Mayport Middle School students will be elbow deep in the St. Johns River this year studying tiny organisms called plankton. The Jacksonville students are working with a $97,000 grant from State Farm.
Eighth-grader Katherine Wilson is in the coastal science magnet program at Mayport.
“When I get older I want to be a marine biologist,” she said Wednesday.
And it shows. She was wearing shark earrings as she leaned over the side of a Mayport dock and dunked a jar into the St. Johns River to collect water.
“This is a whole-bottle sample, so we’re checking for large amounts of certain types of plankton,” she said. “If there’s any large amounts of hazardous ones, we can send it to NOAA, [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].”
She’s one of 140 students who will be studying plankton all year because, as their teacher Jill Sullivan said, plankton is the basis of the marine food chain, and its health matters.
“For example, before the hurricane came we really didn’t know what the composition of the microlife here is,” Sullivan said. “Since this is a year-long study we’ll be able to see if there’s seasonal changes. We can see if any other things that could affect that.”
She says the students came up with the project called “The Wonderful World of Plankton” and wrote the grant proposal. Sullivan said the No. 1 State Farm guideline was it had to be student driven.
Mayport was one of 63 applicants selected in the country. More than 900 schools and nonprofits applied. And Mayport was the only middle school selected out of four Florida winners.
The money is going to new equipment, including microscopes and an incubator, as well as training from the Jacksonville University Marine Science Institute.
The middle schoolers will take river samples once a week from a nearby dock and go out on a JU boat once a month to collect samples to compare.
Throughout the year, they’ll also teach elementary students about their findings and share their data with the St. Johns Riverkeeper.
