The final project for Dr. Shirley Baker’s Marine Adaptations class (FAS 6154) is what Dr. Baker refers to as “choose your own adventure.” The students are tasked with creating a science communication project that focuses on marine species responses to stressors like salinity, hypoxia, and ocean acidification. They can choose any medium and any audience they like, and their imaginations are the limit.

The fall 2024 class found many creative ways to teach their audiences about various marine adaptations, from a TikTok influencer who happens to have tentacles, to a Minecraft world among coral reefs. We covered some of their amazing projects here, in the hopes it will inspire future scientists and science communicators!

Cat Eastman, “Salty Survivors” podcast series

Graduate student Cat Eastman is the program manager at the Sea Turtle Hospital at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience. She has worked on sea turtle conservation and rehabilitation for many years, over which period she’s answered many, many questions about sea turtles. She based the scripts for her podcast, which she dubbed “Salty Survivors,” on some of those questions; envisioning an audience of marine biology students or educators, or science-curious adults.

The result is a series of podcast episodes that explore sea turtle adaptations that allow them to survive in saltwater.

“I often use OpenAI to organize my thoughts into an outline, sort of like rambling to my colleague for 20 minutes and then organizing it,” Cat explained. She used this process to prepare her script: “I asked myself questions, then recorded my ‘best guess answers,’ then edited it into a script.”

Then she used YouTube to learn how to do basic audio recording and editing in Garage Band; a skill that was new to her. “I recorded an audio file in Garage Band, but then I needed to add sound effects. After Googling for a while, I found a free online audio software. I was able to import that audio file from my Mac and add in free sound effects.”

If she was going to pursue podcasting, she added, she would invest more time in streamlining her process and learning editing software. In the meantime, she said, “I love a good podcast. I am happy to talk about sea turtles and our rehab hospital anytime!”

Claire Bolster, oyster reef museum exhibit plan

Claire Bolster, now an MFAS student, works at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. Previously she served in AmeriCorps positions at Assateague State Park in Maryland and the Georgia Sea Turtle Center.

“Both of those roles had educational components, and before that I was an exhibit guide volunteer at the National Aquarium in Baltimore for about five years,” she said. “Most of the work I have done at these places has had some form of science education as part of it, and I love educating the public about marine science.”

In her current role Claire has been helping to renovate some of the exhibits at the Mystic Aquarium, which gave her the idea to design an oyster reef exhibit for her final class project. She reached out to a former AmeriCorps colleague who had worked on educational oyster reef materials for a nature center on Assateague Island.

“I asked her to help me create some graphics or edit some of the graphics that she had used for our nature center project, and once I had those, I started to design the full exhibit around them,” she said. “I also used some resources from other aquariums; for example, the design of the marsh habitat seen in my exhibit is modeled after an exhibit at the National Aquarium. I tried to search for different examples of oyster habitats from other facilities, and tailor that to what I wanted to build.”

To add an interactive element to her digital exhibit sketch, Claire chose to keep it simple in PowerPoint, where it’s possible to link to different slides. “That turned out to be super fun and helpful to create the feeling that you were zooming in and looking around the habitat while it was still a 2D idea,” she said.

The result is a detailed plan for an oyster reef exhibit, designed for visitors who live in Long Island Sound or on the East coast, where oyster reefs are an important ecosystem. Users can “walk” through the various stations of the exhibit to get a sense of how it would be laid out in a physical space.

“If anyone wanted to try something similar,” Claire said, “I would recommend finding the focal point – for me, it was my graphics – and building around that.”

Maddie Busch, Ollie the Octopus (and social media star)

Maddie Busch, an undergraduate student in the Marine Sciences major, was inspired by her little brother to create “Ollie,” a social media-loving cephalopod.

“Last year in his 2nd grade class, he did a project on the deep sea dumbo octopus and fell in love! I wanted to find a way to continue teaching him about octopus and similar animals in a way that would be digestible for him,” she said.

Knowing how much time young people spend on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, Maddie chose social media as a platform for educating young audiences about cephalopods.

First she wrote scripts for several video posts, told from Ollie’s perspective and covering the various ways octopus are able to survive in low-oxygen environments. “I then plugged in the scripts to an AI video-making website and told it the output I was looking for,” she explained. “I wanted a younger-sounding voice, to connect with my audience, and videos of cephalopods. After each video was created by AI, I went in and made any changes I felt necessary, mostly changing the videos to match the script.”

She then created a TikTok profile for @_Ollie_the_Octopus, and uploaded the videos as several separate posts. She also edited the code of each video to make it look like it had received millions of likes and comments. Then she stitched all the videos into one, which she submitted as her final assignment.

Jude Soriano, Minecraft exhibit on coral reefs

Having grown up playing video games like Minecraft, undergraduate student Jude Soriano doesn’t underestimate their power as educational tools. That’s why he chose Minecraft as a platform for teaching young audiences about coral reefs.

“I have seen other games that also do science education,” he said. “The first one that comes to mind is Kerbal Space Program, which is a space flight simulation game where you can apply real physics and engineering principles to make spacecraft and send them to space. I think video games can be very valuable educational tools simply because of the appeal they already offer to young kids today.”

Jude took advantage of Minecraft’s creative nature to produce a simulated video game experience that educates audiences on coral reef restoration efforts. Minecraft was also a good fit for the topic, because it has a built-in coral reef scape that he could tailor to his project.

“I made this video by finding an online seed, which is a code for a specific randomly generated world in Minecraft, of a Minecraft world that contains a large coral reef,” he explained. “I then input the seed into Minecraft to upload the world, and then I modified the coral reef to fit my project by using different blocks to create the area shown in the video. I used sponges, a special type of block, to clear out the water for my project area and barrier blocks to make a see-through barrier for the water, and I used signs to convey the information shown in the video. I also made one side of the coral reef look dead using dead coral blocks, and I populated the living side with marine animal NPCs (nonplayer characters) to simulate a thriving reef.”

As a finishing touch, Jude used building blocks in Minecraft to create what looks like a UF/IFAS research building that players can “enter,” based on research centers he’s seen in Cedar Key, Fla., and on UF’s main campus.

Scott Krieger, “Answers with a Great Pond Snail” radio segment/podcast episode

Graduate student Scott Krieger works at the New England Aquarium’s Animal Care Center, focusing primarily on live foods, like brine shrimp, mysid shrimp and grass shrimp, as well as breeding fish including Copper Sweepers and Small Mouth Grunts.

For the final class project, “I wanted to do something that was engaging and accessible to younger students,” he said. “I thought a cute, animated animal answering questions would be well suited to that audience.”

Scott also knew he wanted to focus on respiratory adaptations in marine species. “I searched for a marine invertebrate which moved past gill breathing and could perform bi-modal respiration, meaning it could take in oxygen using more than one process. I found the Great Pond Snail, which is capable of absorbing oxygen through its skin as well as by breathing air using a lung.”

Greg the Great Pond Snail came alive through a series of digital sketches Scott created, which show Greg blinking and moving his “mouth” as though he were speaking. He recorded audio and video of himself asking Greg questions and nodding his head. He gave voice to Greg’s character – pitching the sound quite a bit higher – and then stitched everything together to make it appear like a flowing conversation.

“It came out pretty good, but I wish I had had a bit more time to get the volumes more consistent,” says Scott. “This was by far the most involved video editing I have ever done.”

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