In early April, when schools closed to in-person learning in Bermuda due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the BIOS Ocean Academy education team began offering virtual classroom support to teachers and students through the Institute’s Curriculum Enrichment Program. As the closure continues, they encourage teachers island-wide to utilize these science programs taught by BIOS staff.

The BIOS Bermuda Program has been a cornerstone of the Institute’s local educational programming for more than 40 years. Since 1976, this unique program has given Bermudian students aged 18 and older the opportunity to gain valuable experience by working alongside BIOS faculty and scientific staff in hands-on internships that cover a range of topics in the marine and atmospheric sciences. Bermuda Program students have the opportunity to work in both field and laboratory settings, learning skills such as data analysis, communication, and problem solving that are crucial for success in a variety of careers.

Bermudian Claire Fox joined BIOS this month as a science education officer, bringing to the job her experience as a BIOS intern, and as a former employee and volunteer for a variety of island-based science education outlets, plus university-level science training.

On June 8, seven BIOS employees will take part in a virtual career fair hosted by the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) in honor of World Oceans Day. The event’s theme, “The Ocean: Life & Livelihoods,” is designed to help local high school and college students explore the wide variety of career opportunities that exist in fields related to ocean science.

Primary and secondary students at Warwick Academy, a private school in Bermuda, now have the opportunity to participate in ongoing scientific research thanks to a partnership between BIOS, the school, and the Living Reefs Foundation (LRF), a Bermuda-based non-profit organization. The project is one of the first at the Academy’s newly-constructed waterfront Marine Science Center, allowing students to learn valuable laboratory skills and play a role in restoring coral reefs in Castle Harbor that were damaged by the development of the airport in the 1950s.

After months of precautionary cancellations due to the pandemic, BIOS staff hosted several school groups on campus this June for marine science studies that complement public and private school curriculums.

This summer, there is a new addition to BIOS: a 20-foot (6 meter) x 4-foot (1.2 meter) above-ground pool, dubbed the Underwater Robotics Innovation Test Pool. The pool is serving as a testing facility this summer for underwater robots, also known as remotely operated vehicles (or ROVs), as part of BIOS’s Mid-Atlantic Robotics IN Education (MARINE) program which is sponsored by RenaissanceRe.

In early August, a team of researchers with the multi-year, multi-institutional BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) program completed their seventh research cruise aboard the BIOS-operated research vessel Atlantic Explorer. For four days, 13 scientists from eight institutions came together to study the unique microbial communities that develop in the Sargasso Sea during the summer, as well as the dissolved organic matter (DOM) they produce, consume, and redistribute throughout the water column.

For two sessions this summer (July 19 to 23 and July 26 to 28), 19 students aged 12 to 15 got to experience Bermuda’s marine environments and learn the foundations of scientific investigations through BIOS’s Ocean Science Camp. Now in its third year, the camp is designed for students who are interested in the ocean, but may not have had previous opportunities to study marine science.

A recently awarded grant from the National Science Foundation is set to bring a variety of improvements to the existing outdoor mesocosm facility at BIOS. Originally constructed in 2018 with funding from the Heising-Simons Foundation, International, the mesocosm facility is essentially a large outdoor aquarium comprising four large tanks (400 gallon, or 1,500 liter) and eight small tanks (130 gallon, or 500 liter) housed under a removable canopy. The tanks are located adjacent to a small laboratory trailer, which is used as a staging area and for sample processing.