Reef Restoration with Art - Shelby Thomas
About Shelby Thomas
Shelby Thomas is founder of Ocean Rescue Alliance International. Her organization works to restore marine ecosystems with innovative, reef restoration projects. Shelby is a marine scientist, a passionate ocean conservationist, and an advocate for artists. Shelby’s non-profit constructs artificial reefs that are living sculptures. It’s 1000 Mermaids Project has installed more than 300 modules, some of them in the form of mermaids, in the waters off Southern Florida. These artificial reefs are ideal spots not only for coral restoration and marine life but also for research and tourism.
Rebuilding Florida’s Reefs
Shelby discusses what its like to dive off the coast of Florida and about her reef restoration work off the southern coast of Florida. Shelby is a marine scientist by training and the founder of Ocean Rescue Alliance International. Having grown up in Florida and spent many hours enjoying water sports growing up, Shelby decided to focus on reestablishing the coral reefs of Florida using artificial materials. Her goal is to submerge a 1000 modules, some in the form of mermaids and others memorials, as surfaces for coral to grow. Shelby discusses the process of getting the modules permitted and her hope that not only will the coral thrive, so too will marine life, and tourism.
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00:00:03 Pam Ferris-Olson Today, on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com, I'm speaking with Shelby Thomas. She’s founder of Ocean Rescue Alliance International. The Alliance restores marine ecosystems with innovative, reef restoration projects. The inspiration for the organization grew out of Shelby’s childhood experiences in Florida. She remembers many happy hours spent surfing and snorkeling.
Shelby Thomas is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com. The podcast engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the ocean. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
00:00:58 Pam Ferris-Olson Shelby Thomas is a marine scientist, a passionate ocean conservationist, and an advocate for artists. Shelby is founder of Ocean Rescue Alliance International, a non-profit that constructs artificial reefs that are living sculptures. It’s 1000 Mermaids Project has installed more than 300 modules in the waters off Southern Florida. These artificial reefs are ideal spots for tourism, research, coral restoration, and as homes for marine life.
00:01:34 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome Shelby. I am looking forward to talking with you about Ocean Rescue Alliance International. Since Wo(men) Mind the Water began its podcast series, we have hosted more than 90 guests; several of whom have worked in some aspect of coral restoration. For example, we talked with Krista Shoe, the founder of Panama-based Mother of Corals. Krista creates coral reefs and teaches others how to do that work. Then there’s Colleen Flanigan, a metal artist who created an artistic frame, that serves as a base for coral to grow. Her metal frame is now part of an underwater museum in Cozumel, Mexico. Ocean Rescue Alliance International blends science and art to restore coral ecosystems, connect people to the ocean, and inspire action and stewardship.
00:02:33 Pam Ferris-Olson Shelby, welcome. Let’s talk about the East Coast or the Atlantic side of Florida where you grew up. For those who haven’t explored these waters, tell us about them. If we go snorkeling or diving there, what would we see?
00:02:49 Shelby Thomas Well, so snorkeling and diving in Florida is incredibly beautiful. We have the third largest barrier reef in the world. Right now a lot of it, unfortunately, has been impacted and is dying but we still have beautiful soft corals. So you can see very vibrant species that are underwater cities of the sea with a ton of different marine life. From little, tiny macro invertebrates, sea slugs like nudibranchs that are very strikingly colorful and beautiful. To much bigger things like sea fans that have a lot of movement and a lot of marine life, from manta rays to sea turtles, dolphins. All kinds of marine animals that are really incredible.
0:03:34 Pam Ferris-Olson So compare the waters off the southern tip of Florida to those along the East Coast. Are there differences between them?
00:03:42 Shelby Thomas Yeah. So where I grew up in Daytona Beach area, it's less clear water. We have more brackish water. Again like grew up surfing there. If you go further down south through West Palm all the way down to the Keys, we start getting much clearer water where you can see those reefs right off the shore in 15 to 20 feet of water. That's where you'll be seeing a shift in the ecosystem and the since the water is clear, you can really see all of those coral reefs and organisms there.
00:04:11 Pam Ferris-Olson So when did you notice that Florida's reefs were changing? What caught your attention?
00:04:17 Shelby Thomas Well, I joined the scientific diving program at the end of 2014 and started diving with the University of Florida. In the end of 2014, we had a disease outbreak called Stony Tissue Loss Disease, which was essentially like leprosy for corals. So tissue was melting off of the corals, it looked like their skin was peeling off, and they were dying. And so we saw this spread like wildfire. And watching a100 year old coral colony, the size of a dining room table that's much older than I am, die in three days was something that completely was gutting and shocking.
00:04:57 Pam Ferris-Olson Three days!
00:04:59 Shelby Thomas Three days.
00:05:00 Pam Ferris-Olson Wow.
00:05:02 Shelby Thomas And it's sad, these ecosystems that support a lot of life and have been here much longer than most of us and can quite literally save humanity in a variety of different ways are impacted and dying. And so that's what really made a big difference for me and shifting my career is watching this first-hand degradation and wanting to step forward and be a voice and help protect and defend it.
00:05:32 Pam Ferris-Olson OK. So it's one thing to think “Things don't look so good,” and another decide to take responsibility for turning things around. Why did you want to take on the challenge of restoring coral to a healthier condition?
00:05:49 Shelby Thomas Really. Because I think it's all of our parts. Throughout my whole scientific career I have now found, you know, one of the greatest threats to humanity, I believe, is our disconnection from nature. People relate very little to even lettuce that's grown on their plate on where it came from and how long it took to grow. And the more that people get disconnected from nature, the more that they're not going to protect it and conserve it and abuse what we call natural resources as a resource to use rather than nurturing and helping support environments that we grow in.
00:06:24 Shelby Thomas Then , of course you know, it's intuitive to say, you know, we all want to have a healthy environment. Healthy environments also mean healthy communities. But we've reached a disconnect in society where we've gotten very exploitative of nature and we're getting more prolific storms and ecosystems collapsing. And so that's something that, I believe, if each of us take an opportunity to take care of our own backyard and our own part of nature and be a good steward of the environment and things that, you know, we're blessed with.
00:07:01 Shelby Thomas That will make all the difference and a lot of that's shifting the connection of how people relate to environments, which is a lot of our mission connect people to nature and to the ocean. I really stepped forward in the sense of just seeing a lot of that inefficiency and knowing that I have the ability to do something. And a lot of us together have an ability to do a whole lot more.
00:07:26 Pam Ferris-Olson OK. So walk us through your thinking that restoration should include an artistic component.
00:07:33 Shelby Thomas Yeah. So I mean, I dedicated my life to the ocean and restoration and throughout my scientific career, I've worked with sea grass, mangroves, oysters, coral reefs, of course, which are my passion. But I had realized at a point where a lot of it was not appropriately financed and some restoration projects are funded from environmental disaster. So something like that oil spill that's happened, they had to spend money to do restoration elsewhere. But that money wasn't being spent on restoration unless that disaster had happened. So truly there is very inefficient models that most people who were doing restoration were financing off of something that was very negative. So one was seeing this problem of how do we actually scale restoration and do regenerative restoration, like not meeting a baseline of like this was destroyed so let's fix part of the problem. But let's go beyond that and make it where it's actually regenerative. And that was a big push to start thinking about how can we support a business model that's able to scale restoration. But art came into play, from really, I can talk to I'm blue in the face of, you know, all the scientific details of quite literally how our oceans save humanity and from a biomedical perspective, from all the ecosystem services they provide, but not everyone relates with the coral. And I got to a point where I had connected with an artist and fell in love with art because it's been used throughout humanity to tell stories and art is a cultural freeze frame of what's going on throughout the world. From cave paintings that we found in Lascaux France of the early days of people and hunting, it's storytelling.
00:09:23 Shelby Thomas To Guernica by Picasso which is about world war and you can see literally what's going on throughout society through artwork. And it's universal language. It means something different to all of us. And art to me is an ability to create something out of nothing and to tell stories and to inspire. And so being able to submerge an underwater reef sculpture like our mermaids, you know, I may tell you we have the most gorgeous, beautiful reef in the world or that a reef is dying and still some people might not get in the water to see it or connect with it. But if we say, “Hey, we have an underwater mermaid sculpture.” People want to go in, check it out, take a picture of it, but now they get to see the fish that lives there. They get to connect and be able to out plant a coral with us. And that's what we use as a bridge to connect people back to the ocean and shift their relationships through experience.
00:10:19Pam Ferris-Olson Right. So where did the idea for the 1000 Mermaid Project come from?
00:10:24Shelby Thomas So 1000 Mermaid Project started through a conversation. I was connected with an artist in Miami that did body casting of people for like Romanesque figures. No head, no lower body, just physique. He had a client who wanted his wife sculpted as a mermaid to put at the end of his dock by his yacht in Miami Beach. And it took them months to build this concrete, lifelike sculpture of his wife. And he comes back to him, when once that's finished with construction,, and the guys like, “Well, I got bad news. I'm losing my house. My yacht. My wife.” He came into some troubles. Wasn't the greatest guy but here's this sculpture. What do we do with it? And he's like, “Throw it in the ocean.” And that got the artist thinking like: “Can we do that? Can we make it an artificial reef?” He reached out to a reef builder, which happens to be our manufacturer, and then he they wanted to put coral on it. So they started reaching out to coral scientists. A lot of the scientists, they reached out to just ignored them and said, “You know, that's not happening. Get out of town.”
00:11:24Shelby Thomas They reached out to me and I knew we weren't going to be able to put coral on there at the time. But this guy cared about coral. I'll have a coffee with him. And through having that conversation, I really thought about, you know, “OK, we might not be able to put coral on the mermaid, but perhaps we can use it to fundraise for real restoration. And better yet, maybe if we design a reef to mimic nature. [Sorry, this sun’s coming at me.] If we design a reef to mimic nature, then maybe I could get coral on next to the mermaid.” And so that's how all of this started. We started making designs, working with our reef builder to make reefs that actually mimic natural reef geology. And then fell in love with using art because we can actually do many other different stories and narratives that can tell the history of locations that we're doing deployments in. And the reef that we just deployed this past weekend is called Guardians of the Reef, and so we did a whole theme around becoming a guardian and a steward of the ocean. And so there's just so much that we can do. This is really just the start trying [trying to block this there.] This is really just the start the beautiful work that we're able to do in the future using art.
00:12:37Pam Ferris-Olson So how did you know what materials would be optimal in creating these living sculptures?
00:12:44Shelby Thomas So we use an environmentally friendly concrete which is great because we also incorporate calcium carbonate which is what coral skeletons are to help increase natural recruitment. Corals are concrete too. They build reefs on top of dead skeletons to build up the reef relief. And what we do is design reefs to mimic natural reef complexity. And we can give coral 100 year head start by building up that foundation, planting living coral on that reef and then now let nature take over. So we really think of it as a helping hand to nature where we can co-design with nature for nature.
00:13:22 Pam Ferris-Olson Who do you go to to put these sculptures in the water. Who cares?
00:13:29Shelby Thomas There's a lot of logistics that go into places. Each project is a little different in terms of how you plan it, where the reefs go and which agencies are engaged in it.
00:13:37 Pam Ferris-Olson So do the agencies provide the money or do you go out and raise the money?
00:13:43 Shelby Thomas We have to go and raise it. Some agencies will. Every project of ours has been done a little differently. Our latest project was funded with the City of Hollywood, who essentially paid for the construction of the work. We're still actively fundraising to cover some of our cost shift. We've learned a lot of lessons with our nearshore Snorkel Reef, it actually costed a lot more than our typical projects do because it is a lot more risky coming super close to shore to deploy 10,000 pound structures and so we're now needing to fundraise an additional $150,000 difference to cover for this project; so some of it's been financed through city funding that voters actually, through tourism actually like paid for that through art and public places. And then we also have donations and grants.
00:14:30 Pam Ferris-Olson So are you monitoring the progression of the marine life as it grows on and around the mermaids?
00:14:36Shelby Thomas Yeah. So the majority of all of our work in the water is a majority of habitat. So we have about 35 mermaids [sculptures] and the remaining, you know, 350 structures that we have in the ocean are all dedicated to marine habitat and underwater fish housing essentially and research. They're dedicated to deep coral nursery bases to scale restoration up the coastline. And yeah we're looking to, with this nearshore project, really provide a model for the state on how we could scale coral restoration up the coast of Florida using tourism and also exploring other models that can support work if we can bring in tourism and also community engagement to help finance large scale restoration. That's our goal with this project. Our art though all includes habitat, so we don't do strictly structural sculptures. We always make sure that we have habitat reefs because that's our core foundation is creating habitat and scaling restoration.
00:15:36Pam Ferris-Olson I see so that there's a difference between the sculpture and the modules that you use to make habitat, but they can be interspersed. OK, so is the continuing rise in ocean temperature cause for the concern or for concern for the success of this project?
00:15:44Shelby Thomas Less for the success of our projects. Temperature’s been impacting our corals here in Florida, but disease has been one of the biggest factors that's killed corals in Florida. Now every reef system around the world has different pressures that impact them. A lot of them revolve around pollution, ocean acidification, warming waters and disease. But here in Florida, you know, we I believe in looking at how can we be adaptive and use today's technology to be more efficient. And so what we're doing is scaling up restoration up the coasts and areas that are in cooler water and away from disease where we can actually give these corals a fighting chance to build nurseries to keep them here. So that's really our focus with the infrastructure and designing to mimic natural reef geology.
00:16:41Pam Ferris-Olson So if it's not, uh, sea level, sea temperature change, what causes the disease that's impacting the coral in Florida?
00:16:53Shelby Thomas So a lot of our disease has been so far linked to some of the port expansions. In Miami they dredged in 2014 and suspended and dug miles of sediment that plumed up into the water column of things that have been settled for hundreds of years. There was also simultaneously a sewage leak into the ocean. So between those two factors of the bacteria and viruses that were lifted into the water column and then taken across the reef track, that is something that scientists believe is the causal agent. Now it's super hard to track the cause of something when you're in ocean. So that's something that just in terms of timing, it makes the most sense in terms of the causal agent, but it is something that's hard to determine the exact moment of time and purpose of that. But right now it's from the dredge expansion and the sewage that's been leaked into the ocean.
00:17:49Pam Ferris-Olson So how do you go about assessing a project's value and inspiring people to become ocean stewards?
00:17:57 Shelby Thomas Yeah. I mean essentially from doing direct engagement with us. We've have so much interest all the time and people wanting to come out. We're doing, we're starting to do follow-up surveys on how not only where people are coming from when they get engaged with our projects, in terms of travel, but how it impacts psychologically. Like if people feel more connected to nature and asking a series of questions. We're working with a few different universities to look at more of a social dynamic study. We're looking to do more of that, but we're needing to help recruit more funding to be able to do some more assessments. Right now we do quarterly monitoring and engagement at all of our sites. We're aiming to do monthly or even weekly if possible as we get a bigger team. So the more people that we can get in the water and engage the better. And now that we have a snorkel site that's 8 to 15 feet, we can engage way more people than we have previously. So we really want to create a movement of people to have a way to make a direct impact on the ocean. And if a 10 year old gets to come out, plant a coral or a tourist gets to come to Florida to out plant with us, you know it not only helps get it out there and finance it but it creates points of connection. They're gonna think about, “How's my coral in five years” and they may go back home and relate to their own environment a little differently. And so that's our goal is to get as many hands into the ocean, getting to make a direct impact. And they can see that they can come and visit their coral and see how nature takes over on these ecosystems. That's the most rewarding part of this work. Even just this past weekend we went and dove the site 15 minutes after it was deployed. And there's already fish calling it home. So it's an incredibly rewarding project to be a part of because you can see, feel, and be a part of that direct impact.
00:19:38Pam Ferris-Olson Nice. OK Shelby. At the end of every podcast before I close, I ask the guests to offer some ways that they might suggest listeners make a difference and promote ocean health. Now you said, people would be interested in how their coral is doing. You also have some sculptures that they put in and I noticed in one of the videos you sent me there was a like a gold heart. So tell my listeners, if they wanted to be involved in helping with the coral or and having a sculpture, how would they go about doing that?
00:20:28Shelby Thomas Yeah. So there's lots of ways to involve get with us. We believe in you can use your voice for good no matter what you do, whether you're an attorney or a marketer, our oceans still need your help. So whether it's just sharing our voice and our projects on your platforms, that's one great way to help from home, being able to become an ocean steward. We have different pledges on our website. Of course wanting to expand our programs, financial support is something that we're in definite need right now as we're growing as an organizer. There's also ways to come get hands on. Come volunteer with us, come out plant to coral. You can adopt a coral from afar that supports a coral out plant. You can even adopt or create your own custom reef. We also do celebratory and memorial reefs. Whether you're celebrating a birthday or anniversary, you can adopt a reef system that we monitor and also send updates on. So there's ways to get engaged no matter where you're at in the world and direct restoration and you can come get a hands on with us. So it really evolves from everything from sharing to taking direct action. And we want to encourage everyone to step forward because our oceans need it.
00:21:36Pam Ferris-Olson All right. So we will on our website have a link to yours, but for those who are doing an audio-only podcast, why don’t you tell them what your website is?
00:21:49Shelby Thomas Yes, our website is oceanrescuealliance.org and you can reach us at info@oceanrescuealliance.org or I am Shelby at oceanrescuealliance.org.
00:22:00 Pam Ferris-Olson Great. I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Shelby Thomas, founder of Ocean Rescue Alliance International. Shelby is using sculptures in the form of mermaids and others to help restore Florida's coral reefs. Shelby believes that art has the power to inspire people and promote the work that needs to be done to create sustainable coral reefs.
00:22:27 Pam Ferris-Olson Shelby Thomas is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on the womenmindthewater.com and the Museum on Main Street and YouTube. An audio-only version of this podcast and a transcript are available on womenmidwater.com, on iTunes and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.
