While many of her peers were working part-time jobs and lounging by the pool this summer, 17-year-old Ryanne Ardisana of Riverside spent a week aboard a 90-foot boat in the Bahamas through a program with the Shedd Aquarium.
Each year, the aquarium chooses 30 high school students to participate in its high school marine biology program. The students spend about a week attending all-day classes at the Shedd in late June studying oceanography, botany, marine life, the geography of the Bahamas and other subjects.
During July, the students are divided into groups of 10 and are taken on three weeklong trips aboard the research vessel Coral Reef II.
“They had our days packed,” said Ryanne, a senior at Riverside Brookfield High School.
The students spent their days working on five research projects.
The 10 students on each trip were divided into groups of two, and each pair had to work on a different research project.
Ryanne and her partner studied marine debris. They sectioned off a 50-meter area of the beach and divided it into 10-meter sections.
With the help of their classmates, they collected any debris they found and kept track of what it was. Of the 26.5 pounds of trash they collected, 74 percent was plastic, and only 6 pounds were recyclable, Ryanne said.
Marine debris is a serious problem, and not just because garbage pollutes the environment and endangers sea life.
“Organisms like muscles attach themselves to the plastic, and then currents carry them across the ocean,” Ryanne said. “They can become an invasive species then.”
The students did not find any organism attached to any of the debris they collected, she said.
When the students returned from the trip, they each had to write a paper on their project. Ryanne wrote 20 pages on marine debris.
During the trip, the boat traveled the waters around the Bimini Islands in the Bahamas.
The students explored the environment by snorkeling both during the day and at night. They encountered sharks, sea turtles, stingrays, octopi, squid and a wide variety of other species. Ryanne was stung by two sea jellies.
The program furthered Ryanne’s lifelong interest in animals. She said she wants to study a biology-related field in college.
“After the program, I’m really looking into an aquatic biology,” she said.
Through the program, the aquarium hopes to encourage students to pursue those types of interests.
“A lot of students have misconceptions about what marine biology entails,” said the Shedd’s Nicole Pierson, who previously ran the program for seven years. “We hope they leave the program with a better understanding of what marine science is and what they want to pursue in college.”
Ryanne grew up in an animal-friendly environment — the family currently has a Siberian husky named Marley, a rabbit and five parakeets, among other pets — and has volunteered at Brookfield Zoo since the summer before her freshman year of high school.
An interest in animals runs in the family. Her older sisters, Rhiannon, 20, and Racquel, 18, are both studying biology-related fields at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Our aunt jokes that we should host a series on Animal Planet,” Ryanne said.
