Its I think one of my favorite camps that I've done this summer.

It's like really exciting because we get to do things that like, like real marine biologist do.

that like, like real marine biologist do.

So it's like shows us what it would be like to be a marine biologist when you're older.

So the Vester Marine science summer camp is a summer camp to get local middle schoolers out onto the water.

Students from Lee, Collie and Charlotte counties can spend a week each summe learning about the environment, with the Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University.

So we try to get them out on the water and more familiar with the water quality issues with the creatures they might see out there, why this area is important for us to preserve for the future.

Um, yeah.

I think my favorite day was either today or yesterday, we did marine geology.

So we put like this big like metal pipe down in the ground and we got like layers of the sediment and we could see like hurricanes and stuff like that.

So I thought that was really neat.

On this day, the students wer taken out by boat to Estero Bay.

We went to the seagrass flats in Estero Bay, which is an estuary.

It's a very important nursery ground for, all sorts of game fish, commercial fish species, invertebrates and stuff like that.

So we took the seine nets and we went to a sandbar and a seagrass flat, and we did a comparison between the biodiversity that we see at each of the sites.

So we take the same net, and it has the two poles on either side with the net in between.

And it has like weights on the bottom and buoys on the top, so that like floats and sinks.

And then when you hold it, you walk as far out and as long as you can, and then you come and meet.

So all the animals and stuff are in the middle, and then all those fish and stuff, like, you got to get the net in the movies to make sur they don't like fly off the top.

And you collect the and put them into like, buckets and then like, observe them and count them and stuff.

We got, like, fish and shrimp and, we got a crab.

We got two seahorse and a bunch of different stuff.

Well, it's kind of fun to se what you can pull off the bottom because, like, you can't really see, like, the water's kind of murky.

And so it's interesting to see what's down there.

While counting fish as fun, it serves many purposes especially for Kimberly's Reef.

So things like mangroves, seagrass beds and even oyster reefs, provide enough like structure and a shallow enough that the babies can come in and develop until they get to a big enough size before they move offshore, so that they don't get eaten by a larger predatory fish like the giant grouper that are out at the reef.

The number of fish can also correlate with the health of seagrass beds and mangroves in these brackish waters.

Some health challenges can be from excessive freshwater from storms, algae growth from too many land based pollutants, and boat traffic which can cause prop scars.

So they're okay and can handl that for a short period of time.

But over time, with repeated stressors, we start to see them die off a little bit.

And that's not great because not only they are food source for certain, invertebrates and then, other smal prey species, they actually form a habitat for these small fish and invertebrates to live in.

Summer camps and outreach to adults help educate people on our local ecosystems.

They don't fully grasp exactly everything that's going on.

And so we're really trying to, provide that outreach to them so that they can see, hey, this is the issue that actually affects me, that actually affects the environment I live in, that actually affects what I like to do for fun.

I'm just trying to make sure that they see the ocean affects the and that they affect the ocean.

Major support for Kimberly's Reef is provided by Bodil and George Gellman, who believe the human spirit is behind every scientific discovery.