Partners wanted: USA’s marine sciences hub
On the Fairhope campus of the University of South Alabama, Dr. Sean Powers has a sign he would like to hang on the front door of the Stokes School of Marine & Environmental Sciences. It would read: “Partners Wanted!” The invitation sums up how the school has grown into the premier marine and environmental science program on the central Gulf Coast — not by working alone, but by embedding itself in everything from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab to the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo.
Powers, director of the Stokes School, took the stage in February as the inaugural speaker for a monthly lecture series USA launched at its Fairhope campus, and the story he tells is one of deliberate growth. The department was established in 1991 as an offshoot of biology under the late Dr. Bob Shipp; Powers took over as chair in 2013. Today it fields 75 masters and doctoral students, plus undergraduate programs in marine sciences and environmental and sustainability sciences that enrolled 170 students in only their second year.
“Folks like us because we do fish,” Powers says. “What distinguishes USA from other state universities is our location to the coast.”
The Sea Lab, demystified
The school’s most important partnership is also its most misunderstood. The Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Powers explains, is not owned by South Alabama. The legislature created it in 1972 as a consortium of 22 state colleges and universities — a way to fund one first-class marine lab instead of competing ones. USA simply has the largest presence: seven faculty members there, more students than any other member, and USA’s president serving as chair of the Sea Lab’s board. Any state university can send students; few do it as thoroughly.
“Our school would not exist if we didn’t have the Sea Lab,” Powers says. “It’s the most important partnership we have.” Its reach runs from K-12 field trips — very few Alabama students pass through school without a Sea Lab visit — to graduate courses that draw marine biology students from across the country and the world each summer.
Fishmas: the rodeo as laboratory
The school’s most colorful collaboration happens every July at the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, the Mobile Jaycees’ massive tournament on Dauphin Island. For Powers’ students, the rodeo is “Fishmas” — an unmatched concentration of species to sample. Working alongside the Jaycees, Powers’ team and Sea Lab staff study what sustains fish populations for both recreational anglers and the commercial fleet. His own daughter started working the rodeo’s ice bin at age three; now a high schooler set on marine biology, she ages fish by counting rings in their ear bones.
The partnerships run far beyond the rodeo. The school works with The Nature Conservancy, the Alabama Coastal Foundation, Forever Wild and the Coastal Conservation Association of Alabama on wetland acquisition, oyster reef restoration and habitat research. Local fishing guides — Powers names Bobby Abtuscato of A-Team Fishing Adventures and Richard Rutland of Cold Blooded Fishing — help tag fish and report what they see on the water, including the day Rutland towed a broken-down Sea Lab boat to the dock, then helped its students catch the redfish they’d spent five days chasing.
The Delta initiative and the next generation
The school’s biggest ambition is the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, the biodiverse river system no other university on Earth can claim as a backyard. The Delta Initiative studies the system’s ecology, its role in fisheries and its potential for carbon sequestration, and the school has hired into it: an environmental law and policy position, a new faculty member experienced in the Amazon rainforest, and journalist and author Ben Raines as environmental fellow and journalist in residence. Environmental sociology has been folded into the curriculum as well.
The career math is part of the pitch. Half of the school’s graduate students go on to university careers; a quarter join state and federal agencies; the last quarter enter environmental consulting — a field Powers says is growing rapidly as corporations build sustainability offices. “Companies like Apple, Google, Amazon… have complete staffs,” he notes.
Underneath it all is a simple theory of place: a university on one of the world’s most biodiverse fish habitats should act like it. The message Powers wants other conservation groups to hear is the one on the sign he hasn’t hung yet. The door, as far as the Stokes School is concerned, is open.