Ways you can Help Make a Difference in the Environment and Help Aquatic Life

A student volunteers to help with a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle release by the National Park Service on Padre Island. Photo Credit: Jennifer Idol, The Underwater Designer

Do you believe that everyone deserves a sustainable and adequate supply of clean, safe water for our homes, farms, and industries? Do you believe fish, wildlife, and all other aquatic life need an adequate supply of clean water, too?

If so, you can help ensure this happens in Texas. Here are ways you can help make a difference, as a student and as an adult. You may be able to think of other ways to help where you live.

• Learn where your drinking water comes from and tell others.

• Become a volunteer water quality monitor through the Texas Stream Team or, have your entire class monitor water quality (see sidebar on Stream Team)

• Learn about water conservation measures you can take and ways you can reduce pollution where you live.

• Help rescue stranded marine mammals, for example, volunteer through the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network.

• Join a conservation organization that has a mission of conserving water resources or aquatic species. There are many to choose from, many of which are formed to protect local water resources, such as a particular spring or river.

• Help restore an oyster reef by recycling shucked oyster shells.

• Buy a federal Duck Stamp because money from the sale of Duck Stamps is used to protect and restore wetlands important to waterbirds.

• Volunteer to pick up trash from the beach, or from around your local lake or stream. For example, volunteer through Texas Adopt-A-Beach.

• Become active in the public debate on water and aquatic ecosystem conservation; attend and comment at public hearings.

• Buy a fishing license and go fishing, and even if you don’t go fishing, funds from licenses are used to manage the states aquatic resources.

 

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Texas Aquatic Science is a cooperative education project sponsored by Texas Parks and Wildlife, The Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. Additional project support came from the Ewing Halsell Foundation and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Sport Fish Restoration Program. Rudolph Rosen, Ph.D. wrote and edited the Texas Aquatic Science textbook. Videos were produced by Randall Maxwell. Sandra Johnson, Ph.D. served as educational consultant and authored the accompanying Teacher’s Guide.