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Marsh Maneuvers is a coastal
ecology camp for high school kids. We bring them out to the marsh
for about a week
and teach them all about estuaries, about productivity of the environment.
We look at some of the
interactions with man, how the channels have been built,
the hydrology changes that have been made. We talk about coastal restoration,
coastal protection.
The kids arrive at Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge on Monday afternoon
and from that point on, it's pretty much action-packed.
We take them to night hikes to shine some alligators and look at
some of the animal activity at night. During the day Tuesday, Wednesday,
we do some crabbing and fishing,
look at some water control structures. We talk about restoration projects
such as a bank stabilization,
oyster reef development. Do some biology stuff
by looking at alligators. We dissect some fish heads
to remove the otoliths. And we talk about how biologists
use that
as an aging technique for fish.
We also try to pull in some of the human aspects of this coast as far as the
functions and values. You know, the commercial and recreational fishing, the oil
and gas industry. So we kind of give them a good biological
background about the coast and also bring in the sociology or the human
impact of the coast.
So today at Marsh Maneuvers, we're visiting Avery Island.
The students have participated in a coastal restoration project where we planted
several thousand smooth cordgrass plants into a shallow water area
to try to re-vegitate that. Each summer we do four weeks of camps. Each week we have about 16
or so kids so there's about sixty
some odd kids each summer that benefit from this program.
The immediate impact is that, these teenagers right now they're in high
school. They can go back
and actually use some of this knowledge in writing term papers and giving speeches.
These are 4-H kids, so they give presentations and demonstrations in 4-H
club meetings. So they're actually using this information.
Long-term though, we have had to some students that
five, ten, fifteen years after the program
have gone on to become wetland scientists, teachers,
science teachers. So they've actually used this knowledge and it's kind of spurred
some of the kids interests in a long-term career.
And so this program is actually a combination
effort between the LSU Ag Center and the 4-H organization,
as well as, Sea Grant's involvement in helping some of the technical aspects.
Myself and some the other people would come
visit with kids and teach them different things about the environment.