Staff Feature - Interview with Russell Hollingworth, Laude The Lady Elizabeth School

How did your career in Marine Biology start?

When I was twelve years old on holiday in Turkey with my family the owners of a diving centre visited the hotel offering free try dives in the pool. We all had a try and decided to go out on the dive centres boat for a day of ‘try’ dives. As I remember I hardly even left the surface without the instructor as I was unable to equalise my ears, but I remember clearly looking around under the surface of the sea in awe of what was only a confined and protected bay. After we had time to snorkel, I left with some of the other children to explore the bay. One warning given to us by the instructors was to not touch a certain worm that looked like a hairy caterpillar with red and white stripes. Apparently, it was poisonous, and the sting was supposed feel like fire burning the skin. Of course, this was the prize find on our expedition and when we came across one, the curiosity burned in the back of my mind, a worm that burns under the water? It sounded too incredible to be true and so of course I had to try, I only touched with the tip of my index finger and I was immediately hit with the hot burning truth. The hairs are hollow and filled with a poison which when it penetrates the skin is extremely irritating and effectively feels as if you have a lighter flame under your finger. It burns, below the water, above the water, in the boat and all the way back to the hotel even until the day after, which caused a sleepless and teary night!

From this moment I was hooked, marine life now fascinated me. I completed my PADI Junior Open Water Diver licence on my return to the UK, in a freezing cold lake. I chose to study Marine Biology at Plymouth University due to the practical side of the course, the university has a whole pier full of boats and a professional diving school. One day a week for the whole course we were out at sea or even better under the water learning scientific diving skills. I had the luck to dive with basking sharks, explore underwater kelp forests and enormous wrecks from the Second World War. I helped pay my way through university by working as a professional diver on the construction of the Royal Navy’s Trident Submarine Docks and other civil engineering projects.

Towards the end of the course I became friends with a Greek lecturer who placed me on a research and conservation project on the Greek Island of Kefalonia in the Ionian Sea. I worked monitoring the turtle nests, educating the public and rehabilitating injured turtles. I started to recognise the need that we must educate the public as no protection for animals will ever be successful if we don’t have the support of the general public.

I thought back to all my diving friends, I don’t know a diver who does not love and care for the marine environment. So, I decided to start teaching diving and travelled back to Turkey to the same dive centre where I did my first try dive. I completed my PADI instructor licence through an internship with them and worked the summer in what had become an enormously successful diving centre, that summer I took more than 1500 clients on their first try dive (more than a few by the hand!). I also completed more than 100 open water courses and many continuing education courses. Since then I have worked in Egypt, the Canary Islands and then the Medas Islands Marine Reserve in Catalonia, Spain. It was here that I rediscovered my biologist side and worked often on investigation projects with the reserve’s biologists. Finally, I found myself in Javea, Spain working in a dive centre before being offered a job as a professional diver in Mundomar Dolphinarium in Benidorm. Shortly after they made the surprise discovery that I am Biologist and I found myself quickly taking control of life support systems, installations, education, animal welfare and several other functions both inside and outside the Zoological Park.

In all I have now introduced around 3000 people to their first diving experience in the sea and completed more than 700 diving courses at various levels, several my ex-students have gone on to become instructors as well. Teach that which you love, and your students will love what you teach!

How do you think interactive and practical learning environments inspire students?

With conservation I feel the key is for the public to experience first-hand, the Blue Planet 2 series has had an enormous impact on the public due to the incredible work done by the production team. However, television is no substitute to looking a dolphin in the eye and feeling the intelligence that is looking back at you. Or finding an octopus and with patience waiting until it gains enough confidence to reach out and touch your hand. Maybe I am a little old fashioned, but I don’t think I could fall in love at a distance, I would need to meet the person face to face.

The same goes for education, studying and reading have their place. But taking a group of students down onto the rocky shore to study the distribution of species or snorkelling to identify the different habitats and characteristic species are experiences that have stayed with me my whole life!

Currently our environment and the human race is facing an ever-growing problem, if we are to repair the damage done and leave a sustainable environment for future generations then we have to educate the younger generations with lessons that will stay with them for years to come. Show them first-hand what wonders we have in our environment, teach them to love rather than ignore and we will one day win the battle.

My daughter is six years old, she has grown up with sea lions and dolphins as her siblings. She snorkels regularly in the sea, collects shells, meets sea turtles in rehabilitation, participated in animal rescue, met the endangered Iberian Lynx (who was eyeing her up for a meal) and has even explored underwater cave systems with me to find blind shrimp in the darkness. Just try dropping a piece of litter in her presence and you will soon receive a sermon about how the plastic will find its way into the sea and maybe cause the death of a dolphin, turtle or whale. She even makes me stop the car to pick up litter!

We have heard about your work with the students at The Lady Elizabeth School on The Tritones Association project, can you explain more about it?

I have always offered diving courses for students and parents, now I have the stability to be able to spend time on educating divers rather than thinking about the money. I follow the PADI standards to the letter and on many occasions spend more time than required with the students to ensure that they become competent, safe divers and to teach as much as I can about what we encounter on our dives. Soon I had a growing group of divers and started organising underwater clean ups (on EVERY dive we collect some plastic) where we sweep a whole zone to remove rubbish. SCUBA diving isn’t everybody's cup of tea and soon I had requests from non-divers to help as well with the clean ups. Local town councils and conservation groups have jumped on board and now in the local area we have more than one event per month.

The interest grew and with some of the more committed students the idea of an association took shape and we are developing a Non-Profit Organisation to better work with local government and town councils. One student came up with the name Tritones, of course at first, I had little understanding and preferred to use my nickname ¨Pescao¨. However, Triton in Greek mythology was the son of Poseidon and was the messenger of the sea, one of the most important facets of our work is the education and explanations we give to the public. On many occasions I start with some twenty school volunteers and after explaining to by passers what we are doing and where we come from, we finish with another ten volunteers mucking in to help. We need to spread the message, set an example and teach people to respect the environment. After a good deal of thought I realised that our volunteers are nothing short of Triton, the messenger of the sea.

Some of the more artistic students designed our logo, a shell and a trident (both were wielded by Triton the Greek God). The shell belongs to the Triton Sea Snail, one of the few animals capable of devouring the poisonous Crown of Thorns Starfish which is devouring the coral of the great barrier reef. This is due to runoff from cities and the fact the Triton Snail have been overfished for its enormous and ornate shell, sold for souvenirs.

The Tritones work as messengers or educators like Triton the Greek God and defenders of the environment just like the Triton Sea Snail. None of this was my idea, the credit goes to Charlotte in Year 12 and Ines in Year 13 at LES. Both are frequent divers and Ines comes from a long family history of professional fishermen. Above all many of these students are the driving force that ensure I never take a break!!

The other driving force is the fact that the voluntary work contributes to our Duke of Edinburgh Award programme at school and helps enormously with our students’ applications to university. How many students can put on their applications that they have worked on real research project with permission from the Spanish Environmental Agency!

Could you tell us more about the active research projects you run in the local area?

Whilst working at school, a couple of local wildlife rangers approached me to ask if I would be willing to continue with the conservation projects that we organised whilst I worked at Mundomar Dolphinarium. The government obliges zoological parks to organise or contribute to conservation.

The first project I restarted was the tracking of a local resident pod of bottlenose dolphins that frequent the maritime portion of the Sierra Helada Natural Park near Benidorm. The park has a large area of sea within its protection, an old friend and colleague has just been named coastguard and equipped with a patrol boat. We quickly signed an agreement with the local town councils, the natural park director and the Spanish Environmental Agency. At least every two weeks we run sweep of the natural park from Altea to Benidorm Island, then returning towards Calpe and the Port of Altea. Each sweep takes about three hours and we place four volunteers visually searching the sea in each of the four quadrants surrounding the boat. The dolphins have to break surface to breath and if we observe any then we break away from the route to track the dolphins and obtain photos and video. Using lateral photos of the dorsal fin I use image recognition software to trace the outline of each fin and match is against my saved database. I have more than 30 fins saved and many of these are spotted on a regular basis, the group of animals tend to feed each morning around the fish factories close to Altea and then travel up and down the coastline. This year I even have the first recorded interaction between the dolphins and a fishing vessel trawling the sea bed, which has never been reported in the Valencian Community. I also have a hydrophone (underwater microphone) which we stop and use to conduct an acoustic survey, sound travels very far underwater and on occasions we can record dolphin noises as they are too far away to see. The data is passed on to the Environment Agency and University of Valencia, who are building a case to increase the level of protection for the natural park. The method of photo identification supplies much needed data about the population without interfering with the dolphins and allows us to observe their natural behaviours.

In Mundomar I worked almost three hours per day underwater with the dolphins, over time I started to associate their vocalisations (whistles and communication noises) with events that were happening. For example, aggressions between the animals would result in set of piercing whistles, the dominant male has a whistle to signal his discontent with a diver, mating has its own whistle and each animal has a personal identifying whistle.

In the sea I use a software package from the University of St Andrews (PAMGUARD) that analyses captured sounds to highlight not only cetacean communication and echolocation noises but also identify species. The species identification is of little use for us in the sea here as many sightings are bottlenose dolphins, but I started thinking about retraining the software to identify individual vocalisations and to classify these. Currently we are observing and recording in Mundomar to base my experience on more valid data by annotating observations of behaviours to contrast with the sound recordings. Our Year 12 Physics students will be presenting their work on isolating vocalisations and making measurements on the characteristics of each sound as part of a competition from the University of St Louis in Madrid. Whilst, I will be using the data to reprogram the software. Over the next year I am aiming to have a working prototype to analyse the vocalisations in the dolphinarium in real time, giving the animal keepers a feed of data on aggressions, mating activity etc so that they can improve the quality of animal husbandry. This will be a world first, not even Sea World in America has developed any such system. The animal keepers will have the ability to receive alarms on behaviour 24 hours per day and take action to reduce the number of aggressions between animals.

Another local Marine Park in Denia, (in line of sight from our new school location!) has a famous man-made cave from quarrying the sandstone at sea level. Hundreds of visitors flock to the cave by foot, boat or kayak every day in Summer. Pollution from sun tan lotion and rubbish has led to the cave being closed on several occasions over the past few years. Questions are being asked by the local authorities about the environmental impact of so many tourists walking around the wave cut platform that surround the cave. The platform is of special ecological interest as the algae, crustacean and fish populations are unique. However, the trampling by tourists could well be taking its toll on this habitat, we are setting up sampling points between the car parks and the cave, around the cave itself and on the far side of the cave where there is little tourist pressure. We are sampling before and after each summer over the next few years before presenting recommendations to the Natural Park Committee. Again, our investigation has been granted permission from the Environmental Agency. This project falls into the hands of our Marine Science Students in Year 12 who study marine ecology and have a recommended practical which involved a survey of the rocky shore. We use the recommended practical as training and then those who want to volunteer make excursions collaborating with a local kayak company to gather data.

In the future we would like to raise funds for own set of kayaks, construct a towed hydrophone array to triangulate the position of animal vocalisations in the sea, purchase a small zodiac with trailer to work up and down the coastline and finally to invest in autonomous recording units to place underwater and record sound over month long periods.

What have been some personal highlights throughout your career?

My personal highlights can be easily split into animal success and human successes.

In Mundomar I entered the water alone during the birth of a dolphin when the mother had been more than twelve hours giving birth. She was exhausted, but the rest of the group were alert and protecting her from any intervention. I approached her underwater and the other animals let me pass (only because they know me extremely well). When I swam by her side, she tilted herself to show the tail of her baby, I gently took hold and pulled with her next contraction and the whole baby popped straight out. I left quickly, the baby was a male and we called him David. I miss working with him dearly, I trained with him many underwater behaviours and never once rewarded him with food, only affection.

On the other hand, my students have many times obtained through Marine Science the grades they need to meet their offers for university. After three cohorts of students, they have been awarded three ‘Top in Spain’ awards from Cambridge International Examinations. Not a single student has failed so far, and I feel this is down to them being interested and motivated. Many of these students also dive and although many may not pursue a career in Science, I know they will carry with them a love and deep respect for the sea.

Finally, I am an extremely proud Daddy whose daughter wants to work with animals and protect the environment!

How important is it to incorporate a wider variety of subjects in the school curriculum?

Whilst working in other countries I always had the impression that international schools could not offer the variety of courses that were on offer in UK schools and colleges. I had the terribly misinformed idea that if I ever had children then they would be better off in the Spanish system. It was my ex head of department Sylvia Jarvis that convinced me to leave Mundomar and start teaching (she was widely referred to as the bulldog and saying no to her was not easy). She taught my brother in the UK and when he spoke to me about her, I saw the effect that she still had on him and I thought that I would give teaching a try.

Quickly I realised that the job was for me and I completed my iPGCE, I was impressed with the variety of courses and the facilities that we had available for Science at Lady Elizabeth.

By chance I found the Marine Science A level from Cambridge International Exams and looked at the syllabus, I immediately found the course motivating (for me, never mind the students). So, I put the son of a friend through the AS course, he was already a diving student of mine and was struggling with the more academic A levels, it was the only qualification that he passed, and he turned to a career at sea. He now works works as an engineer on super yachts and earns about three times my wages!!!

Unfortunately timetabling the course was difficult and the next cohort I started with fifteen students in AS and three students completing the full A level but running the whole course in my non-contact periods. I used this as proof of concept, all students passed, and we won two ‘Top in Spain’ awards from Cambridge International Examinations. I now run the course on four teaching periods per week instead of six (for each year group) and then I run most external practical activities at weekends. So, we can complete more activities and not interfere with other classes.

The course is like a breath of fresh air, many people confuse it with Marine Biology, but we cover a wide variety of sciences and almost all students can identify concepts that they are studying in other A levels or have studied previously. The course gives them the opportunity to apply their learning to examples of an environment that is alien and fascinating to them. We range from ecology, physiology, environmental chemistry, geography, geology, conservation, business and meteorology! Each week we open new doors and change direction, the students are excited to see what surprise will come next!

For anyone who wants to learn more about the environment and how to get involved with helping the world become more sustainable, where would you say, is a good place to start?

The first place to start is at home, recycle and do your best to find out if the rubbish collected by your town council is then recycled. Minimise your consumption of animal products in the food chain only about 10% of energy is passed on from the plants to herbivores. Therefore, if we all become vegetarian then there will be ten times as much food to go around, of course I wouldn’t expect people to drop fish and meat entirely but reducing consumption will go a long way. Finally, pick up litter, attend environmental clean-ups and spread the word about what you're doing. Make those who drop litter feel guilty, give them a good example to follow.

To learn more, follow us at www.tritones.org, the website is not finished but I am regularly adding information especially to the news blog and Facebook. Please feel free to copy ideas and I will always do my best to pass on environmental news, the key is to spread the word. At Lady Elizabeth we are working on weekend Marine Science courses and possibly the full Marine Science course online with practical on the weekends. I will pack the weekend full of practical activities to tie in with A level, iGCSE, Spanish ESO and Spanish Bachillerato as a way of introducing Marine Science or supporting other subjects.

Finally, for those who want to study, first and foremost, Veterinary Sciences are extremely useful. I often work alongside some of the finest vets in the world who leave me in awe. But then also biologists, oceanographers, nautical engineers, there is always an environmental side to every subject if you are willing to work hard. If you decide to make a difference, then you will. We are all connected, reach out and influence just one person and they may influence many more.

Do you have a favourite marine animal or ocean species and why?

Einstein once said “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Every species is special, every individual organism has its own unique and outstanding qualities. Trying to answer this question makes me feel like choosing a favourite student, I have so many!

So here are just a few:

The bottlenose dolphin for its intelligence and ability to work not only together in group but with other species in the wild too. Even humans!

The octopus for its problem-solving ability, they can open a childproof medicine bottle to get food inside in less than a minute, EVEN if they have never seen one before!

The deadly but beautiful Portuguese man of war jellyfish, for being so pretty and yet packing an incredibly painful sting in its tentacles that can kill a human being. They have a float full of carbon monoxide that they use as a sail and can travel with the wind rather that ocean currents, when scared they can deflate the sail and dive like a submarine, only to inflate and appear elsewhere. But even more incredible, they are not jellyfish but more like a community of individuals.

Sea slugs or nudibranchs which come in an incredible variety of colours, they seem like slugs but many species feed on stinging organisms and are capable of deactivating the stinging cells and incorporating them into their own tentacles, they steal the sting from other organisms!!!

The sperm whale (actually a dolphin) who dives deeper than two kilometres and has an echolocation system so powerful that is can use the pulses of sound to stun their prey.

Corals, which apart from trapping food using tiny stinging tentacles and living as a colony of individual organisms, they allow symbiotic single cell algae (zooxanthellae) to live inside their bodies and do photosynthesis, providing the coral polyp with extra energy and protecting the zooxanthellae with their stinging cells.

And of course, the Triton Sea Snail!