Puerto Rico Asset Value -- Meeting our collaborators at Sea Grant

After return from our lunch with Nelson in Rincon, we went to the University in Mayaguez for our meeting with Berliz Morales who runs the Aquatic Safety Outreach program through Sea Grant. We arrived a bit earlier than our meeting, so we decided to check out the nearby agricultural experiment station hoping to learn a little more about agriculture in Puerto Rico. When we arrived, we were told so sign in and the woman at the front desk emphasized to us that this was a research station not a botanical garden. But when we started to walk around it was hard to see that it was any different than any botanical garden other than some research greenhouses scattered around.

We thought we could walk along the path through the station straight over to sea grant for a pleasant detour and change of scenery. We were wrong. Turns out the whole area was fenced off and we ended up having to book it back to the car to make our meeting.

When we met with Berliz we learned about how Sea Grant had already been attempting to develop solutions to the issue of frequent decompression sickness among fishermen. In fact it was the doctors at the hospital who had originally alerted them to the issue as they saw more and more patients at the hyperbaric chamber. Berliz had a lot of valuable information and resources to share with us, and we ended up leaving her with a whole list of resources and contacts to send to us. It does seem like there are multiple entities aware and trying learn more about this issue in Puerto Rico and places in the Caribbean, so some of our work may have partially been done for us.

Sea Grants approach to the problem is education based as most of their work tends to be. It certainly seems like a case of we have a hammer and we are going to use it and hope it works sometimes. Berliz almost said exactly this in her own words during our meeting. We were glad hearing that there are people trying to address this issue, but we wondered if classes and education would be that effective. It seems to us like our advantage here is that we might be more flexible in the solutions that we could provide.

The team admiring a particularly large talipot palm tree at the experiment station