Bering Sea Days has started on St. Paul Island.
Bering Sea Days is a weeklong program hosted by the Ecosystem Conservation Office, Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, and the Pribilof School District, and funded by the Central Bering Sea Fisherman’s Association.
The whole school week is dedicated to learning about Bering Sea Research. Scientists spend the week in school, visiting classrooms and leading field-trips about a whole range of subjects including marine debris, re-articulating an Orca skeleton, building a mobile that looks at the evolutionary relationships between animals, 4H g 
ardening, the physics of pressure, seabirds, fur-seals, zooplankton… and archeology. Oh my!
It’s a great chance for both students and visiting researchers to learn from each other.
I’m here for two different projects. I’m meeting with Miss Melovidova and her class to help kick-off the pen-pal project with students on the Commander Islands, and I’m working with Pam Goddard on invasive species activities.
It’s a busy week.
We landed on Sunday, after a diversion to Cold Bay to wait out some fog on St. Paul…
Yesterday Pam and I met with the 7th and 8th graders in the morning. We talked about how special the Pribilofs are, and how important they are to seabirds. We learned about rats, and their crazy reproductive ability. It’s impressive. They can start breeding at 5 weeks, have on average 8 babies in a litter, and usually produce about 5 litters a year…. Yikes!
We played a math game (with jelly beans) to look at the rapid population growth of rats and how they can decimate a seabird colony in months.
In the afternoon, the same students took a biodiversity field trip out to a nearby fur-seal rookery. On the way we saw kittiwakes, harlequin ducks…mushrooms, and one student even found a spider! Seal activity from the blind was phenomenal… pups playing in the big surf, mom’s still nursing, the odd male hanging out on the water’s edge, and a beautiful white fox eating the carcass of a dead pup. Lots of action and noise. The perfect end to a busy day at school