Today's New York Times ran an article about the increasing interest in marine biology in today's youth culture (some of you believe I should now go confirm this story--check their sources and double-check their stats; I will not). In the U.S., about 50 summer camps, most of them near the ocean, now specialize in marine biology studies, which is up from 40 camps in 1998. Perhaps we can expect a growth in the number of marine biology majors in another ten years time (and, better still, more ocean awareness at the polls).
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I teach high school biology in rural Indiana and two years ago I got my school to add a one semester marine biology elective to our course offerings with an optional, associated field trip to a marine biology camp in the Florida Keys. About the only promotion I did for it was hanging a flyer around school at course request time, yet it instantly became the most popular elective course in our department and has continued to be so. I still get comments questioning how I can teach such a course where I am, but the students don't care how close we are to an ocean, they just love the environment and all the animals that live there.
Shameless self promotion, but Mote Marine Lab can bring the ocean to your classroom via distance learning. We work with a large number of Indiana schools via CILC. If your school has videoconferencing capability, you can sign up to do a virtual dive in our shark tank. More info at seatrek.org.
This fits with my subjective experience. Always seems to light up an otherwise dull cocktail party conversation when I answer that I'm a marine biologist ("Oh!", they say, "I always wanted to do that . . ."). And the excitement is clearly innate in kids. Along these lines, I just finished reading Richard Louv's superb book
"Last child in the woods" (which might easily be adapted as "last child in the tide pool"), which has a broader focus than might be guessed from its title, and I highly recommend to anyone interested in the human bond with nature and how critical it is to the physical, social, psychological, and spiritual well-being of kids and adults alike. Not to mention how important experience of nature is to developing a conservation ethic in the next generation(s) of policy makers and voters.