Shelter Island students building seahorse hotels: Cornell/School program launched  

It was a cool and somewhat dreary afternoon under the tent outside the Community Center last Thursday afternoon. But early rain had stopped by the time students crossed the street from Shelter Island School to keep seahorses from becoming extinct. 

Makayla Cronin, a 9th grader, who is already thinking seriously about becoming a veterinarian, said that’s why she wanted to participate in the Shelter Island School/Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) program focused on creating seahorse “hotels.” These are protective units where seahorses can live, give birth and keep their offspring safe over time to re-populate their numbers and help restore eelgrass — bottom meadows essential for healthy ecosystems.   

“I figured it would help,” she said, to learn about the needs of seahorses and how to help restore the seahorse population, which is native to Eastern Long Island. This is the first of such programs to be launched as an experiential learning initiative focused on marine conservation. Similar projects are slated to take place in Sag Harbor and Southold. But last week’s effort on the Island was a trial run to determine the efficacy of combining student education with CCE’s “Back to the Bays” program to improve water quality so organisms can thrive.

The program is funded through contributions that can be made at backtothebays.org. 

Shelter Island School was chosen as a launch site for the program because of its size, which allows for the individualized attention that organizers believe enables the seahorse hotel program to be most effective.

After hearing from CCE’s Marine Habitat Specialist Kimberly Manzo about the once-ubiquitous seahorses, now declining in numbers, the students were given recycled wire platforms weighed down with bricks, metal pipes and other re-purposed aquaculture gear and challenged to build the seahorse hotels. 

Ms. Manzo said when she learned there were seahorses native to the area, she was eager to launch this program.

Seahorses are “masters of camouflage,” used as a means for protecting themselves, she said. They aren’t fast swimmers and the hotels are meant to protect their numbers from being washed away in heavy tides, Ms. Manzo added.

Alice Potter, a 7th grader, wanted to participate because “seahorses are cool,” and she wanted the chance to help out in the effort to keep them from disappearing from local waters.

The students discovered how cool seahorses are when Ms. Manzo told them both mothers and fathers tend to their young, and often it’s the mothers that will swim away from the young ones for the day, leaving fathers to attend to the youngsters. (Not generally the case among humans, Ms. Manzo said.) Seahorses also mate for life.

“I like science in general,” Natalie Mamisashvili said about what she was learning. The 9th grader said she thought participating would be fun.

“It’s up to you to be creative” in building the seahorse hotels, Marine Aquaculture Specialist Kate Rossi-Snook told the students as they embarked on the challenge to design and build their visions of what would work best. The one piece of advice they got about how to structure the units was that the seahorse hotels had to provide space that would not only be safe for the seahorses, but ensure turtles and other marine life might swim in but would need an exit path so they don’t get trapped in the units.

Over time, the CCE specialists hope to deploy about a dozen seahorse hotels within crab pot areas, places allowed without special permits, Ms. Rossi-Snook said.             Amara Cajamarca Goodale said she didn’t know she would be participating in the program until shortly before it started. Her aunt had signed her up.

What brought William Marshall, an 8th grader, to the event was his idea of eventually studying at Cornell. Sister Gracie, a 5th grader, simplified her reason with a two-word response: “Why not?”

Lida Kendall-Posner, a 6th grader, was quick to embrace the challenge, working with her friends and finding it fun to contribute her ideas to the project.

About halfway through the program, 9-year old Erich von Carp, an Island resident who is a student at Our Lady of the Hamptons, joined the group, rapidly opting to work with William Marshall, who was demonstrating success with his design. The two worked amicably for the remainder of the hour-long session, and Erich wanted to know when other Cornell Cooperative Extension programs would happen.

Ms. Manzo responded that Cornell Cooperative Extension posts its programs at backtothebays.org.