Episode 20: Leading the Way Towards Oyster and Shoreline Restoration in Mosquito Lagoon

Jessy Wayles:

In the northern region of the lagoon, along the shorelines of Turtle Mound in the Canaveral National Seashore, there lies a secret nature path. Well, it’s not actually a secret, it’s pretty well-defined. But the mature oak trees to the east and flourishing mangroves to the west make you feel like you’ve stumbled upon something hidden from the past.

Today we chat with two professors from University of Central Florida to discuss their ongoing habitat restoration efforts in Mosquito Lagoon, including the creation of this peaceful path, today on this episode of One Lagoon, One Voice.

Duane De Freese:

Hi, I am Duane De Freese, executive director of the IRL Council and the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program. Welcome to our One Lagoon, One Voice Podcast.

Each week, myself or one of my staff members will host leaders in the community, scientists along the lagoon, people who know a lot about the system to talk about some of the problems.

And most importantly, some of the solutions to solve the Indian River Lagoon’s health and make sure it’s great for future generations. So let’s get the show started and let’s talk a little lagoon.

Jessy Wayles:

Hi, there. Welcome to One Lagoon, One Voice. My name is Jessy, and I will be hosting today’s podcast.

I’m really excited because today we are here to talk about the amazing work that University of Central Florida has been doing to restore shorelines, sacred Native American shell middens, seagrass beds, oyster reefs and so much more in the Canaveral National Seashore in Mosquito Lagoon.

So joining us are two of my favorite professors at UCF — part of the Coastal and Estuarine Ecology Lab at UCF — Dr. Melinda Donnelly. Welcome.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

Hi, Jessy, thanks for having us on today.

Jessy Wayles:

And Dr. Linda Walters, thanks for coming on.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Thank you. We are happy to be here.

Jessy Wayles:

So I’ve been very excited for today because I know that, Melinda, you just got back from doing some field work.

And Linda, you were out in the lagoon yesterday. Real quick, how’s everything looking? Is everything looking okay?

Dr. Linda Walters:

I can start and say that Mosquito Lagoon is looking the best it’s looked in probably at least 10 years — maybe 20 years. The water’s been super clear and our restoration efforts have been working really well.

We’ve figured out what we’re doing and we’re making really good progress where other barriers just aren’t the same problems they used to be.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

We’re wrapping up our annual monitoring at all of the sites. So we’ve been able to go and get a good overview of everything from our oldest site — which was Turtle Mound — to the sites that we just recently did this past summer. And I have to say that Turtle Mound is still one of my absolute favorite sites.

So being one of the biggest remaining shell middens is one of the attractions of Turtle Mound. So one, everybody that goes to Canaveral National Seashore wants to go visit that site. It’s a great educational opportunity.

Whenever we’re out there working, everybody’s asking us what we’re doing and we’re telling them we’re monitoring a restored shoreline. They just look at you in shock like, “Oh, this is a restored shoreline? We never would’ve known walking past it.” I always say that’s the biggest compliment we can get for our work because the goal for all the living shoreline stuff is to make it look natural.

As somebody that likes to kayak and fish in Mosquito Lagoon, I don’t want to look at a big seawall when I’m out there doing that. I want to look at mangroves and things like that. Our older living shorelines have just developed into these great natural looking shorelines, and I don’t think we could ask for a better result from those areas.

Jessy Wayles:

Turtle Mound definitely has a place in my heart as well. I moved down to Florida for school in 2010 and I got a job working as a volunteer camp counselor with the Marine Science Center in Ponce Inlet.

And one of the days we took our kids down to Canaveral. I think it was like every Tuesday or Wednesday we would take our kids down to Canaveral to walk Turtle Mound, which was perfect for 10 year olds because you just send them along the boardwalk and whoever made it up to the top first won and tired them out. So we were happy about it.

I didn’t know anything about Florida coming down from Pennsylvania. So it was great to learn about the work that you guys were doing because that was when you had started creating the living shoreline out at Turtle Mound, which is a Native American shell midden.

We tended to find a shell midden as a collection of shells and other cultural materials that the humans back in those days intentionally accumulated. And it was used as a vantage point so they could see beyond the trees and look out onto the ocean and look out onto the lagoon. It also has papaya trees growing out of it, which was wild to me, and sour orange and all of these different artifacts.

The fact that you could look on top of the hill and see an oyster shell and realize that oyster shell was thousands of years old was just so trippy. I remember taking our kids down on the nature walk to the side of it. And at that time, it was just tiny, spindly, little mangrove propagules almost like an oyster mat.

I remember asking our lead camp counselor, what is going on here? And she was telling me all about the restoration work that you guys were doing. It’s been really neat to see that project back in 2010 and now, 14 years later — [growing] up with it in a sense. I just love it so much.

Dr. Linda Walters:

I will add on to that, Jessy, that we created that nature walk, which is not something a bunch of marine biologists are trained to do. But we worked with the park staff. Our goal was that if we’re going to do restoration, we didn’t want people walking all over it, which is what they were doing prior to that. They were just walking in the water, which is exactly where we were going to put the mangroves and the marsh grass and the oyster recruitment substrate.

So [with] John Steiner — who is now the retired research management specialist — we had a bunch of volunteers who came and we created the trail where he told us to. And it is super popular. Everybody walks on that trail now thinking that somebody who knows what they’re doing made it.

But I will add, and then let Melinda take over, that was our first big living shoreline stabilization. And we did put in mangroves that were nine months old at that time, grown by a preschool class that my son was in at UCF, the creative school. Most of those mangrove propagates were so small they were gone in less than a week — so we replanted three times.

Now, we don’t plant anything that’s younger than four years old because we are so much smarter now.

Jessy Wayles:

I always tell everyone that we don’t plant anything that’s less than knee-high. [The plants] need to be at least knee-high.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

I mean, that’s been one of the interesting things about this project all along — we’ve been able to learn from everything. We went into it with this idea of, okay, we’re going to grow some mangroves and put them on a shoreline and see what happens.

Now, we’ve learned from those early projects and have been able to establish this ongoing nursery where we’re working with local schools around Central Florida to get the mangrove started. And then we have lots of UCF students getting trained in nursery work over at UCF taking care of all the mangroves.

It’s just really exciting to see how the project has grown and changed. Overall it’s just a lot more successful as we’ve been able to learn from the results from all those early projects.

Jessy Wayles:

Absolutely. And you guys spoke about getting volunteers involved and getting your preschoolers involved, which is crazy because Josh is so grown up now.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

He’s 27. Yes.

Jessy Wayles:

Oh my gosh, that’s insane. So I know this is a little bit out of the lagoon boundaries, but one of the last projects I worked with you guys on was the creation of a living shoreline up at Washington Oak State Park in Palm Coast.

How is that looking? Is it doing well?

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

It actually went really good. Overall, the sites look great. The gabions were almost completely rusted away, so we spent some time at the end going ahead and picking up some of the scraps and stuff that had washed up into the mangroves.

But otherwise, it’s like we started walking out there and I’m like, I think there’s supposed to be gabions here. And we weren’t finding anything at all for probably the first 100 feet or so. They had just completely disintegrated.

The volcanoes are covered in settled oysters. The oyster’s survival is not great because it’s obviously getting knocked around by huge waves. But they literally are just completely encrusted with oyster shells now. The whole volcano is covered in oysters and it has all kinds of little rib muscles that were all growing amongst all the nooks and crannies. So not a lot of live oysters but lots of live rib muscles coming in.

And even the old site where the shell bags got tossed around, everything’s become sunk in and has a nice spot. The vegetation is growing really nice. So we were really excited and happy with everything.

Dr. Linda Walters:

That was during COVID we put that in. So that would’ve been four years, three years.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

I believe so. I think it was in 2019 or 2020 when we were working that first section. So that one is right at about four years.

Then [we put in] the biodegradable stuff in 2022 — so that was in two years.

And especially the stuff behind the volcanoes looks amazing. That whole area has filled back in with Spartina, which was why we wanted to work there because we had seen it all disappear. It used to be our control site when we did the first round, and then it turned so bad — we turned it into a restoration site.

Jessy Wayles:

I remember it was getting battered by all those big boats coming down.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

We saw something we had never seen before — a church boat.

Dr. Linda Walters:

I saw that in New Smyrna on Sunday.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

Yeah, it had the steeple. You could see into the windows. It had rows of pews and everything.

Jessy Wayles:

Stop. Seriously?

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

Yeah, we got some good photos because obviously they were right on the ICW and it was going right past the sea wall when we were sitting there.

So that was a new one. I’ve seen a lot of houseboats but that was my first church boat.

Jessy Wayles:

I feel like we need to make restoration bingo and have that be one of the bingo that you would never honestly get to fill out unless you were super-duper lucky.

Or the one down in Oak Hill where the houseboat has the chickens on it?

So you’re out doing seagrass surveys and you hear a chicken in the middle of the lagoon and you’re like, “Where is that coming from?”

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

Yeah, I swear we call it the guard chicken because… I guess it’s a rooster. It crows whenever there’s anybody on the shoreline to let everybody know somebody’s out there.

Jessy Wayles:

I love it. A lot of the work that you guys are doing revolves around getting students, especially UCF students, involved and out in the field. How do you think that has impacted you personally as well as the work you’re doing?

So I know, Linda, you take on a lot of undergrad students in your lab. How do you feel that that has impacted you as a professor and how has it helped impact your work as well?

Dr. Linda Walters:

Well, students are only successful if they have really good experiences with undergraduates. And really, taking a test doesn’t make you a great student. It’s the high impact experiences that get you the job, get you into grad school, get you the career you want.

From that perspective, the students need it. And UCF is a really big school so we have a lot of students who need experience. There is nothing but joy in seeing a really dedicated student either having a wonderful time when they go out in the field with us on Mosquito Lagoon or actually honestly having a really horrible time.

I mean, that’s not really joy, but it’s showing them what the field of marine conservation and restoration are. There are lots of thoughts about marine biology that are not quite accurate. We don’t all just sit on boats and count dolphins. I mean, that is a research field, no question about it.

Jessy Wayles:

I thought Flipper was going to be my life.

Dr. Linda Walters:

So do many. But it’s hard work and you have to really have the passion for it. So helping students find their passion is something that I care a lot about.

We give students the opportunity to help on campus with our mangrove gardening, making other restoration materials, and then lots go out in the field. All of my classes go out, a lot of Melinda’s classes go out, and then we hire up to 20 students each summer.

And again, some love it, some not so much.

Jessy Wayles:

Right. But like you said, that’s so important because then you realize that maybe this isn’t what I wanted to do. Or maybe I am more of a lab tech than an oyster pointer tour.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Absolutely. And yeah, it’s hard. It’s either hot and buggy or really cold, which we don’t really think about too much — Florida being cold. But if it’s January and it’s 40 degrees out and you’re in the water, you may not be the happiest person, but can you still work that way? We love all of the students who come out and help.

And the ones who are going to become marine biologists in this sort of field, we do push them through. There have been so many that have been so successful working in state agencies — fish and wildlife DEP — at Disney and at nonprofits like Marine Discovery Center.

It is really nice to see the students from our lab being successful throughout their careers.

Jessy Wayles:

And I feel like you guys do a great job of pushing your students to think more along the lines as if they actually are researchers with a job. In the way that they clean up when it comes to conferences and poster presentations or oral presentations.

I remember when I was in your class, we had to do a service learning project and then present all of that research. And we ended up getting an honorable mention, I think, that year. But how do you think that that is setting them up for success in the future?

Dr. Linda Walters:

I believe that if you’re going to work on something and you’re going to present it to whatever audience it is, be it your peers, be it the community, be it the top scientists in the field, you just have to be the most prepared — the most engaged person in the room.

And [getting on-site experience] shows the students being prepared. It works wonders — and it takes a lot of effort. Again, you have to be willing to put it in. But every student who goes to a conference is a winner in my eyes. And some of them do really well and their preparation shows.

It’s really [about] being able to answer those questions that you aren’t anticipating. It’s like, do you really know your stuff? So we work on that as hard as we can. I know Melinda gets tired of me making everybody practice in lab meetings — and I don’t blame her.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

When you see how great they come out, it’s worth it.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Yeah, it is worth it. And sometimes there are 15 students going to the same conference. That’s when we all get really tired of practicing.

Jessy Wayles:

Melinda, you worked very closely with a lot of the REU students this summer. Can you tell us a little bit about the REU program and how they were helping you with your living shorelines work?

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

Yeah, the REU is research experience for undergrads and it is an NSF funded program that is really designed to get students that research experience. So the goal is to really immerse them in research over the 10-week period that they’re here during the summer. And I think we did a really good job at just keeping them so busy that they didn’t really have time to do anything else and it allowed them to work on a lot of different projects in the lab.

I mean, I think that’s one of the strengths for our lab in general — there’s lots of different projects going on. It’s not all the same thing.

So by being able to get the students helping each other, they’re doing everything from the living shoreline stabilization. We had somebody working on testing the different biodegradable meshes on oyster reefs. We had somebody that was doing wildlife cameras, looking at how feral hogs and other animals were using the shoreline. By being able to get them all to work together and help each other, they got lots of experience.

On top of that, they got to help other students in the lab, and they helped with seagrass restoration. They helped with oyster restoration. I feel like by the end of the summer they got their fill of research and really got to see lots of different examples of what this marine biology research really looks like and to take that forward.

I know that the one student I work closely with, Maura, was just filled with all these ideas by the end of the summer of things that she wanted to do. To me, that’s the purpose of doing that — to get them excited about it and get them to be excited and ready for the next step.

So I thought it went really well this summer with all the students that were there.

Jessy Wayles:

Absolutely. The times that I was able to get out with you guys, everybody seems like they were having a very good time despite it being 175 degrees. And that is not at all sarcasm. No, we really did have a good time going out there.

So you guys are constantly engaging students. You are constantly seeking out funding. You are constantly trying to come up with new experimental methods to restore and improve these shorelines that are so important to us both culturally, economically and environmentally. What do you think is the next big thing when it comes to advancing lagoon restoration?

You’re doing oysters. You’re doing mangroves. You’re doing seagrasses — living shoreline. Oh my! What is going to be the next big thing? What’s on the horizon for CEELAB?

And go ahead. You guys figure out who wants to take that one first. I know it’s a big question.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

I can start with that and then I’m sure Linda will have some other thoughts of where it should go.

Honestly, what I envision is we’re starting to get a better understanding that all of these systems work together. So it’s not so much about planting mangroves, restoring oysters, restoring seagrass, but really looking at [how] this habitat mosaic seems to be the cool new buzzword that’s going around in estuarine ecology.

And also understanding how all of those different systems are impacting each other. You can think about how having healthy oyster reefs is improving water clarity and that’s going to improve seagrass growth. And having oyster reefs in front of mangroves is going to improve the wave attenuation and prevent them from getting washed out.

So I really think we’re in a good place because we’ve been working on all these systems to really be able to expand our scale that we’re looking at rather than focusing on one habitat. [We’re] thinking about how this works in this interactive effect between all of the systems together.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Melinda’s exactly correct. I will add that every time we go out, we see something a little bit different and it becomes… Oh my God, we have to study this. It could be a little overwhelming — which is really good.

We have lots of students we work with because they take on a lot of the projects. They take ownership of them.

Jessy Wayles:

So you get to think of the big questions and then you get to have your students answer them for you? That sounds like a dream job.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Yes and no because you always have your idea in your mind of exactly how it should be done.

It is a challenge sometimes to let students have the ownership that they deserve when they’re working on it. But I can say that some of the stuff we’re working on right now that are offshoots of doing the restoration and trying to improve restoration is looking at mangrove encroachment on oyster reefs.

A lot of the reefs are transitioning from being 100% oyster. Some of them are going to be 100% mangrove in 20 years. And how is that changing the system? Is it good? Is it bad?

That’s one thing. We are looking at atmospheric deposition. Is a type of microplastics getting into the Indian River Lagoon and getting into the oysters and other organisms there? It’s only been since 2019 or 2020 that people were even worrying about this topic.

Jessy Wayles:

Yeah, yeah. Because you guys did a study recently where you looked at microplastics in oysters, didn’t you? How did that turn out?

Dr. Linda Walters:

It was actually very scary. We were in some of the most remote oyster reefs we could find in Mosquito Lagoon and throughout the entire Indian River Lagoon.

We were capturing an average of 2.2 pieces of the plastic per oyster. There are plenty that were zero but there are other oysters that had 30 and 40 pieces of plastic in them that were easily identifiable — like fibers that were bright royal blue in color or bright yellow or something. It’s like somebody could eat that and it may be a bird eating it or maybe a person eating it. That’s really scary.

The lagoon water has an average of about one piece of plastic per liter. So that’s why we’re doing the atmospheric deposition trials right now — to see how much is coming in from the air as opposed to other sources like people on boats dropping things.

Jessy Wayles:

I think my favorite part of that project was when we were looking at the microplastic samples and you have your microscope and you’re going through and you mark down what you see on the data sheet.

Originally, the data sheet was just ROYGBIV. Just the rainbow colors plus clear and black. It got to the point where we were seeing so many blue pieces of plastic that we actually had to tease out, well, is it light blue? Is it navy blue? Is it royal blue? Because just saying blue did not figure it out.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Absolutely. And when we are getting into research projects that are detailing that, it’s best left to one or two people doing all the blues.

Jessy Wayles:

Yes, that is so true.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Because everybody calls something different, light blue versus medium light blue versus dark light blue. Yeah, that gets a little overwhelming.

Jessy Wayles:

And you guys are really focused on non-plastic stuff too, right? So always testing that out.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Yeah, that’s all we do now. We stopped using any sort of aquaculture type plastic material in 2019 on oyster reefs and in 2020, 2021 on shorelines — and it’s a heavy lift. You wouldn’t think that it would make that much difference. But in terms of restoration — the restoration community and the people who produce and create materials — they weren’t really ready for the onslaught of restoration practitioners like us only wanting new materials.

I think they thought it would be an easy slide in. But we test lots of different materials from companies around the world. And since we’re outsiders, we didn’t make the material, we don’t have any biases, which I really like that we can say it’s good or it’s bad. Other places don’t.

So we’re now starting a citizen science project funded by the Indian River National Estuary Program to look and just see what’s in the atmosphere on oyster reefs, on the edges of reefs, in the towns surrounding the oyster reefs.

I can tell you from our sample collection this summer near the beach parking lots in Canaveral National Seashore that we are getting a lot of styrofoam — so polystyrene. Everybody who brings an expensive boogie board or a cooler or something like that, all those little circles of styrofoam, they’re not all staying on your cooler.

Some of them are blowing in the air and they’re going to land somewhere. It could be in our throats. It could be in the jars that we put out. It could be in an oyster after it gets into the lagoon if it sinks to the bottom. So that’s one of our other fun projects. Another one we’re just starting on is looking at fragmented reefs. So [with] oyster reefs, he big problem when we started in 2007, was how boat wakes were dislodging oyster clusters and they were washing away from the system. And that was what we did our restoration for.

Now we know that sea level rise is a problem that we didn’t really think too much about in 2007. But it’s taking the intertidal reefs and turning them so that they’re exposed part of the day into something that’s subtidal. And there are subtidal oyster reefs around the country but they’re exposed to a lot of different stressors — one of them being boring sponge [and] different crabs. Other vertebrates and invertebrates eat things when they’re underwater that they won’t eat when they’re out of the water. So that’s changing the dynamics of the system.

And Reef Sitter used to be one large reef — it’s now breaking into pieces, partly through sea level rise, partly through other stressors. Can we improve our restoration by taking these fragmented reefs and rejoining them? So that’s something we are just starting. And we’re not talking about miles separation, we’re talking about a couple feet or 10.

Jessy Wayles:

Yeah, exactly where you have those little gullies that are filling up with water.

Dr. Linda Walters:

That didn’t used to be there. We only see what we see at that point in time — so we don’t think that.

If you look on a map 10 years ago, this was a much bigger reef and didn’t have all the edges. So where oysters are most stressed around the edges of the reef. That’s where the boat wakes are hitting. That’s where the boring sponge is.

The more edge you have, the more opportunity you have to lose the reef. So is it exacerbating our reef loss? We have lost 63% of intertidal oyster reef area in Mosquito Lagoon since 1943. That’s a big loss and most of it’s been in the last 10 to 12 years.

Jessy Wayles:

Wow! That’s insane.

Dr. Linda Walters:

What can we do to improve upon what we already know are good restoration techniques and take them to the next step? That’s what happily keeps me awake at night.

Jessy Wayles:

I mean, I feel like you guys have definitely dedicated yourself to your work and it’s more than just a job or career.

You’re very passionate about what you do — and it shines through in the work and the way that you give presentations, and even just hanging out and having a conversation. You could tell.

So I know, personally, that I love field days on the water with you guys and your team — whether we are raking down oyster reefs, which is exhausting in the best way possible.

Dr. Linda Walters:

We’re raking down dead areas. We’re not raking down an oyster reef. We do not touch those.

Jessy Wayles:

That is a good point — [the places] where we are raking down dead oyster reefs so that we can restore it back to living oyster reefs using non-plastic alternatives.

Or if we are neck deep in water planting seagrasses where we can’t see anything, we are just going by feel, hoping that we don’t step on our partner’s hands.

Either way, it’s always fun to get out in the lagoon and see everything firsthand whether it’s the different species of birds that we see on oyster reefs, or the fishermen who are out there hoping that they catch dinner, or the kayakers that are enjoying the sunrise. Because let’s be honest, we are trying to get out there as early as we can. It’s enough to make you guys want to dedicate your lives to restoration, like I was saying.

So it completely makes sense for those of us that live near the lagoon and spend a lot of time on the water but may not necessarily be involved firsthand in some of the restoration techniques going on. What are some ways that we can work to be more lagoon friendly?

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

I think it’s just really important if you’re going to be a user of the lagoon. Whatever it is you want to do, whether it’s fishing, kayaking, boating, church boating as we learned was a thing earlier today. I just think you need to be aware of what you’re doing and its impact on the system. That way you can try to minimize it.

I mean, if you enjoy being out in the lagoon, you don’t want to see trash everywhere. So you’re going to make sure that you’re not throwing your trash out or it’s not blowing out the boat as you’re going by. Making sure that you’re mindful of where some of these sensitive habitats are and not driving your boat right through the really shallow seagrass bed. [And also] making sure that you’re following the channels and staying out of those really sensitive areas and not having that direct impact.

There’s lots of ways to make your recreational activities a lot more lagoon-friendly simply by recognizing that, oh, the boat wakes are a problem here, so we’re going to slow down when we go by this area. Or making sure we avoid those super shallow locations right along the shoreline. I think that really goes a long way in terms of decreasing the overall impact.

It’s like, if everybody did that, then you would see much less damage to the shorelines and the oyster reefs and the seagrass beds simply by having people out there. I’ve literally seen people pull up mangroves in order to put their chairs on a shoreline to go fishing. So that’s a very obvious one — making sure that you’re using the areas that are set aside.

I mean, working in Canaveral, they’re very visitor-friendly, so they want to make sure that there are areas for people to use. So focus on setting up in those shoreline areas that they have set aside for you and leave the more natural ones intact without pulling the mangroves out.

That’s what I think is important for just your people that want to come enjoy the lagoon. It’s just being aware and trying to minimize what you’re leaving behind.

Jessy Wayles:

Absolutely. Linda, what do you think would be some of the ways that we can respect our lagoon?

Dr. Linda Walters:

I think Melinda has covered it really well.

Jessy Wayles:

Yes, she has.

Dr. Linda Walters:

I think if you care about the lagoon, you will protect it. I don’t understand how people can’t care about it — especially the Mosquito Lagoon.

The whole Indian River Lagoon is important, but the Mosquito Lagoon, you got to face it — it’s the most beautiful part of the Indian River Lagoon system. It is so special.

Jessy Wayles:

We’re not biased at all for listeners out there.

Dr. Linda Walters:

But you take care of what you love. So I think getting out there is one of the best ways to get people to care.

Jessy Wayles:

I have definitely gotten into the habit of wearing pants that have really big pockets whenever I do nature walks along the lagoon or even coming out on restoration days with you guys.

So that if I happen to see a chip bag or a bottle or anything that isn’t supposed to be out in the environment, I can just tuck it into my pockets and find a receptacle to throw it out.

Because it’s crazy what you can find out there in the middle of the lagoon floating along the water like Doritos bags — and sometimes that flies accidentally off of a boat. Of course, you never think that people are doing that on purpose, but it’s always nice to take one for the team and go ahead and pick it up.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Absolutely. And I’ll just add on, things like old boat ropes that are made out of polypropylene, change out your boat rope. Don’t have something that’s fragmenting into thousands of pieces because every one of those pieces is going to end up inside an oyster or a crab or something like that.

And the same with old tarps and things like that. If it’s falling apart, just get a new one.

Jessy Wayles:

Yeah. All right, guys, so that brings us to our time. Before we sign off today, is there anything else that you would like the listeners to know?

How can we learn more about the projects that you guys are doing? Are you active on social media? UCF’s website? What’s the easiest way to get ahold of you?

Dr. Linda Walters:

I’ll start by saying that yes, we are on social media, mostly on Facebook, but a lot of the students also have other types of sites. We advertise everything there.

We also use it as a photo repository so people can see what we’re going to do, what we have been doing and the successes that we’ve seen.

Other ways to get information is to email us or ask any of the people in the biology department because we’re always looking for help. We are starting to get into mangrove and restoration unit making. We start back up tomorrow.

Jessy Wayles:

That’s the fun stuff.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Fun stuff. It’s not the time commitment or travel commitment that a lot of the deployments are — so we can get lots of people involved.

This last year we’ve had three or 4,000 people who’ve helped us and we appreciate every one of them. And we honestly need every one of them.

Jessy Wayles:

Absolutely. And that Facebook page, if you’re interested, is facebook.com/UCFCEELAB, that’s CEELAB. Or you can search for it on Facebook — Coastal and Estuarine Ecology Lab. All right, guys.

With that, I think that is our time for today. So I just want to go ahead and thank Linda and Melinda for joining us. It was really fun to chat with you because we have such a deep history, and I’ve been working on your projects for close to 10 years now, which is just insane.

I’m excited to see what you guys do in the future. And of course, I would love to get out in the field with you again. And I will see you guys soon at one of the upcoming conferences — I know we’re all going to RAY together.

Then of course, we have the IRL Symposium. So yeah, thank you guys for joining us.

Dr. Melinda Donnelly:

All right. Thank you, Jessy, for letting us come on and talk about all of this stuff. We love talking about Mosquito Lagoon — so happy to help you.

Jessy Wayles:

Absolutely.

Dr. Linda Walters:

Yeah, my thanks also. And yes, you were a very good student when you were in my class.

Jessy Wayles:

I am going to record that and save it as my alarm in the morning.

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