COLRAIN — A recent Stoneleigh-Burnham School graduate from Colrain is teaming up with a tiny mollusk to try to fix water quality problems in Barbados, and that research recently landed her a quick trip to Hawaii, where she presented it at an international coral reef science symposium.
Now, she’s spending her time in New York, learning the ropes of raising oysters so that she can head back to the Caribbean island and apply her idea in the real world.
Sophie Spring, 18, of Colrain, said her project seeks to employ the Mangrove Oyster, Crassostrea gasar, as a natural bioremediation agent to remove excessive levels of phosphorous and nitrogen from Holetown Bay in Barbados so that the water will have adequate oxygen levels to allow coral to grow on nearby breakwaters. It started as a research paper for Stoneleigh-Burnham’s International Baccalaureate program, the Extended Essay, a 4,000-word paper in which students investigate a topic of their own interest using college-level methods.
Spring said she got the idea for the project after reading an article about the use of oysters to a similar end in the Chesapeake Bay. She was encouraged to pursue it by her adviser at school and her mother, who is a marine biologist.
During her initial research, she contacted Baird & Associates, a Canadian coastal engineering firm, whose CEO Kevin McIntosh tipped her off to the situation in Holetown Bay and recommended it as a spot to develop her conceptual model.
Spring said the bay has been polluted by sugarcane farming in the area, and more recently by tourist activity, which resulted in the heightened phosphorous and nitrogen levels. That causes more algae to grow, starving the area of oxygen.
The oysters naturally filter those chemicals out of the water.
If the process works and coral begins to grow, Spring said that’d be a good indicator that the water quality is indeed improving.
After spending a week in Barbados, she penned the paper and was encouraged to submit it to the International Coral Reef Symposium, which was being held in June in Honolulu, Hawaii. To her surprise, it was accepted.
“I put it in just in case, but it got accepted,” she said, speaking by phone from the oyster farm in Fishers Island, N.Y. Friday. “I was really, really excited.”
Spring said she was able to present her own research, sit in on a series of lectures on other scientists’ projects, and network at the conference.
“It was the time of my life,” she said. “I got there, and everyone thought I was older than I was,” she said. “It was mostly graduate and doctoral students, and when they asked where I went to school I told them ‘I’m going to the University of Exeter in the fall.’ It was cool to be treated like an adult.”
Spring said she’s been in talks with Baird & Associates about the project’s future and plans to return to Barbados to implement it. She hopes to secure funding from the Barbadian government.
She’ll study conservation biology and ecology at Exeter in the United Kingdom in the fall.
You can reach Tom Relihan at: 413-772-0261, ext 264
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