How many children do you know that can say they watched humpback whales feeding on bunker while building sandcastles at the Atlantic Ocean’s shoreline to learn about and experiment with erosion? I know nine of them and this happened during the first day of summer programming held at the Town of Southampton’s Tiana Bayside Stewardship & Education Center (aka Tiana Bayside). I would have to say that the Summer of 2021 was a spectacular one!

A Southampton Town Lifeguard shows our Thursday DayVenturers where to spot the humpback whales!

An Ideal Setting

Tiana Bayside is located at 89 Dune Road, a barrier island, in Hampton Bays with the Shinnecock Bay approximately 300 feet to our north and the Atlantic Ocean approximately 1200 feet to our south. We are surrounded by coastal and marine habitat making it an ideal location for marine education, exploration and inspiration! it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

As you can imagine there is a lot to see and do surrounding Tiana Bayside and our days were packed full of learning, adventure, exploration, and creativity.

We offered two Tiana Bayside Marine DayVenture programs and two Tiana Bayside Marine Art & Science Camps for children aged six to twelve years of age. The DayVenture programs met once a week from 9 am until 2 pm for four weeks. The Marine Art & Science camps ran from 9 am until 2 pm for one week each.

Some of the things we discussed and explored this summer were coastal habitats (ex. mudflats, the marshland, and the dune system), erosion, water quality, the important work Cornell Marine Program does, human impact on the environment, and everyone’s favorite the inhabitants (ex. fish, sharks, whales, dolphins, sea turtles, crustaceans, shorebirds, birds of prey). We also created art inspired by the marine environment and spoke of the important relationship art and science have with each other.

Just taking a stroll through Shinnecock Bay!

with our Tiana Bayside Adventurers

“Painting” with modeling clay! Check out the fish tank on the desk in the background of this photo-each student who participated in our Tiana Bayside Marine Art & Science Camp learned how to set up, care for, and maintain a basic salt water aquarium!

A highlight of the summer was being a part of the New York State Horseshoe Crab Monitoring Program. Our students assisted in finding horseshoe crabs collecting data, tagging, and releasing horseshoe crabs at Tiana Bayside, a registered NYS Horseshoe Crab Monitoring Site. The information collected will be used to assess the status of horseshoe crabs in in the area and it will help determine the management and conservation of this important species throughout the New York Marine District.

Appreciating and thanking this large elderly female horseshoe crab before setting her free.

Without a doubt beach seining and eelgrass seining are a favorite amongst most of our students. A beach seine net is a rectangular net with poles attached to the ends. It has small buoys on the top of the net to keep the top at the waters surface and small weights on the bottom of the net to keep the bottom of the net on the bottom of the sea. An eelgrass seine is a rectangle net that is framed out with PVC piping and “combs” attached the bottom. The “combs” gently comb through the eelgrass in search of seahorses and the many other inhabitants of eelgrass gently pushing them into the bed of the net. Many people use a beach seine net to catch bait for fishing. During all of our summer programs we are using both the beach and eelgrass seines to see how many different types of fish we can find to observe, study, and be inspired by.

During our Marine Art & Science Camp each student was provided a three gallon fish tank to set up, care for and maintain. We did not go to the local pet shop to get the fish for our aquariums, we walked out the doors of Tiana Bayside and into the Shinnecock Bay with our seine nets to haul up our marine ambassadors.

Almost every seine we pull in at Tiana Bayside has the two species of local “baitfish” that everyone seems to know, silversides and killifish. Many people do not understand the diversity of aquatic creatures we have right here in the backyard of Tiana and around Long Island. So we covered silversides and killifish, here is what else we found while out exploring the bay with out seine nets and dip nets (hand held scoop nets): sheepshead minnow, cunner, blackfish, bluefish, black seabass, northern puffer, pipefish, lizardfish flounder, fluke, three and four spine stickleback, filefish, permit, American eel, naked goby, kingfish, bunker, sea robin, mummichog, needlefish, tomcod, oyster toadfish, lookdown, spot-fin butterflyfish, comb jelly, blue-claw crab, lady crab, broken back shrimp, grass shrimp, sand shrimp, northern brown shrimp, spider crabs, flat and long clawed hermit crabs, Asain shore crab, European green crab, green crab, mud crab, channeled whelk, moon snails, mud snails, lots of salps, and I am sure there are some species I am missing!

Beach seining is not only exciting but it is hard work too!

There is so much more to share about our adventures during the Summer of 2021….tie dying, bird watching, shark dissections, bead making for shark tooth necklaces, journaling, exploring the touch tank, water games, snapper fishing, and collecting amphipods are a few of them!! I can go on and on, but will leave you with the fact that during the last week of our summer programming we sighted spinner and hammerhead sharks in the ocean, pretty incredible.

Thanks to all our great program participants (and their parents!) for helping us make this summer so successful. We plan to continue to evolve and grow our program offerings in the future, so join our Tiana Bayside Facebook Group, follow #tianabayside on Instagram, or check our website for updates on what we have going on!

-Carolyn Munaco, CCE Marine Program Art + Science Instructor