Dive Into Your Imagination

***Special alert!  I am heading to the Galapagos from August 5th until September 6th.  I will be on an expedition, but there are still a few spots available.  If you are interested in joining me in the Darwin Arch Club to scuba dive or snorkel with whale sharks for one of four weeks, please contact me as soon as possible at annie@anniecrawley.com *** After several months of development I am launching my new website specifically to highlight and promote the speaking side of my business.  Please help us celebrate by visiting www.AnnieCrawley.com and considering me for your next conference, event, keynote speaker or school presentation.  Please take a moment to let me know what you think!  I would like to thank my colleagues who helped make this site possible: Richard Salas for an unbelievable studio session to get professional images and Taylor Reaume of The Search Engine Pros who is an internet guru.  This week I am attending the National Marine Educators Association Conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and it has been four days of action packed learning, networking and fun.  Surrounded by educators from across the nation being represented by teachers, professors, Aquarium Education Departments, NGO’s and corporations setting the pace for the future in Ocean and Great Lake Education to be incorporated into K-12 curriculum.  Last night we were treated to an unbelievable experience at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Aquarium of the Smokies.  They have tunnels so you can get a birds eye view and actually get behind the animals within the exhibits.  We also danced to an unbelievable band, The Chill Billies underneath a quote by Jules Verne, speaking as Captain Nemo, “The Sea is a vast reservoir of nature.  It was through the sea that the earth so to speak began…”   And so I joined the Ocean Literacy Committee in the NMEA who has been lobbying to get Ocean Literacy into the national standards of education.  This next round will determine what teachers will need to teach for the next 15 years so it is imperative we let our voices be heard for the need of Ocean Literacy in the classroom.  Dive Into Your Imagination lesson plans for Pre K through K and First to Third Grades will be releasing in late 2010.  These and our new adventures of Ocean Annie Books have been partially funded by a grant from Save Our Seas so we are very excited to have them meet national and international standards!  As I write this, we are getting ready to hear from our keynote speaker, Shark Lady Dr. Eugenie Clark, who told me one of her favorite experiences was scuba diving with whale sharks for the first time!  And I could totally relate because my life changed during the summer of 2001 when I dived with whale sharks for the first time in my life.  Here are a few highlights from Dr. Eugenie Clark’s keynote speech.  I wanted to bring you here with me to learn a few of the reasons she was awarded the NMEA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.




Dr. Eugenie Clark started studying sharks when she was 9 years old.  She would go to the aquarium and look at sharks in the tanks and vowed that one day she would swim with sharks.  She went on to not only swim with them, but also to study them.  She has gone on more than 200 expeditions around the world.  She just returned from the shark conference in Australia where she dove with seven-gill sharks in South Africa.  She is the one and only “Shark Lady!”  She opened the presentation with a shark that looks like a cartoon, but it was a real shark: a cookie cutter shark.  It has the largest teeth in relation to any other shark and is known to children everywhere!  Cookie cutter sharks feed on larger animals by simply taking cookie-cutter-shaped bites out of them.  There are several types of cookie cutter sharks.  The smallest is less than a foot long, but there are 3-4 foot long cookie cutter sharks with big green eyes and great big fleshy lips, and the longest can grow to 23 feet.  The cookie cutter sharks have interlocking teeth and bite their prey, twist their bodies around, lock their lips on, and suck and remove the flesh of other animals.  They usually do this to narwhals, risso dolphins and other marine mammals.   In Japan, they eat the cookie cutter sharks.  They eat the livers and flesh and make sashimi.  The Japanese also have a big industry for shark liver oil that solves everything in their lives, from constipation to impotency.  Dr. Eugenie Clark said, “Especially the old Japanese men.” And laughed out loud at her own jokes.

Dr. Eugenie Clark also showed many other images of fish and animals in the waters around Japan.  When you go more than 100 feet and up to 1000 feet deep you can find the largest crabs in the world.  The largest specimen is with a Japanese doctor who is a gynecologist that collects crabs!  The audience exploded in laughter when she told us the irony.  The largest crab collected was 14 feet across!

Dr. Eugenie Clark is studying convict fish, and previously the adults had never been seen.  They found the adults in a tube they never come out of, but it was the same place where the juvenile fish would go back to every night.  The babies go into the tunnels and hang by a mucus strand for rest after they feed all day long.  They go out to feed on plankton and come back.  After the babies secure themselves to the ceiling, the adults go and put a whole bunch of fish in their mouths.  They thought, hmmm…are they eating the babies?  Sucking off the mucus to be fed?  Are the babies pooping and feeding their parents?  Or are the babies gorging themselves so much that they vomit in their parents mouths?  They are still studying them, so they are not sure…but hopefully soon we will know.  In addition, they are studying Poisonous Catfish because they believe that no animals eat the convict fish because they are mimicking the poisonous catfish.  Poisonous catfish have two pectoral spines and a dorsal fin that is poisonous.  The catfish has been documented to clean moray eels and one another.

Dr. Eugenie Clark talked about her time spent studying whale sharks.  She dived with them in Baja, California, and the first time she dived with them she would ride them for up to 10 or 15 minutes.  Last year with her students, they saw five babies, and she said, “Don’t touch them!”  Touching sharks is not allowed anymore.  The science we have learned over the years allows us to understand the damage we cause if we touch any animals.

A lot of whale sharks are caught in Taiwan, but they usually cut up the sharks at sea and never bring in the whole animal because they are taxed by the pound.  Dr. Eugenie Clark really wanted to see a whole female so she could study their reproduction, so a Taiwanese Doctor gave a fisherman the money to cover the taxes so he could bring in the whole shark.  On the way in, he witnessed babies swimming out of the whale shark and when they got the whale shark inside, they found 307 babies inside, but some of them were in egg cases and some of them had no egg cases.  This means whale sharks use ovoviviparous reproduction, which means they lay eggs, but the eggs hatch while still inside of the female.  So the mystery had been solved!

Basking sharks feed by holding their mouths open and feeding on plankton.  The megamouth shark showed up in the 1970s and is also a filter feeder in deep water.  This proved that there are plankton in deeper waters.  Dr. Eugenie Clark was part of the first dissection of a female.  They were hoping to witness the first dissection of the megamouth shark to find out if they have live birth or lay eggs.  She went into the cloaca and could tell she was a virgin and had never been touched by claspers.  Dr. Eugenie Clark is quite the character as she tells her stories with a straight face and just tells it like it is.  She is charming and brilliant and a ball of energy!

“The Great White Shark is not really dangerous if you know how to swim with sharks.  If you are a spearfishermen, yes, if you are baiting them, yes…they may come in and touch you to see if you are food.”  Yes, she really said that!  I am not sure if I would ever get out of a cage to swim with them even if I thought I knew how to swim with sharks!

Wendy Benchley, the wife of Peter Benchley who wrote Jaws, has started an organization to protect sharks and encourages everyone to donate to the organization.  Just a few days ago, Dr. Eugenie Clark saw nine white sharks, tagged them and took tissue samples from them with Allison Cook.  Dr. Eugenie Clark knows Rodney Fox who was bitten by a white shark while abalone fishing and has dedicated his life to preserving them.  Rodney Fox makes his living by showing people white sharks.  In South Africa there are now so many tourist operators taking people out to see them because we are fascinated at seeing white sharks.  In the old days, Rodney would throw chum in the water and the sharks would come and bite the boat.  On a trip with Rodney Fox for David Doubilet at National Geographic, Dr. Eugenie Clark would get into the cages.  David wanted to get a picture of Dr. Eugenie Clark with a Great White but after many tries it was Dr. Eugenie Clark who took a picture of underwater photographer David Doubilet looking nose to nose of the Great White Shark in the cage.  She laughed as she said she made so much money from that one photograph of David with the shark because of all the covers it appeared on,  because David was supposed to get a picture of her!  Dr. Eugenie Clark has many friends around the world as she is truly one of the most incredible role models and explorers of our Ocean.

One of her favorite experiences was her deepest dive to 12,000 feet.  She desperately wanted to see a hooded octopus.  She played us a video by Emory Kristoff of a hooded Octopus at 9,000 feet.  Emory Kristoff is also a famous underwater explorer known especially for his deep work.  And she still has yet to see one in the wild and has many other explorations left!

There is so much left to be explored and discovered in our Ocean.  We know more about outer-space then we know about the Ocean.