George Shillinger, Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove, CA -- A couple of weeks ago, Flat Ava and Flat Joe arrived at the Hopkins Marine Station safe and sound after their long journey from the 4th grade class at Catherine Cook School in Chicago.

Flat Ava and Flat Joe are part of the Flat Stanley Project. The Flat Stanley Project began with a group of teachers who wanted to encourage students to write by sending Flat Stanleys to other schools, where they're treated as guests. The host students keep a journal of their activities with the Flat Stanleys. In 2005, 6,000 classes from 47 countries took part in the Flat Stanley Project. Flat Stanleys have hung out with all sorts of people, from prime ministers to Antarctic researchers to celebrities. The idea originated with Dale Hubert, a third-grade teacher in Canada, who based the character on the 1964 book, "Flat Stanley" by Jeff Brown. The project is sponsored by the Literacy Community.

Flat Joe spent a couple of weeks with James Ganong, TOPP's computer programmer. Flat Ava hung out with me.

That's Flat Joe, with James.

And me, with Flat Ava, who just finished looking through "The Biology of Sea Turtles".

I'm a graduate student in the laboratory of Barbara Block. I work mostly on leatherback turtles, and helped organized last year's Great Turtle Race. I have loved nature and the outdoors for as long as I can remember. I was inspired to study turtles when I was four years old, when my father brought home an eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina) from work at NASA. Max, the turtle, became a longtime pet and the centerpiece of many show-and-tells. He was the first turtle ever sent into orbit, on Project Biosatellite, an early space study to understand the effect of zero-gravity on living organisms.

Today, the eastern box turtle is listed as endangered by CITES -- the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (http://www.cites.org). Their numbers have been decreasing because humans are destroying and fragmenting their habitat, and people collect them for the pet trade. The leatherback sea turtle, the species I study now, is also in trouble. In the last ten years, its population in the Pacific Ocean has dropped by 95 percent, because people have been taking over the beaches where the turtles lay their eggs, and because they've been caught accidentally in the giant nets and the miles of long lines that commercial fishermen put out.

I also tag bluefin tuna. Since we don't have any leatherback turtles in captivity, we took Flat Ava to visit the bluefin tuna that we have here. Bluefin tuna research is Barb Block's specialty (see her amazing Tag-A-Giant project).

That's Flat Ava visiting Barb, who runs the lab that I work in and is a world expert in bluefin tuna. She loves them as much as I love leatherbacks.

Here's Ava with a small bluefin tuna who's exercising in a tank where water flows fast. They're measuring how fast the tuna breathes, and how many calories it uses up.

Here's Ava by the tuna tank, where our research tuna live.

A friend and I also took Ava to visit the mola-mola -- sometimes known as the giant sunfish -- at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. This mola lived in the aquarium since September 2005, when it was only 22 inches long and weighed less than 20 pounds. It grew to be 6 feet, 7 inches long, and weighed 1,247 pounds!
The Monterey Bay Aquarium is the only aquarium in the world in North America where sunfish have lived. Sunfish are amazing creatures. They are “jellivores” which means that they love to eat gelatinous zooplankton, better known as jellyfish! Sometimes, it’s possible to see leatherbacks and molas eating jellyfish in the same place. Unfortunately, this sunfish was sick -- it had stopped eating and wasn't swimming well. So the Monterey Bay Aquarium veterinarian euthanized it.

Another 683-pound mola that was 5 feet 8 inches long was released to the wild on January 23. They put a satellite tag on it that will pop off and transmit its data in a few days, so the aquarium researchers will be able to see where the mola swam.

Flat Ava made friends with a Flat Leatherback in the Monterey Bay Aquarium!
After all that hard work, we took Flat Ava and Flat Joe out to eat, in a restaurant in Big Sur. Here's Flat Joe, after a big meal.