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Pirates are pervasive in Beaufort, North Carolina, their evil essence committed to wax mannequins and cardboard cutouts at the North Carolina Maritime Museum. There are cannonballs and other artifacts from Blackbeard's presumed flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge, recovered at Beaufort Inlet. There are squeezable puff bottles that produce odors familiar to pirates, such as the sulfur smell of gunpowder. And there are placards with fragments of pirate lingo, including "Shiver Me Timbers!"—a term, according to the glossary on display, meaning "Goodness!"
Right across the street from the museum, visitors can catch a harbor tour on the Water Bug, a captain's launch retired from the U.S. Navy. Today "Captain Bob," with his seafarer's sunglasses, balding head, and graying beard, has on deck a tourist family and an apparently unattached dachshund. Captain Bob explains that pirate ships (and some German U-boats) plied these waters, that Beaufort is the twelfth-oldest town in America, that more than 100 local houses are on the National Register of Historic Places, that wild horses roam nearby Carrot Island and Shackleford Banks, and that—somewhat dubiously—a Beaufort native invented crocs, those plastic boat shoes that have morphed into trendy fashion accessories.
Then, in sun-dappled waters so calm that even the dachshund is undaunted by the modest rocking, Captain Bob powers the boat on a path alongside, as he puts it, "the world-famous Duke Marine Lab."
Captain Bob returns his passengers to Front Street, where they're bound to see a sign pointing out that the area long has been valued by marine scientists for its research potential. U.S. Army surgeons at nearby Fort Macon published articles about marine life in the 1870s. At the end of the nineteenth century, the federal government chose Beaufort as the site for a fisheries laboratory, the nation's second after Woods Hole in Massachusetts. Rachel Carson, the author of The Edge of the Sea as well as one of the literary linchpins of the environmental movement, Silent Spring, conducted research in Beaufort in her later years. The estuarine sanctuary across from the Beaufort waterfront is named in her memory. And Duke founded its marine laboratory on Pivers Island, just over the bridge from Beaufort, in 1938.
Today the Marine Lab exudes an intensity in its teaching and research, even as it shows a more modest profile than Duke's self-consciously splendid main campus. The research areas have wryly worded signs like "Beware of Attack Crab." In the parking lots, the prevailing bumper sticker reads, "No wetlands, no seafood." In the dining hall, students consume baked cod or fried shrimp—along with breakfast grits—beneath banners from landlocked places that, over the decades, have sent their students to study here: Allegheny, Albion, Amherst, Oberlin, Iowa State. This past fall the Marine Lab fed—intellectually and otherwise—twenty-three undergraduates, the same number in the graduate Coastal Environmental Management program, and a slightly larger number of Ph.D. students.
On a fall weekday evening in the library, students, in their typical ways, are scratching at their reading with highlighter pens or running their eyes over laptop screens. The books around them have marine-life-minded titles: The Spider Crabs of America; Medusae of the World; Marine Bio-Acoustics; Pollution Impacts on Marine Biotic Communities; Sea Microbes; Clays, Muds, and Shales.
Just beyond the library, the residential quad is formed of dorms built in the shingled cottage style; bathrooms post stern warnings: "Do not put sand in sink or showers." Outside, amid the skateboarders and Frisbee flingers, a couple of students are operating on a bike's flat tire. A half-dozen are sprawled on benches and drifting between studying and socializing. One woman is engaging nonchalantly with a soccer ball and more adamantly with a cell phone. An island paradise, seemingly—but with homework.
On Duke's main campus, there's no set mealtime, and certainly no set meal place: Freedom of choice is the imperative, and eat-and-run is the norm. A staple of the Marine Lab routine, on the other hand, is a common dining experience.
Over one meal that suits his vegetarian sensibilities, Scott Spillias, a senior, sits across from Boon Shan Quek, a junior from Singapore. (The chef, Sylvester "Sly" Murray, marking more than three Marine Lab decades, drops by to muse about preparing a special meal for a birthday-celebrating student and delivering a pot of chicken soup to an ill student.) Like their undergraduate Marine Lab peers, they are working on independent-study projects.
Quek is looking at the level of PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) in the runoff ponds built alongside shopping-center parking lots and residential areas. PAHs, which come from gasoline, paving asphalt, and parking-lot sealants, are carcinogenic and can accumulate in aquatic animals, notably snails. "Students here have fewer commitments to their extracurricular activities and other non-academic responsibilities, so they have more time to focus on academics, and in particular, research," she says. She's quick to add that there are plenty of social activities, official and unofficial.
Spillias says that the Durham and Beaufort campuses invariably invite different social dynamics. Marine Lab living means "talking to everyone you live with," he says. The small numbers discourage the forming of the usual cliques. In Durham, he says, "I have many friends—and I've experienced this myself—who live on a hall on the main campus and won't talk to anyone on their hall, because they didn't know them before and they aren't part of any of their social circles." The downside of life at Beaufort, of course, is that students can feel removed from those same social circles.
Last year Spillias studied at the Turks and Caicos Islands in the British West Indies. "It was a place where the economy of the country is completely reliant on its natural resources—tourism is number one, fishing is number two," he says. But that doesn't mean that the locals are attuned to the stresses on the marine environment or that they understand how to manage it. He says he came to realize "how over-exploited and under-researched the marine world is," an insight that led him to contemplate a career in marine ecology. For his independent study, Spillias is trying to figure out whether man-made marshes are suitable settlement grounds for the commercially important blue crab.
One of the professors Spillias is working with is zoologist Richard Forward, who teaches marine animal physiology and who came to Duke in 1971. His list of publications goes on for some twenty pages, including articles in journals in oceanography, comparative physiology, and marine biology. In one of his typical class lectures, Forward—wearing the Marine Lab quasi-uniform of shorts, sneakers, and a print shirt—is explaining how crabs, shrimp, and other crustaceans use waves, the sun, the moon, landmarks, and their own magnetic compasses to navigate their environments. Some animals can orient themselves with just "a little patch of blue sky," he says; others, which day by day have to master anew even familiar territory, are "basically stupid."
"I probably walk up to his office for a chat about something at least every other day," Spillias says. "This is true of the Marine Lab professors in general, who are all very friendly and willing to go out of their way for students. One thing that certainly helps is the small class size, where you get to know your professors well, and the fact that you know everyone in your class socially, so you are not ever shy about speaking up in class."
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