Biology and Biomes With Mark Hall

Jun 04 2009

Written by Ava

Mark Hall is not your average marine life aficionado. Nor is he your average school teacher. The marine biology educator tells us he was so obsessed with marine life since he was young that becoming a part of a marine life business in high school supplying marine specimens to schools and colleges nationwide, was not even a question. And it worked--Mark made enough money to pay for college.

Now the owner of the Biomes Marine Biology Center, Mark is still going strong, teaching kids about the marine world through visuals rather then typical schoolwork assignments. What started as a mere trip to a classroom for a marine life show at 23, cemented Mark's future and he knew he wanted to impact kids for the rest of his life. Now in his 40s, he still doesn't call it a real job.

Among other things, Mark is also the creator of the Biomes Blog,which surprisingly enough no longer has a lot to do with the Center of the same name. But while he calls his blog creation more of a "link blog", it's the Daily Kos's Marine Life Series where he gets the chance to write what he knows on marine life.

TRT had the chance to ask Mark a few questions about his marine biology experience. Here are the great things he had to say.

As the owner of the Biomes Marine Biology Center, what kind of school and hands-on programs do you offer for students and families in Southern New England about the Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic Ocean?

I try to concentrate on animal interactions. Any teacher can put up a slide show or assign a book reading. Students learn from doing and observing. Tell a kid what camouflage means and he may forget it a week later. Show her a flounder changing color before her eyes and that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

So I travel out to schools with my animals and allow classes to visit my education center to learn first hand what is living right in their own backyard.

You started your own marine biology business at the age of 14?

I was always obsessed with marine life. As a kid I’d spend my time feeding anemones and pouring over rocks in the intertidal zone trying to identify as many species as I could. I ran into this old man named Jim who was collecting specimens for a local school’s science class, and he took me under his wing. At 14 he helped me set up a wholesale business supplying preserved marine specimens to schools and colleges all over the country. I couldn’t drive yet, so my mother would drop me off in some marsh or salt pond and I’d collect all day until she picked me up. After preservation in formalin the animals would be packed up and shipped out. I did this all through high school and made enough to pay for college.

Jim and I invented a method of preserving sea cucumbers in their natural state, body elongated and feeding tentacles extended. Nobody had figured out how to do this, so I cornered the market in a way. If you had one in your science classroom you can bet I’m the one who collected it. When I gave up the wholesale business, partly because you couldn’t make a decent living at it and partly because I was sick of killing invertebrates, all the biological supply houses had to discontinue the specimen from their catalogs.

Why the decision to start a marine biology education center?

It just sort of evolved. The collecting business enabled me to learn about such a huge variety of marine life that I started getting asked to come in and show my animals to students. As my living collection grew to close to 100 different species I decided to open a small aquarium in an abandoned old mill building that I renovated. I already had ten years worth of school contacts so it was easy to get started with a customer base.

I would say the main motivation was the frustration I had in wanting to share so many of my animals that I simply could not travel with. You can’t just throw a four-foot sand shark into a bucket and show up at an elementary school.

Biomes was originally a traveling marine life show for schools. Tell me about that experience.

The first time I went into a classroom sort of cemented my future. I’d never taught before and had no formal training. I was just winging it. But the response from the teachers and students was phenomenal. Once I got started I put some lesson plans together to increase the types of concepts I could introduce to students, as well as visual aides and activities that the teachers could use as follow up lessons. My background in specimen preservation helped with this quite a bit. I couldn’t believe I was actually getting paid for it, and I was especially excited about the possibility of never having to go out and get a real job. I was 23 at the time. I’m 44 now and I still haven’t had a real job.

What is your opinion on saltwater aquarium owners? Avid marine conservationists?

To be honest, I’ve always been skeptical -- perhaps even a bit disdainful -- of saltwater aquarists. That has changed, though. Provided the hobby is done with ecological considerations in mind, I now feel that aquarium hobbyists are not only not destructive forces, but can and have become vital partners in conservation. Breeding techniques that are developing for saltwater fish, like they have long been done with the freshwater counterparts, would not have been possible without the motivation of the aquarium trade. And the more species that are captive bred the less wild-caught animals are needed. And like any other renewable resource, those people that benefit from the resource are also the most motivated to protect it.

I kind of think of hunting as a good example of this. I’m not a hunter, I dislike sport hunting on principle, but if I was king for a day I would not ban it. Hunters are some of the biggest proponents of wilderness conservation out there.

Another huge asset of having this large community of marine hobbyists is the vast amount of knowledge that is being collected on the biology and care of these animals. I’d say that much of what I personally know about the environmental requirements, feeding and parasite and disease control of any given specimen I keep has been gleaned from books and websites written by aquarium owners.

As far as the conservationists go, I’m all for what they do. But like with anything else, practicality, moderation and common sense is the key. Why spend your life fighting against sustainable aboriginal whaling, for example, when there is a million-square-mile island of plastic refuse floating in the middle of the Pacific?

Tell me about your foray into the blogosphere. What is the purpose of Biomes Blog?

It was around 1999 that I started to make the Biomes Center website more interactive for the teachers and students that visited. I felt that a static page would discourage return visits, but if I could create content that changed on a regular basis it would give people a reason to come back.

It was also around this time that I began frequenting political websites and message boards, and suddenly there were these odd sites springing up that updated daily and posted content in descending order with the newest posts at the top of the page. This was before I heard of the term “blog” that was just coined by Peter Merholz, but I was fascinated by the format. I set up part of the Biomes Center site as sort of a diary of things that were going on at my business. New animals collected, which school visited on that day, links to interesting online articles, and so on. As soon as the term “blog” became more widely used I renamed the diary page.

I had two problems developing with this diary, though. One was I kept running out of space on my site and would have to trash months worth of posts and start all over. The other is I became more and more interested in the politics of the early Bush years, and my business website wasn’t really the place for progressive political expression.

So, although the Biomes Blog and the Biomes Marine Biology Center share a name, I’ve really disassociated one from the other. And by transferring the blog content to a commercial blog provider, I use typepad, I eliminated the space problem.

You also write a Marine Life Series for Daily Kos. How did that start and why does a progressive movement blog want a serial on marine life?

Now that the blog was disassociated from the business I could indulge myself and share some of the online world I was discovering with others. I do very little writing on the Biomes Blog. That’s by design. I like to think of it in the “link blog” genre, with each post being a collection of links to science, political, food or any other items I happen to find interesting.

As far as my participation on Daily Kos, I’ve been an avid reader of Markos's site from almost the beginning. Once it became more community oriented I found a desire to participate, but really had very little to say about political matters. I also didn’t see myself as much of a writer. I’ve never written a thing in my life outside of term papers for school 25 years ago. But I learned two lessons from my very early blog reading: One was put content up every single day (which I do on the Biomes Blog. I’ve published just under 2,000 consecutive posts), and the other was to write about what you know.

I honestly didn’t think anyone would be interested in marine biology essays on a political site, but I noticed this one guy who would write about a different species of spider each week. I thought “I can do that”, and put together a very short essay on snail shell chirality that got a decent response. I’ve been trying to do a couple of essays a month since then and I’m up to about 80 essays so far. What’s interesting is that early on I decided to let the community determine the subject for the next essay. At the end of each diary I put up a poll with three topics and the one with the most votes is the one I write about next.

What is your opinion on issues like marine life endangered species, ocean acidification, and climate change?

All forms of life eventually go extinct. It’s been like that for a billion years and will be like that for another billion. There’s nothing we can do about it. But extinctions caused by human activity is morally wrong and something that absolutely must be addressed continuously. I guess the same can be said for ocean acidification and other environmental issues.

Climate change presents a different problem, though. The debate on endangered species, for example, isn’t about whether or not it is caused by us (it generally is), but on where to draw the line between the value of biodiversity versus exploitation. You can legitimately take either side or any place in between. With climate change the debate seems to not be about whether it’s bad or good, but with whether or not it is anthropogenic. I have no patience for climate change deniers any more than I have patience for creationist theory. The debate is over, the other side lost and I have no interest in arguing it further. We should be addressing what we’re going to do about it.

I also believe that conservationists really need to rethink the philosophy of environmental issues. Fighting acid rain or stopping the harp seal hunt is great, but ultimately we’re fighting for our own future. The planet’s been around a long, long time and a climactic shift, or even a nuclear war, will hurt the human species more than the Earth. The biosphere has survived much greater insults than we can ever dish out and it will be around long after we’re gone.

Do you think an aquarium owner can be considered a marine conservationist?

Absolutely. In fact, I believe the aquarium hobbyist has the potential to be one the most effective voices for the marine environment. There is nothing more effective in demonstrating biological principles than a living, breathing example. I’m sure everyone reading this has had to address the well-meaning person who feels we are doing a disservice to the animal by taking it out of its natural environment and keeping it penned up in an cage or a tank. Here’s how I answer that concern, and I get it often: This animal is an ambassador for its species. Simple as that. People can only be concerned enough to care about an ecosystem or habitat to protect it if they have an appreciation of the organisms that live there. Knowledge of and personal contact with an animal is far and away the best way to achieve the level of concern needed to protect them. It’s no coincidence that zoos are some of the leading institutions for habitat protection and endangered species work. Go to the Bronx Zoo and spend a half hour watching the mountain gorilla exhibit and then see if you shed a tear reading news reports of bush meat poaching. Responsible aquarium hobbyists can do the same thing on a smaller scale.

You’re obviously an expert in providing awareness of marine biology and marine world issues. What else can and should be done to promote education? What can the average marine enthusiast who’s not a marine scientist and doesn’t own a marine-related business do?

I do this education thing for a living, and a lot of it out of love for the subject for free in the blogosphere, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert. I’m mostly just a guy with website who’s trying to share his passions with other people. But in a world where anyone with a modem and a little bit of curiosity can share what they learn to a potentially global audience, well that’s a wonderful thing and can do as much to promote education as the guy who travels around the world on the lecture circuit.

As far as your last question goes: Write about what you know. And post something every day.