For their first semester final project, Kori Ellis’s oceanography students turned in a research paper about an ocean-related environmental problem and possible solutions to it. Unbeknownst to the students, Ellis and Kim Morris-Zarneke, the manager of educational programs at the Georgia Aquarium and advisor to the Grady delegation, chose three students to send to Washington, D.C. for the fourth annual Coastal America Summit on March 9-12.

The trip, including airline and hotel fees, was paid for by the Georgia Aquarium. This is the second year the aquarium has sent a delegation of Grady students to the Coastal America Summit.

“[I was] very excited and honored,” said junior Lauryn Taylor, one of the students chosen to go to the summit along with juniors Annie Mason and Ted Galanos. “I never thought it would be me.”

The purpose of the Coastal America Summit, according to its website, is “an action-oriented, results-driven collaboration process dedicated to restoring and preserving coastal ecosystems and addressing critical environmental issues.”

Each of the 18 delegations who attended the summit—from the United States, Mexico and Canada—was required to prepare a presentation that focused on an environmental problem in the ocean and how it could be fixed. After the presentation, which was broadcast live on the Internet on March 11, a panel of three experts gave their opinions on the project.

“Only one person, Ted, showed up for the meeting where we were going to decide what the topic was, and his topic was overfishing,” Ellis said.

Overfishing occurs when humans fish too much of the same species of fish, which depletes the food supply for larger predators and results in a drop in population of those larger predators.

Mason, Galanos and Turner, along with Ellis and Morris-Zarneke, worked from the beginning of the second semester to the start of the summit to create their exposition.

“[We worked on the project] after school,” Ellis said. “We had a regular meeting day after school on Monday and in order to do the video, we were here all day on one Saturday.”

Galanos, Turner and Mason also worked on the project during their oceanography class.

“The biggest challenge was to get them to work on their own,” Ellis said. “This is supposed to be something that they do, and myself and Kim were there to bounce ideas off and facilitate [the project].”

The delegation prepared for its presentation by creating a video on overfishing during visits to the aquarium, and also made a Facebook page called “Fish as You Wish.”

“[The Facebook page was created] to inform the public about overfishing,” Taylor said. “We have pictures and videos to help people understand better about the problem. We have surveys to see what you do and don’t know and easy recipes to make better seafood choices.”

The students’ presentation at the Coastal America Summit was met with great praise and compliments from the judging panel.

“I want to applaud you and everyone else for the communication side of this [project],” one panel member said. “It is so important as we move forward with the various issues and tasks that you are undertaking … It’s really important for us to explain why it is important to understand and that’s what [Galanos, Mason and Turner] are doing right now.”

Galanos was very proud of the delegation’s presentation.

“They loved it,” Galanos said. “[The panel] gave us only compliments because they could not think of any questions to ask [us].”

Morris-Zarneke and Ellis, who attended the coastal summit, were also pleased with the delegation’s performance in D.C.

“They did a great job with their presentation, and I look forward to the next phase of implementing their action plan through their Facebook site,” Morris-Zarneke said.

In addition to their presentation, Mason, Galanos and Turner participated in student workshops, visited the National Aquarium in Baltimore and met with U.S. Rep. John Lewis to discuss how to raise awareness about the problem of overfishing.