Environment

A new state of the art environmental monitoring station was installed last week at the Marist College boathouse on the banks of the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie. The station was built in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the New York State Department of Conservation (NYS DEC), the Cary Institute or Ecosystem Studies, and Marist College. Funding for the new station was made possible through the Environmental Protection Agency.

The new station will continuously monitor water quality by collecting samples in order to detect the presence of toxics, pharmaceuticals and microbes.  Dr. Stuart Findlay, freshwater ecologist at the Cary Institute, said the new station will make it possible “ to actually collect a water sample so we can look for things that the sensors at the other stations cannot detect.  This is quite a big change in capability.”

Jupp Von Kerckerink saw his first great white shark while diving with his daughter, Phillipa, near Isla Guadaloupe in the Pacific Ocean. That was almost ten years ago, and since then sharks have become his passion. “To stand in the cage and watch those massive white sharks swimming very close in front of us was breathtaking,” he said. Since then he has made over 200 dives with sharks, 17 of them in open water with great whites. Open water means no cages, which may be why they call diving with white sharks “the Everest of shark diving.”

Von Kerckerink read everything he could find about sharks, and “the more I learned the more I thought about working to protect them.” To that end he founded the Shark Research Institute, which lobbies on their behalf and works to educate people who have very little idea about these creatures that have been around for 430 million years making them 18-20 million years older than the dinosaurs.

Perhaps canoeing with my 68-year-old mother through an almost uninhabited part of South America was not the most responsible thing to do. However, she felt the trip would make a pleasant change from the misery of Zimbabwe and the gray dampness of England. Very well, but I hadn’t counted on her actually being in the boat. “You do realize that if you get hurt, you could be in pain for days?” She said she didn’t care, so I bought a 16-foot inflatable canoe we could paddle together.

Spondias mombin. The Latin sounds so much better than “Mope.” “When you are on the river, look for a big tree with little orange fruit. That’s Mope, and you’ll be able to smell it. You can watch Tapirs and other wildlife come to eat the fallen fruit.” I was also told that the river was so high it would be difficult to catch fish, find camping spots, or run some of the rapids we would encounter. But it was the season for Mope. Some consolation.