoming bird.

I found the Cape Eleuthera Institute very interesting and a great learning opportunity regardless of the fact that I did not learn the outcome of some interesting experiments. I heard that smaller versions of the aquaponic system are coming into the common household with a few goldfish and a basil plant. Maybe when we move back ashore, we will get one to have fresh basil and goldfish of course.

These are all the research tanks. The aquaponics are to the right and the office building is to the left.

 Forest, Jack, and I with the CEI just behind us.

 – Porter