Newsletter

The next meeting is the June General Meeting which will be held at the Conservation Centre, 120 Wakefield Street on Wednesday 20^th June commencing at 7.30pm.

We will have Tony Isaacson who will talk about the progress being made with the Jewels of the Sea (JOTS) project.

Steve Reynolds informed me recently that June 2001 is another milestone for MLSSA. It is our 25^th birthday on the 16^th of the month.

Thus we will be able to celebrate our 25^th birthday at the June meeting.

All are invited and may I suggest everybody brings a plate of nibbles? (For the second month in a row!)

Looking at slides from one’s latest dives can reveal some real surprises. More than once I’ve discovered that included quite by accident in the frame is some diminutive fish or invertebrate which I hadn’t noticed on the dive (Fortunately, no white pointer profiles have vet ‘ghosted’ the background of any of my piccies!) Indeed just in the past month or so there have been several such occurrences, two of which are worthy of mention.

At Pearson Island I discovered quite a few little red and white patterned amphipods on the brown algae surrounding the main subject, a navy blue stalked ascidian, Clavellina ostreatum. Now just imagine a macro shot of one of these wee crustaceans perched on such a colourful ascidian - the colour contrast would be stunning. Well- maybe next time

But for me the pinnacle of such pleasant surprises to date was the discovery of a pair of shrimps Rhynchocinetes kuiteri, cohabiting with the main subject a Southern Rock Lobster on a slide from Margaret Brock Reef at Cape Jaffa. The photo was taken ‘blind’ in very surgy conditions (the lobster was facing downwards in a ‘blind’ cavity in the roof of a large overhang, so I couldn’t use the wideangle Nikonos viewfinder and had to ‘point and shoot’, at minimum focal distance, in the general direction of the subject!).

The shrimp however are very attractive and are clearly identifiable as Rhynchocinetes kuiteri, and the only reference book in my possession which includes this species (Graham.J.Edgar’s ‘Australian Marine Life’) records their distributions as (Portsea to Wilson’s Promontory, Victoria, and around Tasmania). So this could represent an extension of their known range. However, Edgar has just released a revised edition, so I’m keen to review that before getting too excited!

If nothing else, such ‘after the event’ revelations highlight the crudeness of my (and dare I say, many colleagues’) powers of observation during dives. I hope I can learn from this but then at 46 my aging vision is becoming a handy excuse for a number of personal imperfections!

This conference was a major event held jointly by the Australian Association for Environmental Education and the Marine Education Society of Australasia. It was held for five days during January.

The money that MLSSA donated enabled me to attend a pre-conference professional development workshop, held for two days at the Queenscliff Marine Discovery Centre. This was a fantastic opportunity to see marine education for professionals in action, and to pick the minds of the wonderful staff at Queenscliff. There were 18 participants in this workshop, most were from Victoria, I was the only interstater and there were two from overseas. We spent very little time indoors, but what we did do indoors generated fascinating discussions about many different issues associated with the marine environment. The majority of time was spent outdoors kayaking, catching fiddler rays, watching soldier crabs retreat into the mud flats they forage on, foraging in rock pools, dredging out in the bay, watching sea lions and discussing the issues associated with ecotourism of these animals, and many other activities. The activities were designed to demonstrate the kinds of exercises one can do with students of all ages.

At the main part of the conference the structure of each day was fairly similar, with a major speaker or two in the morning and then concurrent sessions in the afternoon. I attended basically three kinds of seminars/workshops: 1) those that gave me ideas for classroom exercises, 2) those that were about what other schools/organisations were doing, and 3) sustainability-oriented sessions.

The first major speaker who opened the conference was Jonathon Porritt from the UK. Having grown up in the UK, I was mightily impressed that he had been able to attend the conference. He has been an environmental activist for 30 years or more and was, at one stage, the director of Friends of the Earth (UK). He is now the Chairman for the Sustainability Commission gathered together by Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has written several books, is witty, funny, honest and thought provoking. It was most refreshing to see someone in a fairly powerful and tenuous position to be completely frank about his opinions with regards to everything. He made many jokes and used allegories to convey his messages and thoughts, though unfortunately these got completely misinterpreted by a media reporter from the Melbourne Age. He did not seem to have hidden agendas. He was an excellent speaker with which to open the conference.

The only other speaker I wish to comment on was Jason Clarke, for many years "hijacked by his hormones" and working in advertising, until he suddenly realised how terrible it all was and got out. He gave a most insightful talk about how the advertising world manipulates the masses and the psychological behaviours they have known about and taken advantage of for decades. He talked about how schools "program robots instead of socially responsible humans". There was much more that was very funny, deeply poignant and very revealing at the same time. I would pay to see him speak again.

There was one school I was most impressed with, apart from our very own Urrbrae Agricultural High School, and that was Caulfield Grammar School, situated in Yarra Junction in Victoria. It is a rich private school that has built its own Earth Studies centre in the middle of the Yarra Ranges. There is one main building with small huts that house up to 8 kids at a time. The school sends one of its classes there at a time and it is used all year round only by Caulfield Grammar students, so it is a little limited. However the centre incorporates many of the issues that are close to environmental educators, especially ‘practicing what they teach’ – mainly sustainability. The first thing the kids notice as they approach the Earth Studies centre, situated in the middle of a field, is that it has no cables running to it. The centre has been built with passive solar design in mind and runs completely off solar panels. There are no forms of heating or cooling within the building.

The centre also runs its own profit-making dairy, where the kids learn about biology, respect for animals, the impact on the land and that milk comes from cows, not bottles. Some of the younger age groups are encouraged to adopt-a-calf, they measure and weigh it everyday and watch as its diet and behaviour changes. The older groups are allowed to help put the teats on the cows and monitor milk production, the data from which goes onto an online database. They connect lifestyle with agriculture.

The centre has its own enormous permaculture veggie patch that the children manage and collect vegetables from, which they then cook with. And, of course, they have their own free-range chooks. The use of their own food can be linked by a teacher to waste minimisation and pollution issues. They have a wetland area that they have rehabilitated and built boardwalks over to prevent erosion.

As well as promoting an understanding of sustainability, the centre promotes an understanding of ecology: energy flows, nature rambles, seed collection, science observation, frogwatch, waterwatch, weather, salinity and artistic interpretation are just a few of the methods used of immersing the children in the outdoors. There is also a cultural day when an Aboriginal guide comes for a day to teach about history and they make things with the children. This promotes an appreciation for culture and an understanding of different links with the land.

Living in shared cabins promotes tolerance, respect, consideration and conflict resolution. Each day the children have to pump their shower water up to a header tank and they are taught how to light a fire safely, to heat the water. Each day the huts are inspected and their energy consumption is monitored, the kids get fined or rewarded in ‘energy dollars’, an idea taken from the Institute of Earth Education. The kids are motivated to get lots of energy dollars because at the end of their stay there is a big feast and they have to buy the food with their energy dollars.

Another idea taken from the Institute is "magic spots". I think this is a fantastic way of creating a spiritual connection with the land and should be promoted in many schools. Each day the children spend a specific amount of time, depending on age from 10-30 minutes, alone in the environment. They are encourage to find a magic spot of their own, whether it be by a tree, the river, or sitting on a rock and in this special place they write a journal, or spend time in solitude, silence and harmony. This develops individual qualities as well as creating a strong bond with nature.

An issue that was discussed many times at the conference was that of reinforcement of messages. At Caulfield they do this by letting the children attend the centre every other year of their school life starting at Y7 and once they reach Y11 they then become mentors for the younger children. The feedback from parents has apparently been overwhelmingly positive with comments like "What have you done to my son/daughter? They are actually turning the lights out!" I hope to be able to attend a conference at the school in September this year and I hope more well-funded schools can create centres like this that are accessible by other schools.

Unbelievably in the same session as the school was a talk about environmental education in the Shire community of the Yarra Ranges. The Yarra Shire is a significant proportion of the Melbourne catchment and is agriculturally significant for vineyards, floriculture, orchards and dairy. The Yarra Shire council created a document, "Vision 2020", from a survey of the Shire community that asked them how they see the Shire in twenty years from now. The main issues incorporated in the replies were: social fabric, environmental stewardship, safe shire, local economy, tourism & culture icon, and living & learning community.

To start to create these ideals now, there was not only a community commitment, but also a political will. They have created an environmental education network in the Shire, which undertakes projects like water monitoring using all the schools in the Shire. They have created partnerships with many other bodies and companies. They hold regular meetings and workshops such as "Skills for small property management", "Practical renewable energy systems" and "Growing backyard organic vegetables". The Shire council has also started producing a newsletter called ‘Educating for Sustainability’. This year schools and community groups are going to be monitoring the water quality of both the Yarra River and the Dandenong Creek systems. The Shire of Yarra Ranges Sustainability Program is sponsoring a series of canoe expeditions to enable water monitoring in hard-to-reach places and secondary schools within the shire are invited to nominate students to take part in the expeditions.

The Shire boasts the Birdsland Education Centre, an old homestead that has been renovated incorporating sustainable energy systems for kids to explore. There are composting toilets, a bushland restoration program, pond activities, birdwatching, water quality testing and so on. A program can be developed specifically for the needs of particular schools.

All these projects are co-ordinated or sponsored by the Shire council – amazing isn’t it?

There are only two other presentations that I thought totally worthwhile commenting on. The first is one given by a colleague of Jason Clarke. It was titled ‘From Ideal to Real’ and was about the process of getting from a thousand ideas to one practical reality. This was particularly pertinent to me as I am a quite good ideas person, but pretty hopeless at getting things into reality, so to me it was a fascinating mix of talk, example given by the Melbourne Aquarium and then a hypothetical exercise. They have identified four phases of any project such as the aquarium, and thus four kinds of people to help bring it into reality:

1. Exploration, dream it: dreamer, explorer comes up with lots of ideas

0. Creation, design it: designers get the ideas brief and say this is popular, this could work, what about this?

1. Evaluation, decide it: judges decide exactly which ideas get through, what happens if…?

2. Action, do it: doers make budgets, deadlines, staff decisions, the ‘little’ things.

In our hypothetical exercise it was extremely difficult for the whole group to distinguish between the ideas and the designs, although the example given by the aquarium seemed fairly straightforward. The ideas included a world class aquarium, Melbourne’s top tourist attraction, a "one-way" journey, NOT a fish museum, contemporary, interactive. The designers then got to travel all around the world looking at other aquariums and decided what worked and what didn’t, they are the ones who say things like ‘You’ve got to have sharks’. The decision-makers took into account things like past experience, bias, budgets, value for cost, entertainment vs. credibility, risk, multiple view points and focus groups. The doers then got down to business building, training staff, making last minute changes and taking some ideas back to the judges and designers.

They emphasised that this is by no means a linear process, many parts overlap. The insights gained from the process include:

• Give and take approach

• Decide what’s worth fighting for now and what can wait until later

• Don’t be afraid to trial and refine

• Good planning and procedures pay dividends

• Pick your fights carefully

The other workshop that should have been attended by all environmental groups was on how to use the media. It was fantastic. The lady presenting the talk was from the Gould League and obviously knew her stuff. I think they should present this as a workshop or at least a leaflet, for green organisations all over Australia.

Firstly, she talked about the ‘funnel of filters’ that your information goes through before it comes out the other end and is eventually put out by the media:

• Is it live or pre-recorded?

• Who owns it?

• Who edits it?

• Who is the audience/consumer?

• Who advertises in it?

• How long does it take to reach the audience?

All of these must be taken into account no matter what the medium.

There are two types of media: above the line = print, TV, radio; below the line = everything else e.g. buses, taxis, billboards, junkmail, etc. They all have differing costs, audiences and cycles e.g. television is expensive, has an hourly cycle and a wide audience, as opposed to radio, which is cheap, has a minute cycle and a loyal wide audience, or magazines, which have a monthly cycle, are expensive and have a loyal but narrow audience.

There are several rules on how to use the media:

• Define your objectives

• Pick your fights carefully (again!)

• Make your message simple and sexy

• Don’t grind an axe

• Education disguised as entertainment

• Don’t tell the audience what to think

• Use predictable news cycles (use events)

• Use plain language and common sense

• Establish a network of like-minded allies

• Give an old story a new twist

• Understand different but parallel agendas

The things that get hype are:

gossip bargains prizes money sex

tragedy controversy corruption horror fame

absurdity desperation being the first weird & wonderful

Her laws of media (there were 4 but I only managed to copy down 3):

1. If you want to change the world you need more people to do it.

0. You want the people you have to feed the funnel.

1. You have to choose whether to play the game.

I learnt a huge amount about education, sustainability, mindsets and all that lovely jargon! So for a first-timer it was fabulous. I came away from this conference feeling that I got every penny’s worth that I, my family and friends and MLSSA forked out to enable me to be there. Thanks, guys!

Geoff Prince told us that he would be diving down at Second Valley and Rapid Bay on 21^st January if MLSSA members wanted to join him. I headed down there with two friends. We thought that we would go to Rapid Bay but ended up turning off at Second Valley. We didn’t get to see Geoff and we decided to enter the water from the second bay south of the boat sheds. We scrambled over the rocks into the water and snorkeled out to a point on the coast. We followed the seabed along to the first cave in the cliffs that we could explore with the torches we were carrying. After that we were restricted to just exploring the bay due to swirling conditions and sections of poor viz. I was lucky to find a diver’s knife during the 80 minute plus dive. We sighted many fish including a Blue Devil, juvenile Scaly Fin, Rainbow Cale and Senator Fish. We tried to get close to a school of tiny squid but they were too quick for us. My buddy missed seeing the cormorant that I saw swimming underwater but I missed seeing the stingray that he saw. We hope to return again one day when the conditions will allow us to explore further.

• sheltered, ships could safely head north in a gale

• shallow, sandbanks and mudflats, abundant stingrays

• freshwater streams, fertile land, superior to the borders of Spencer Gulf.

• the creek (Port River) is sheltered from every wind, and will make an excellent harbour

• Holdfast Bay, sand and weed provided secure holding in a series of gales, and there appeared to be ‘no bounds to a flat of fine rich looking country’

runoff channels and increased impervious area –

150ML water, 6000 tonnes of silt, and 1000 tonnes nutrients, once deposited in the reedbeds, reach the gulf each year. Sealed surfaces and new concrete channels prevent infiltration.

2000tonnes nitrogen, 500tonnes phosphorus, and 80ML water reach the gulf from 4 Waste Water Treatment Plants. Early settlers buried their small amount of waste.

The coastal dunes are covered with houses and roads, locking up the reserves of sand. Barriers built on the shoreline alter the patterns of sand movement, and dredging muddies the waters.

A marine ecosystem which developed in clear waters with very little runoff from the land is now struggling to survive in a turbid, nutrient rich sink.

In the most affected areas, mangroves are dying, seagrasses have disappeared, and the sand they once stabilized is on the move.

Research by marine scientists along the metro coast has identified nutrient discharges as the dominant factor in seagrass degradation, masking the possible effects of turbidity and fresh water runoff.

The nutrients, mainly nitrogen, promote the growth of small opportunistic algae (epiphytes) on seagrass leafblades. These algae damage the seagrass by:

• preventing light from reaching the plants
• weighing down the leaves so they become covered with sand
• putting more drag on the leaves with wave action, so they break off

Over the last 15 years, researchers have developed a method which identifies areas of coastal waters where excess algal growth is likely to damage seagrasses

Artificial substrates, with a similar surface to seagrass leaf blades, are attached to cement blocks or bricks, and dropped along the coast in the area to be tested, and at 2 or 3 control sites.

• Spring is the best growth time
• all blocks must be dropped in the same water depth
• take a GPS reading at each site for accurate relocation
• leave blocks in water for 4-6 weeks
• recover all blocks at the same time, taking care not to touch the strips
• photograph the strips from each site on a separate sheet of white paper, with the site number
• Compare the photos of each site for density of epiphyte growth
• rank the growth on a scale of 1-5, using the pristine control sites as 0

The method will identify sites where there is a potential threat from a new discharge, an existing threat from a current discharge, and suggest why seagrass may have been degraded or has disappeared from a section of coast.

(This article will be the first to appear on a new page on our website which will tell viewers a little about the topics covered in some of our General Meetings. - Editor)

I have been liaising with Project Seahorse in Canada recently. Dr Amanda Vincent has been conducting field work in the Philippines and Vietnam. A Post Doctoral Fellow has been hired by the Project to study seahorses in Australia. Dr Keith Martin-Smith has been appointed to the position and he will be in Australia by the end of this year. Project Seahorse recently sent me a list of syngnathid references. The list includes over 600 references concerning seahorses, pipefish and seadragons. I have got some information about Project Seahorse from the web (www.seahorse.mcgill.ca). The web page includes information about topics such as seahorses and their relatives, biological research and conservation programmes. Some of the other major headings include "What’s new at Project Seahorse", "Seahorse FAQs" (Frequently Asked Questions), "More Information" and "How to help". Headings under "Biological Research" include "Biology & population dynamics of seahorses in the Philippines", "Studying the shape & form of seahorses (morphometrics)", "Studying the genetics of seahorses" and "Habitat & fisheries project in Talibon, Central Philippines". If you are interested in seahorses then I recommend this web site to you.

The following list details the results of the 2001 MLSSA elections.

COMMITTEE President Philip Hall

Secretary Steve Reynolds

Treasurer Phill McPeake

Ctee #1 David Muirhead

Ctee #2 Chris Hall

OTHER POSITIONS

Diving Officer: Geoff Prince

Assistant D O: Steve Reynolds

Librarian: Steve Reynolds

Con. Council Rep: Chris Hall

Reefwatch Rep: David Muirhead

S.D.F. Rep: Steve Reynolds

Assistant S.D.F. Rep: Geoff Prince

Photo Index Officer: Steve Reynolds

Webmaster: Danny Gibbins

Auditor: Phill John