From sharks to Shakespeare, there are certain subjects you can’t completely “get” in the classroom. To this end, Coastal provides some unique off campus opportunities designed to consummate the educational experience that is only begun in the textbook.

The Bimini Biological Field Station in the Bahamas is one of the best places on the planet to study sharks. Marine science professor Dan Abel, Coastal’s shark specialist, and biology professor Mary Crowe take a group of 13 or so students there for a week every May as the grand finale of Abel’s Biology 473 (Field Studies in Shark Biology) class. Some students will admit that this particular class—and the trip that tops it off—is why they became Coastal students in the first place.

“I’ve dreamed my whole life about doing what I did in Bimini this past summer,” said Jason Garwood, a senior marine science major from Kalamazoo, Mich. Growing up on Lake Michigan, Garwood loved fishing from an early age and became interested in sharks in his teenage years. By the time he was in high school he knew he wanted to study sharks in depth.

Dan Abel, assistant professor of marine science and leader of the Bimini course

Mario Travaline is another student whose fascination (“obsession is more like it,” he says) with sharks led him to Coastal and to Abel’s class. “I was a baby on a boat for most of my childhood,” says Travaline, who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, and on nearby Pymatuming Lake, where his family fished regularly.

Both agree Bimini was everything Abel promised and more. Almost as soon as the students get off the plane, they are in the bay swimming face to jaws among the creatures they came to see and study. The students, in snorkeling gear, hold on to a line while Abel, Crowe and members of the field station staff feed the sharks from a boat. After the feeding the students swim freely among sharks of all varieties: lemon, Caribbean reef, tiger, blacknose, sharpnose, hammerhead and black tip.

Mario Traveline and friend

More than one Bimini alumnus has described this initial encounter as a life-changing experience. “I’ll never forget looking down to see a Caribbean reef shark swimming practically between my legs,” says Garwood.

Jason Garwood during "the summer of his life"

Such scenes do not jibe with the popular image of the deadly predator, or the occasional sensational news story detailing gruesome attacks on vacationers. Unlike the bloodthirsty man-eaters of fiction, the real sharks of Bimini generally keep at least a good arm length’s distance from the swimmers. “If one gets too close a brisk swat with your flipper in his direction will send him away,” says Abel.

If what Abel and his students describe sounds more like Flipper than Jaws, it doesn’t mean that there’s no danger or that the students haven’t been apprised of it. “It’s stupid not to be afraid,” says Travaline. “But the public’s association of sharks with murder and death is a mistake. People shouldn’t fear sharks as much as they should respect them, respect their place in the ecosystem. That’s one thing you learn in Bimini, where you’re really a visitor in their home.”

"Doc" Gruber at work

The director of the Bimini field station is Sonny “Doc” Gruber, a professor at the University of Miami and one of the world’s foremost authorities on sharks. (“You can’t watch a Discovery channel program or read a scholarly article on sharks without running into Doc,” says Abel.) Gruber helped build the station and now runs it full time, expertly but on a shoestring. Basically a couple of double-wides by the sea, the facility has a world-class reputation not only for its shark research resources but also for its commitment to “conservation biology.”

The ethos of the place reflects an ideal of stringent and purposeful self-sufficiency, pursued at the lowest possible cost to the natural environment. Students learn quickly that this is no Sea World vacation. They bathe and brush their teeth in rainwater. They eat vegetables and fruit grown on the grounds. They learn a new meaning of the word “recycle.”

Shark guru "Doc" Gruber on the hunt

In a place where fish are so plentiful, scientists are loath to kill one even for dissection purposes. Instead of cutting open a fish to study its diet, for example, they perform a “stomach eversion,” using forceps to pull its stomach inside out through its mouth. Afterward the stomach is reinserted and the fish returned to its habitat. In the rare case when a shark dies, there’s a sense of loss throughout the station, and it’s a rule that every part of it is used for research.
“I brought home a whole new perspective on the world and how we live in it,” said Travaline. “We take so much for granted. We waste so much.”

Both Garwood and Travaline say that they found the spartan regimen at Bimini invigorating and challenging. (“We worked our tails off,” said Travaline.) In addition to classroom lectures and academic chores, the students help tag sharks for identification and research purposes. This requires them to insert a microchip under the dorsal fin, which allows the field station staff to monitor shark growth and migration patterns. One night the students were rousted out of bed at 2 a.m. in order to witness a rare event which had happened only once before at the lab. A mother lemon shark, caught on the line, gave birth to a litter of pups, with Doc Gruber serving as midwife.

A shark caught, tagged and ready to release

As hands-on educational experiences go, Bimini has no parallel in sharkdom, according to Abel. “In any given year there might be four highly-qualified instructors for 13 students, plus a National Geographic photographer hanging around. Only a handful of universities in the world offer this opportunity, and Coastal students have a great reputation at Bimini for their knowledge, their eagerness to learn, and their work ethic.”

The Bimini trip has reinforced Garwood’s and Travaline’s passion for sharks. The two of them put in many hours of volunteer time each week on Abel’s on-going shark survey in Georgetown’s Winyah Bay, which has given them a good lesson in hard-line time management. “We lose student volunteers all the time because they don’t understand how much work it is,” says Garwood. “If it’s a choice between hanging out with friends all weekend or spending eight hours studying and another eight hours making longlines, you’ve got to have your priorities straight.”