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Anglerfish Albert

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

Meet Anglerfish Albert! As the number one fan of Ocean Annie and the Dive Into Your Imagination DVDs, he is a living example of how entertaining education can change the way a new generation views the Ocean. Albert is an ocean advocate at six years old yet lives in the middle of America, miles away from the sea! Albert wants to grow up to be a scientist, explore the deep sea and study the ocean, but he already has a wealth of knowledge because he spends his free time discovering nature and exploring the Ocean through his imagination! Albert teaches his friends, family and even his teachers about the Ocean. He inspires children and teaches them how to protect it.

What do you do to protect the ocean? What do you think others need to do to protect the ocean?
There are so many ways I protect the Ocean. I take the bus to school instead of having my mom drive me. I turn lights off, use water containers that I refill and use containers for my lunch and snacks instead of baggies. I tell my mom to use reusable bags. If I use a paper bag I always bring them home and reuse them over and over. For art work, I draw and color on the back side of paper my mom doesn�t need and I love to find ways to re-use things like empty tissue boxes or paper towel rolls to make craft projects. When I�m outside, I help my mom and dad plant in our garden, make our compost pile with my grandpa and grandma and I never litter anywhere. At our house, we recycle everything we can and it�s my job to take care of the recycling container. One other thing I�m doing to protect the Ocean is learning about sustainable seafood to eat. I love sharks so much and want to protect them!

Another way I protect the Ocean is by teaching my friends about it so they will be interested in wanting to save it too. Whenever I have a chance at school, I write about the Ocean and make drawings. My family and my teachers love the Ocean now too!

I want all people to work harder to save the Ocean. If garbage is not thrown away in the right place, so much of it can get into the Ocean. I want people to stop littering and use less plastic because it gets into our Ocean and sea creatures mistake it for food. Plastic can look like jellyfish for turtles. If fish eat plastic by mistake, it can hurt or kill them. I think people should drive cars only when they really need to because they can walk places, ride a bike, and take a train or a bus too. I want people to stop using Ocean creatures to make things such as umbrellas, which can be made from whale baleen.

What do you want to be when you grow up?
When I was four I wanted to be a professor. But now, I want to be a scientist, an oceanographer and a pilot of the deep-sea. I still would like to be a professor too, maybe a professor of the Ocean.

I�d like to study bioluminescence. I read in one of my books that bioluminescence can be from bacteria in some fish, but other fish have special light-making cells. Also, I have heard that Ocean creatures are being studied for helping humans with sickness. Like, scientists are studying why sharks do not get cancer and squid eyes are being studied for helping humans with eye problems. Maybe studying things about how the Ocean can help people stay healthy would be interesting too.

How did you get so interested in marine life all the way in Chicago?
We checked out �Who Lives in the Sea� by Annie Crawley from our library when I was four and I fell in love with the Ocean. I watched it over and over. I especially loved the Hammerhead sharks in the �Ocean Song.� I have the entire collection of Dive You�re your Imagination products! Since then, I love to study the Ocean everyday by reading all kinds of Ocean books, watching nature DVDs, visiting aquariums and looking up creatures on the computer. I like to see interesting marine life. Some creatures are beautiful, some are silly looking, some are scary looking, but they are all very cool.

I love the Ocean because it is amazing. I love the incredible creatures and want to know where they live within the Ocean, and what they eat. For example, some of the creatures on the rocky shore are predators including carnivorous whelk, which are sea snails that feeds on crabs, lobster and clams or anemones. Cephalopods can change their color and skin bumps thousands of times in just one day, and are really fun to watch feed. Octopuses balloon up around their prey and have a beak that squirts venom into their food. Cuttlefish and squid feed by snapping their very fast special tentacles out toward their food. I love the Ocean zones too. The creatures of the different zones are so cool that I just want to jump right into Ocean to see them!

Ocean Annie just recently visited your school! What did she teach you and your classmates while she was there?
It was so cool when Ocean Annie came to my school and took us scuba diving with her all over the world in our imaginations. She taught us the golden rule, which is that we all need to �stop�, �think� and �breathe slowly�. She also said that when we are afraid of something, we need to learn about it so we will not be afraid anymore. It was so fun when she asked us to turn around and thank our teachers. She said that our teachers are some of the most important people ever!!! My teacher had this huge smile when we did that and then said �gracias�!!!

Ocean Annie said we can do anything! If we have a special dream, or something we really want to do we have to practice really hard but sometimes we have to be really patient.

I want to thank Ocean Annie for teaching me about the Ocean. Now the Ocean is part of my life every day even though it�s so far away from me! Ocean Annie is an amazing scientist and I want to be just like her. I want to learn more all the time so I can teach kids about saving our Ocean the way she does. I�m not old enough to scuba dive yet, but when I am I hope she can be my scuba teacher! For now, I have a really cool new facemask and snorkel to practice with!!!

annie crawley hammerhead
shark

What is your favorite marine creature and why?
My favorite creatures are the Hammerhead Sharks because of the way they look and how they hunt for their prey. Their head shape is like a hammer, a mallet, a wing, diamond or even a bonnet. Their eyes are spread apart so they can see on both sides and their nostrils are spread apart so they are able to smell prey from a long distance away. I like the Hammerhead (and actually all sharks) because they are on the top of the food chain and I love to learn how they feed. Hammerhead�s favorite foods are stingrays, squid and octopus, but not humans! People don�t know this, but it�s true, Hammerheads and all sharks are more afraid of you than you are of them!

You know SO much about the ocean! What are some fun facts that you think everybody should know?
There are so many things I�ve learned about the Ocean that are really interesting and unusual, like clownfish are born male and can change to female as they grow! Zebra sharks are born with stripes that change into spots later. I really want people to know some fun things about the Ocean too like people in Japan and China make Sea Kelp farms in the Ocean for food. They eat the kelp raw or cook it like we cook vegetables. Sea stars can re-grow arms if they lose one, even a crown-of-thorns sea star can grow into two separate crown-of-thorns sea stars if they are cut in half! California sea otters are so smart, they wrap themselves in sea kelp while they sleep, kind of like we wrap ourselves in a blanket, which keeps them safe from the strong Ocean currents that could take them into the open sea. Dolphins are really smart too. They use echolocation to bounce sounds off fish to find food. Other really interesting things that people probably don�t know is that whales are so enormous their tongues are as big as an elephant and a blue whale�s heart is as big as a cow! Wow! Those are huge mammals!!!

Everyone can learn something from you! Your nickname is Anglerfish Albert because you also love the deep-sea, what do you find most interesting about it?
One cool deep sea fact is there is no plant life since it�s very cold and the sun�s rays cannot go down that far. Another is definitely the strange creatures like anglerfish, fangtooth fish, viperfish, hatchetfish and the scary looking gulper eels that can open their mouths bigger than an adult human�s head! My favorite part of the deep sea is that so many creatures have bioluminescence, which is really cool because it helps them produce a light to see or attract food. Squid can actually glow in the dark! I wish I had bioluminescence in my body so I could always have a light in the dark! I picked the nickname Anglerfish Albert because anglers are one of the top predators of the sea. I love how they feed! My mom calls me Anglerfish Albert since I look like an anglerfish at night when I use a miniature book light to read in the dark.

Albert ocean kid kid
scientist

Anglerfish are so amazing and unusual. The female Anglerfish is twenty times larger than the male. The male attaches onto the female and feeds on her blood for his whole life. The angler also has his very own fishing rod called an esca to lure creatures like squid, jellyfish, fish, and red shrimp.

What kind of ocean experiences have you had? Which has been your favorite one?
I went to California last summer and was so excited to see the Pacific Ocean. I wanted to jump right in! My cousins and I played on the beach with washed-up Kelp and shells. We went to the Birch Aquarium in San Diego and saw a big school of sardines, moon jellies, sharks, coral, sea stars, leafy sea dragons, sea horses and moray eels. I was able to touch many Ocean things at the special touching station like a sea cucumber, mussel, sea star and algae.

My favorite Ocean experience so far is when we went to the Birch Aquarium. I learned so much about the Ocean and was even able to talk to all the experts there and ask them lots of Ocean questions. I also loved the shark feeding. The scientists pretended the squid or sardine was alive by moving the food on a pole then the sharks chased them and ate them just like it happens in the Ocean.

What kinds of marine creatures would you like to see? Are their any animals you would be scared to swim with?
If I was snorkeling, scuba diving or in a submersible I would definitely want to see coral, anemones and their relatives, jellyfish, lots and lots of cephalopods like octopus, squid and cuttlefish, garibaldi, frogfish, parrotfish, grouper, great hammerhead sharks, whale sharks, blue whales, humpback whales, sea breams, sea robins and weavers. I�d also want to see giant squid, sea wasp jellyfish, also known as a box jellyfish, hairy anglerfish, hatchetfish, viperfish, dragonfish, gulper eels and sperm whales feeding on giant squid, but I�d have to be able to go to the deep sea to see those!

When I�m old enough to scuba dive, I know I have to follow the Ocean rules and respect all creatures by not touching them or trying to scare them. I would not be afraid to swim with any Ocean animals because I know they would not want to hurt me, they really just want to eat other sea creatures or plants.

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