Dr Corina Ciocan visited the Collège du Bois de Locquéran in Brittany, as part of a plan to embed her fibreglass pollution research in school curricula in England and France. She and Angie Richard of The Floating Stories Lab were welcomed to the school at the launch of a collaborative research project.
A post by associate member of the Centre for Environment and Society, Angie Richard, first published on the Floating Stories Lab substack blog.
Recently, we welcomed our scientific partner Dr Corina Ciocan to Plouhinec. Together, Corina and I made a visit to Collège du Bois de Locquéran, the middle school [11-15 years], embedding our ReTISS citizen science initiative into their ‘Euro’ curriculum, which merges English and Biology for two hours a week. Over the next year, the middle school students will contribute to important research, mapping end-of-life boats in their local village, collecting and analysing bivalve samples for fiberglass pollution, and creating a short video to communicate their school’s participation in the project.
Corina was warmly welcomed by the school’s biology teacher, Gwen, giving a presentation about the problem of end-of-life boat pollution on marine ecosystems, with a particular focus on the scientific work of her team at University of Brighton who discovered micro fiberglass ingestion by oysters and mussels in Chichester Harbour. The kids listened attentively, connecting the issue to their local context, as the school fronts the biodiverse Goyen Estuary, and a cluster of dumped wooden and fiberglass boats.
I popped down to the Goyen before class to collect a handful of organisms for Corina to teach the kids how to analyse correctly. I have been saving this site to map with the kids and our upcoming creative residency participants, so despite driving past the cluster of dumped boats countless times in the past year, I’d not yet walked around the site at low tide until that morning. I was, frankly, shocked. I collected fragments of paint, fiberglass, and other plastic pollution shed from the boats on to the mud, algae and plant biota growing around the high tide line and under the boat hulls. I viewed closely cracked and thereby exposed fiberglass from the damaged boats, along with exposed electrical wiring, plumbing, shedding paints, and all kinds of waste that come with end-of-life boats.
As I walked towards the water, now at low tide, I hesitated when I heard the cracking of shells—I was walking atop hundreds of oysters and mussels that grow on anything they can cling to along the sides of the estuary, like rocks and, sadly, bad boat waste. I collected some of the organisms in my wire basket and hurried home to place them in water with a touch of salt for those we would not be analysing in the school lab I would return to the river so as not to waste their lives.
Back in the school lab, following Corina’s presentation and a sound introduction to the impacts of fiberglass pollution, Gwen pulled out the microscopes and I also introduced the kids to the handheld 4K bluetooth microscopes we are using in our ReTISS fieldwork. We looked at the fiberglass, paint and plastic samples I had collected from the shore to give the kids a better view. They were shocked to see the shards and splinters so exposed, especially now knowing the impact that ingesting these materials has on bivalves as Corina had shared from her research in the UK. The kids learned to record photos and video on the handheld microscope, collecting important data for our mapping research.
The Floating Stories Lab (FSL)
The Floating Stories Lab (FSL), a non-profit association, is creating a research and storytelling vessel, a 41ft Polynesian-inspired wooden catamaran that serves as a collaborative base for research, storytelling, and community engagement. Fundamentally multidisciplinary, the Floating Stories Lab is ultimately committed to building bridges between communities, researchers, creatives and policy makers to address the ecological and social challenges of our time and inspire regenerative solutions.
