Steve Jasiecki, chairman of Sustainable Margate, educates children and their parents about the critters that live in the ocean.
MARGATE – While it’s dubbed The Planet’s Biggest Beach Party, the fun-filled annual Beachstock event also provides those concerned with preserving and protecting the marine environment a somewhat captive audience.
On Saturday, Sustainable Margate, under the leadership of photographer and scuba diver Steve Jasiecki, children and adults learned more about the critters who live in the ocean, bays, rivers and creeks in the South Jersey area.
Under the Sustainable Margate tent, children had the opportunity to learn about how fragile female diamondback terrapins come out of the water to make their way to higher ground to lay their eggs, often becomming road kill from unsuspecting motorists passing along the roads leading to Absecon Island.
Jasiecki enlisted the help of Project Terrapin, a program of the Marine Academy of Technology and Environmental Science in Barnegat Bay. The organization studies the biology and ecology of terrapins. They mark and recapture terrapins, study nesting habits, enhance nesting areas, promote conservation and support of terrapins and educate others about their life cycle.
Children learned that terrapins like to lay their eggs on bay beaches, where clutches of eggs will hatch 30-90 days later. The hatchlings, the size of a quarter, emergy from their nests 30-90 days later and make their trecherous journey to the water. Along the way, many are snapped up by seaguls, which is part of their natural life cycle, but oftentimes, they are destroyed by motorboats or on highways, snatched up in crab pots, or taken from the wild and sold, which has decreased their population.
The children also had the opportunity to draw colorful pictures on a banner pledging they would do their part to preserve and protect the diamondback terrapin.
Jasiecki provided a teaching moment as waves lapped behind him on the beach at Huntington Avenue, educating children and their parents about the shellfish that live in the waters off the coast of Margate and other critters that need protection.
