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Mitchell Doctor (shown above) is in the middle of an 11-week stint at the University of Santa Cruz where he is working for a non-profit operation called the Diver’s Alert Network. The network is a non-profit medical and research organization dedicated to the safety and health of recreational scuba divers and associated with Duke University Medical Center.

"The whole purpose is to prevent injuries," says Doctor, a senior in marine biology.

Each summer, Divers Alert takes on eight interns. Doctor had to spend a week in training at the network’s headquarters in North Carolina before heading out to Santa Cruz. There he works with undergrad and grad students monitoring their dives. The divers are hooked to computers which register depth, time, temperature and other factors during each dive. Each dive profile is then sent to the network’s database which it is analyzed and eventually used to create safety guidelines.

Doctor, who hails from Staten Island, will return in August to get ready for his senior year. He plans on grad school and is most interested in coral reef ecology.

Lindsay Harmon is just a freshman in marine biology, but she is already active in research projects that will take her to the British Virgin Islands for a month.

A student in Dr. Graham E. Forrester’s ecology course, Harmon volunteered to help him with some of his research. One of her jobs was to count something like 50,000 fish eggs in a population study on the bridled goby, a fish that Forrester is studying.

"He must have liked my dedication," says Harmon, and consequently she is joining Forrester in the islands to help him with two projects. One is to take fragments of staghorn and elkhorn coral and see whether they will grow in certain areas around Guana Island. The other project is to continue with the bridled goby project, monitoring their population size and interactions. The fish are only about two inches long.

Harmon, a resident of New Jersey, says she has been fascinated by marine biology ever since she was in the sixth grade and did a science project in the field.

Jessie Sanders is another CELS student who is volunteering at the Mystic Aquarium this summer and she has a definite goal—gathering research data for her senior honors project.

This is her second year as a volunteer intern and she takes care of the fish and invertebrates. She works a full five day week.

While part of her time is spent taking care of the aquarium’s denizens, she also is concentrating on gathering data for her senior honors project. The aquarium raises plankton to feed the fish and she is studying the optimal conditions for rearing these tiny organisms. Specifically she is interested in the caloric content of the home-grown plankton.

Sanders, a Connecticut native who has lived in Rhode Island for three years, plans to attend grad school and her goal is to teach marine biology at the college level.

Amy Kolb, a resident of Syracuse, N.Y., is at home this summer but her summer work, while interesting, also has an unpleasant side—she works with a team that is studying the most polluted lake in the country.

Onondaga Lake has that reputation, she says. Only a couple of miles long and one mile wide, this lake has just about everything that’s bad in it, she adds.

Kolb, who is entering her sophomore year, is working at the Upstate Freshwater Institute where she collects and helps analyze water samples, not only from Onondaga Lake but rivers, reservoirs and other lakes in the region.

But Onondaga is in the worst shape. She says if you drop an anchor, it does not take hold because there is so much sludge on the bottom.

Kolb said she took the paying job to start gaining some experience. Her plan is to get into marine science as a profession.

Pactrick J. Lyons graduated from URI this year and is headed for grad school at Stony Brook University on Long Island but for the summer he decided to put in a second stint as a researcher on Cape Cod. He is studying growth rates of macroalgae in the East Harbor lagoon in Truro for Cape Cod National Seashore.

His study involves an estuary that was sealed off from the ocean for many years and was recently reopened. The result has been macroalgae blooms, which many people find annoying. Part of his work is to insert plastic tubes into the lagoon, introduce algae into the tubes and then measure their growth rates.

He plans on getting his PhD in a few years and is thinking about staying in academia. “But who knows what will come up” he says.

When it comes to traveling, Kelly Pennoyer, a URI Coastal Fellow, is doing a lot this summer. She is working with Dr. Graham Forrester on a project taking an interdisciplinary look at Carribean marine reserves. Since she has been looking at the ecological side of things, she is doing a lot of Scuba diving measuring corals and checking coral diseases.

She says she is also learning to fish “so that I can do roving fish surveys and fish counts.”

“We have been diving inside and outside of marine reserves to compare fish diversity, bottom cover, coral diversity and disease,” she says.

So far the North Kingstown resident, a senior come this fall, has visited St. Vincent, Tobago Keys, St. Lucia, Barbados and Tobago and at last report was headed to the US Virgin Islands. She will finally wrap up her summer with a visit to Puerto Rico.

Her diving experiences are fascinating. She says, "One day we swam with dolphins and nurse sharks."

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