Our speaker this month is Nancy Caruso. Nancy is a Virginia native with a B.S. in Marine Biology with an emphasis in aquaculture and chemistry. Early in her career, Nancy worked in the aquaculture industry and for a local public aquarium. Wanting to do more conservation work within her community, Nancy left the aquarium to build a program to restore Orange County, California’s decimated kelp forests using aquaculture and community involvement. With help from magazine and newspaper articles, as well a television and radio, Nancy has helped to bring the message of the importance of healthy kelp forests along our coast to millions and recently spearheaded kelp restoration on the Northern California coast.
In 2009, Nancy founded Get Inspired to continue to conserve and restore the Orange County coast. Get Inspired is dedicated to Inspiring stewardship and curiosity for the natural world through the exploration of science. The Orange County Ocean Restoration Project has taught 5000 students how to grow giant kelp in their classrooms that was planted in the ocean by 250 trained volunteers and now there are giant kelp forests in areas that had been barren for more than 25 years.
Nancy continues to restore the kelp forest ecosystem and has taught 5000 more kids to grow white seabass in their classrooms which are released annually to their ocean habitats in the restored kelp forests. The Green Abalone Restoration Project was started by Nancy in 2009 to restore green abalone with the help of public aquaria, museums, and 36,000 southern California students in their classrooms. This project will educate millions of people about how, in one human lifetime, we nearly ate the abalone to extinction and how we can all work together to bring them back. Pismo clams are on the list for the next restoration species!
Each month, AVDD hosts general meetings on the second Monday at 7pm. Meetings typically run about an hour and include announcements of upcoming events, a presentation on an interesting dive-related topic, and a fun raffle.
The meeting will be in-person at the Palmdale Cultural Center, 38350 Sierra Highway, Palmdale, CA. It will also be hosted over Zoom. Members will receive an email with the instructions to join the Zoom meeting when the date gets closer. For non-members who wish to join the meeting, please email your inquiry to avdesertdive@gmail.com.
We look forward to seeing you there!