Teacher at sea brings science back to the classroom

EVERETT — For the past 28 years, Barney Peterson has taught fourth grade at James Monroe Elementary in Everett’s Silver Lake neighborhood.

For the next two weeks, however, Peterson is in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the Oregon II, a 170-foot-long National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship.

She is taking part in that federal agency’s Teacher At Sea program, which brings teachers along on marine science excursions to provide them with educational experiences they can apply in their classrooms.

Peterson’s two-week mission is conducting a survey of scalloped hammerhead sharks, which can grow up to 13 feet in length.

To do that, she and the scientists aboard the Oregon II will be trawling a long-line to catch and evaluate samples.

“As they bring them in, we’ll be taking the fish from them, tagging them, taking samples for scientific experiments, weighing them and hopefully releasing them right away,” she said.

There likely will be a number of red snapper too, because they’re one of the scalloped hammerhead’s common prey in the region.

One thing Peterson said she hopes to learn is how to apply statistical formulas to their catch to determine the overall health of the shark population.

Scalloped hammerheads were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2014, the first species of shark to be added, largely as a result of over-fishing for their fins and meat.

The sharks are listed as “endangered” in the eastern Atlantic and Pacific oceans and “threatened” in other parts of those oceans. The Gulf of Mexico is one of the few places where the population isn’t listed.

In preparation of Peterson’s research trip, staff from NOAA visited her class in May, and Peterson had her students do some independent research on the sharks.

They discovered, for example, that the hammerheads’ unique skull shape, with its mouth located on the underside, is used to hold bottom-feeding prey like red snapper on the sea floor so they can be eaten more easily, Peterson said.

This is the 26th year that NOAA has run the Teacher At Sea program, which has taken more than 700 teachers on marine science missions since 1990, usually about 30 per year.

This year is an evaluation year, so only about 10 teachers who are returning alumni of the program are going out, said Jennifer Annetta, the alumni coordinator for the program, and an education specialist at the nonprofit National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

The goal is to get feedback and updates from teachers who have taken part in the program before to measure the kind of impact Teacher At Sea is having, Annetta said.

“Teachers don’t like to bring a lot of attention to themselves,” Annetta said. The feedback will help NOAA find out more about the connections the teachers have made, what kind of outreach they have done and even if they’ve won awards that can be traced back to their experiences on research ships.

Learning about those successes is always exciting, Annetta said, because NOAA often doesn’t hear about a lot of it.

Peterson is one such alumni who took part in 2006 research trip aboard the NOAA ship Rainier, which sailed to the Aleutian Islands to do hydrographic mapping of the sea floor.

In 2008, she also took part in a pilot program, Teacher in the Air, in which she flew on one of NOAA’s Lockheed WP-3D Orion “Hurricane Hunter” aircraft to study winter storms over the Pacific.

She’s also taken part in NOAA’s Teacher in the Lab program and for the past two summers has gone on research trips through NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries to take part in a 27-year-long survey of salmon populations in the headwaters of the Columbia River.

Peterson has kept a salmon tank in her classroom for the past decade for the kids to learn about the salmon life cycle, and she sees her current trip as another way to teach her kids about a new ecosystem.

“These guys are going to grow up to be voters, we want them to be as well-educated as possible,” Peterson said.

Quite a few of her students have gone on to study or have careers in some scientific field, and one former student just got a master’s degree in environmental sciences, she said.

“I’ve had students come back in high school and say, ‘I’m going to be a science teacher, that’s what I want to do,’” Peterson said.

“That’s getting an extra paycheck, when they say that,” she said.

Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.