Education | Southern Fried Science

Getting your kids started in conservation technology: a quick guide for parents who have no idea where to begin.

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Andrew Thaler

Southern Fried Science has been a bit dormant for the last year, so first, a re-introduction:

I’m Andrew Thaler, I’m an ocean scientist, and I make weird tech things.

Ten years ago I inherited an old mechanical tide gauge from a lab cleanout. For some bizarre reason, I thought: what if, instead of tracking the rising and falling tides in the Beaufort Inlet, it tracked the waxing and waning of conversations about sea level rise on Twitter. And thus, the Sea Leveler was born.

Meet Sea Leveler: the open source water level gauge that wants you to talk about #sealevelrise

In a lot of ways, the Sea Leveler was the precursor of things to come. It was exhaustively documented and released as an open-source project on GitHub. It merged the digital with the physical, creating an object that allowed you to connect an online conversation to the real-world environment through repurposed technology. It was weird. And it was fun.

The Sea Leveler itself was passed on to a good friend and champion of ocean outreach, but its legacy lives on in the plethora of projects to follow: Drown Your Town, Dolphin Vision, the reStepper, Turtle Borg, and, of course, the OpenCTD.

Creating Healthy Working Cultures in Marine Science Education

Posted on April 10, 2020 by Catherine Macdonald

Below you’ll find a document I’ve been thinking about for more than a decade. I teach marine science field skills to undergraduates and graduate students at Field School and the University of Miami, and I’ve had a lot of opportunities to observe science and scientific learning in action. This is my best effort to distill the key principles I’ve learned about creating a healthy, supportive working environment. Starting the year, my students at Field School will all read and sign on to these principles before working with us.

It feels important to add that cultures are the product of choices and actions (or inaction). They don’t create themselves; they are created by the people within them. That means, sadly, that in every toxic organization there are people who choose, and benefit (or think they benefit) from that toxicity. The good news is that it also means we can choose something else. It’s not out of our hands.

I’ve spent a lot of my time thinking about how to create welcoming, supportive learning environments for all of my students. And no: I don’t believe compassion and acceptance mean you have to sacrifice scientific rigor—in fact, I think students learn and grow more in these settings.

If you are also engaged in looking for solutions to the systemic problems in how we train future marine scientists, please feel free to join me by sharing this, implementing it in your own teaching, or reaching out with suggestions for how it can be improved based on your knowledge and practice. If you are a student who is struggling with these issues and you need advice or a friendly ear, please know that you are not alone, and my inbox is always open to you.

Worldwide SciComm Challenge: #SharkSafetySlogan

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Michelle Jewell

Can you remember how young you were when you were first taught stop, drop, and roll? How about turn around, don’t drown? Slogans are abridged stories that fulfill our human need to convey information quickly and memorably. Their uses range from social connection, cooperation, and informing cohorts of risk. Sayings like the above are effective because of these three main achievements:

They are memorable.
They incorporate knowledge with action.
And by fearlessly acknowledging rare, potentially fatal, risks – they create a constructive dialogue.

Imagine a world without stop, drop and roll where children are simply taught that there is an incredibly rare risk that they could catch fire, and that’s it. While the statistic may be true, just providing the information would result in a classroom full of hysterical first-graders. A great slogan captured and presents the risk fearlessly.

Put another way, slogans are science communication wins. So let’s get together and apply this human craft of slogan creation to another incredibly rare risk: shark encounters! Your risk of encountering a shark is extremely low–a statistic that is repeated ad nauseam. But just like our classroom of traumatized first-graders, stats alone aren’t always enough. Enter the #SharkSafetySlogan challenge!

Join us on twitter at #SharkSafetySlogan to crowd-source a memorable slogan. Shark experts and organizations from across the globe will be sharing sharky information to help you on your scicomm quest. Anyone who visits a beach is encouraged to participate!

Remember, keep it memorable, brief, and incorporate shark smarts with actions. An example could be:

Seals? Seabirds?! See ya!

The above slogan is brief, memorable, and incorporates the knowledge that an abundance of seals and seabirds is a strong indication that sharks are present, and you’re better off not swimming juuuust yet.

Come join us at #SharkSafetySlogan and see if your slogan ends up with the most likes and retweets! I’ll be leading the charge at @ScienceRhapsody. See you on the interwebs!

5 things to know about spotted eagle ray tooth plates, August’s 3D printed reward!

Posted on August 17, 2018 by David Shiffman

I recently unveiled a new tier of Patreon rewards: 3D printed shark and ray models!For $17 per month, you will get a monthly 3D printed educational model of different shark or ray parts in the mail, and you’ll be supporting my efforts to provide these models to schools for free.

August’s reward is a row from the tooth plate of a spotted eagle ray, Aetobatus narinari! The original specimen is housed at the University of Tennessee fossil collection, and the 3D scan was shared online as part of the FOSSIL project.

I asked University of Florida/Florida Museum Ph.D. student Jeanette Pirlo about the FOSSIL project:

” The FOSSIL Project is an NSF funded project, based out of the University of Florida and the Florida Museum, devoted to cultivating a networked community of practice in which fossil club members and professional paleontologists collaborate in learning the practice of science and outreach. The myFOSSIL.org website is the platform from which our members can collaborate by sharing their fossil finds, curate their personal collections, and participate in ongoing paleontological research” – Jeanette Pirlo

A full set of Spotted Eagle Ray Jaws showing multiple tooth rows fused into a plate, photo by Cathleen Bester courtesy Jeanette Pirlo at the Florida Museum. The specific individual tooth row that was scanned here, photo by Maggie Limbeck, University of Tennessee Masters Candidate. And the 3D printed version

Learn more about the spotted eagle ray and it’s teeth below!

I built a head-mounted LiDAR array that lets you see the world like a dolphin via vibrations sent through your jaw.

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

I’m Andrew Thaler and I build weird things.

Last month, while traveling to Kuching for Make for the Planet Borneo, I had an idea for the next strange ocean education project: what if we could use bone-conducting headphones to “see” the world like a dolphin might through echolocation?

The author wearing a head mounted LiDAR array, looking very pensive.

Spoilers: You can. Photo by A. Freitag.

Bone-conducting headphones use speakers or tiny motors to send vibrations directly into the bone of you skull. This works surprisingly well for listening to music or amplifying voices without obstructing the ear. The first time you try it, it’s an odd experience. Though you hear the sound just fine, it doesn’t feel like it’s coming through your ears. Bone conduction has been used for a while now in hearing aids as well as military- and industrial-grade communications systems, but the tech has recently cropped up in sports headphones for people who want to listen to music and podcasts on a run without tuning out the rest of the world. Rather than anchoring to the skull, the sports headphones sit just in front of the ear, where your lower jaw meets your skull.

This is not entirely unlike how dolphins (and at least 65 species of toothed whales) detect sound. Read More

Jacques Week 2018 Begins July 22! Join us for a week of classic Cousteau Documentaries!

Posted on July 17, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

Jacques Week begins this Sunday, July 22, 2018! Join us for a week-long celebration of the ocean documentarian who started it all! Without Jacques there would be no Blue Planet, no Mission Blue, and no Shark Week. All next week we’re watching classic Jacques Cousteau Documentaries, discussing ocean science and conservation, and celebrating all things Ocean!

Most of these films will available online. Some will require purchase. We’ve provided links to the for-purchase options and offer alternates if you can’t find them. It’s become nearly impossible to find copies of the Jacques Cousteau Odyssey collection, so, though this series includes some of my all time favorites, we’re going to phase them out this year and instead lean more heavily on River Explorations for more recent Cousteau work. Links to all available films can be found at the JacquesWeek2017 YouTube playlist.

Jacques Week is a collective viewing experience. We’ll provide links to each piece of media, due a countdown on Twitter, and then everyone hits play at the same(ish) time and we watch these incredible documentaries together. Read More

Try your hand at celestial navigation with an open-source, Glowforge-ready astrolabe!

Posted on March 28, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

I have a bit of a soft spot for classic navigational instruments. In an age where more people interact with maps than ever before and yet spend much less time plotting their own course, being able to look up at the sky and discern your place in the world is a powerful skill. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly easy to make your own navigational instruments. Unless, of course, you have your own laser cutter.

I recently got a Glowforge, so honestly, you should have seen this coming.

Say hello to the Mariner’s Astrolabe!

This month’s 3D printed reward is a megalodon tooth! Here are 5 things to know about megalodon.

Posted on March 14, 2018 by David Shiffman

I recently unveiled a new tier of Patreon rewards: 3D printed shark and ray models! For $17 per month, you will get a monthly 3D printed educational model of different shark or ray parts in the mail, and you’ll be supporting my efforts to provide these models to schools for free.

The first month’s reward comes from one of the most (in)famous sharks of all time, Carcharocles megalodon! The first 3D printed Patreon reward is a meg tooth, an exact copy of the meg tooth that has been used to educate thousands of students at UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum!

The original tooth

Here are some things to know about Carcharocles megalodon!

6 Essential Tips for the 3D Printing Newbie.

Posted on January 23, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

It’s meta.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been enjoying watching David Shiffman and Craig McClain take their first steps into 3D printing. For a small subset of people, small consumer 3D printers can be an incredibly useful tool, for a larger subset, 3D printing has fantastic teaching applications, but for most enthusiasts, it’s a fun hobby. Fortunately, the 3D printing hype train has slowed down in the last few years and it is now much easier to separate the wheat from the chaff and drill down into the applications where 3D printing really shines.

3D printers are fairly inexpensive now. You can get a pretty okay 3D printer like the Monoprice Mini (which we used at various hack-a-thons and maker events) for around $220 USD on Amazon. I’ve worked a bit with that particular printer and it’s good. It won’t blow you away but it will do everything you’d expect a solid 3D printer to do. My in house machine is a Printrbot Simple Metal, which has since been replaced by the Simple Pro. It’s not the cheapest one out there, but it’s an absolute beast, taking all the abuse I can throw at it. It’s even been to sea.

Gills Club Shark Tales: An online and in-person sharkstravaganza 19-20 September at NEAQ!

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Michelle Jewell

Note: This post has been updated on 18 September 2017.

Friends, Researchers, Countrywomen, lend me your ears!

The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and New England Aquarium are hosting a completely free two-day event, 19-20 September, featuring an amazing line-up of shark scientists and enthusiasts, including:

Keynote Speakers:

Susan Goldberg – Editor in Chief of National Geographic Magazine

Wendy Benchley – Renowned global voice for shark protection and co-founder of the prestigious Peter Benchley Ocean Awards.

Gills Club Science Team Speakers:
Dr. Michelle Heupel – Australian Institute of Marine Science
Dr. Alison Kock – South African National Parks
Read More