Is someone in your community doing great things for the oceans? We want to hear about them!
Nominations for our fourth annual Ocean Heroes Awards open today and we’re searching for people who work hard to make a difference and deserve to be recognized for it. Each year we choose a selection of adult and junior finalists, then let you vote to pick the winners.
What does it mean to be an Ocean Hero? The other day we took a look at previous finalists’ areas of interest, ranging from SCUBA and submarines to marine mammals and sea slugs. They work to influence lawmakers, rehabilitate animals, and reduce pollution. Every Ocean Hero is different, but they all share a passion for the world’s oceans that drives them to make a difference.
You can nominate an Ocean Hero between now and June 20th — that gives you two weeks to tell us about your friends who are working to protect the oceans. This Friday, June 8th is World Oceans Day, a good chance to look out for Heroes in your community.
We will announce the finalists on June 27th, and let you all choose our 2012 Ocean Heroes. The winners will receive a prize package that includes fantastic gifts from our corporate sponsors, Nautica and Revo.
Now’s your chance to tell us about the ocean heroes you know!
If you read the blog yesterday, you may recall two things: (1) the 4th Annual Ocean Heroes Contest kicks off on June 6, and (2) nearly 1/3 of Ocean Heroes finalists hail from California. Now while the a significant proportion of finalists in the contest’s first three years have been from the same state, our 30 previous finalists cover a wide breadth of conservation issues.
For starters, if you were to ask, ‘How are the Ocean Heroes finalists helping the oceans?’, then I’d tell you there are – in my opinion – seven unique areas where people can invest their time: Political Activism, Habitat Conservation, Education, Pollution Reduction, Animal Rehabilitation, Research, and Promoting Sustainability. As you can see in the chart below, most finalists are politically active –from three girls scouts in Hawaii who rallied the state legislature to make World Oceans Day an official holiday to a physics and math professor in California who pushed Italian officials to end drilling in her native region of Abruzzo, which sits east of Rome on the Adriatic Sea.
Now that you see there are many different ways to put your energy into ocean conservation, you may ask, “Where is all that energy being focused?’. Amazingly, there’s no end to the different areas of focus where our Ocean Heroes commit their time and energy – SCUBA lessons for underprivileged kids (Education), developing a mooring buoy system to protect coral reefs (Conservation), saving stranded marine mammals (Rehabilitation), and the list goes on and on. As you can see in the pie chart below, marine mammals and sharks are the most popular focal points for our Ocean Heroes Finalists, but even an intense interest in sea slugs (Bonnie Lei, ’10) can earn someone a bid as an Ocean Heroes Finalist.
So, whether you want to nominate yourself or someone else for conservation, education or activism, know that there’s no one sure-fire area of focus that makes someone an Ocean Hero Finalist – it’s about dedication and having an impact.
When sea turtles are sick or injured, they can spend a few weeks or months recovering in sea turtle rehabilitation or research centers. The turtles are released back into the wild as soon as they have recovered enough so that they can live normally in the ocean.
But sometimes, sea turtles spend years or even decades away from the ocean. Still, even after sea turtles have spent long periods of time in captivity, they are able to return to the ocean and live like a wild turtle – even following complex migration routes.
Wild sea turtles migrate long distances to reproduce, as females return to the same beach where they hatched in order to lay their own eggs. Sometimes, these turtles cross entire oceans to get back to the beach where they were born. These long journeys inspired the Great Turtle Race, where leatherback sea turtles were tracked as they crossed the Pacific Ocean to nest.
Although not all sea turtles can be released from rehabilitation, healthy turtles that have spent a long time in captivity can still easily adapt back to ocean living. In 1996, researchers released a female loggerhead named Adelita, who had been raised in captivity for 10 years.
Researchers attached a satellite tracking device and were able to follow her incredible journey from Baja California to nesting sites in Sendai Bay, Japan – over 7,000 miles away! Even though she had spent her entire life in a research facility, she was still able to find her way to the area where she hatched.
