Update: The date for this cleanup has been changed to May 21 from 9 a.m. – noon. This event is free and open to the public.
On May 21 this year, our newly-formed SPC Underwater Research Society on the Clearwater Campus will have around a dozen divers working under Pier 60 alongside non-diver members of the Science Adventurers Club to clean debris that has accumulated there from fishing and crabbing.
In the months before the 2010 BP oil spill, I formed Reef Monitoring Inc., a non-profit corporation. I enlisted several marine science faculty and several of my former marine biology students to be on the Board of Directors, and we began teaching local sport divers how to make underwater fish and invertebrate surveys. Many of these local divers are ones I certified in my SPC scuba classes (PEN 2136) over the last 40+ years. The main purpose of our group was to collect baseline data on the existing marine communities off Pinellas County, so when we later have fish kills or man-made disasters in local waters, we will be able to evaluate and possibly mitigate the damage.
Once we began doing these underwater surveys on local artificial reefs, we found that they were accumulating large amounts of old crab trap rope and fishing line that poses a very real threat to marine birds, turtles, and mammals, including the now-famous dolphin, Winter, who lost her tail to old crab trap rope. To combat this problem, Reef Monitoring began in 2012 to host a series of Reef Clean-Ups, where we enlisted local sport divers to go out into the Gulf to remove as much of this material from the Clearwater Artificial Reef as possible. I admit I am a bit partial to our artificial reefs because I founded the Pinellas Artificial Reef Program back in 1974.
In 2015, the City of Clearwater Harbormaster requested our group do a cleanup of crab trap rope that had accumulated under Pier 60, a favorite fishing spot on Clearwater Beach. We removed several hundred pounds of old rope on a Saturday morning, but found the actual fiberglass crab traps were embedded in the sand and our divers needed to pull them up to remove them. So this year, the teams will work together with hooks and heavy ropes to pull the old crab traps up out of the sand. We will have a local crab trap person pick up and recycle the fiberglass crab traps. The students will then have a free lunch provided by Hooters, an organization that has been very supportive of all our clean ups and has provided lunches for these events.
Our choice of April 23 was simple: That is one day after Earth Day, when similar clean up events will be occurring all over the country. Also, on that same day, the Natural Science Department is hosting an open house event for local high school seniors to encourage them to enroll in science classes for the fall. We hope to set up a large screen TV at the science building and have live streaming – both under and above water – of the clean-up event to spotlight our science-related studies at SPC.
