A Mobile Fish Exhibit, Beehives & Water Gardens With James Frank
September 2013
For this month’s spotlight, we’re introducing a community member that we admire for their commitment science education: James Frank. “Ranger James” of the East Bay Regional Park District has been teaching science in one way or another since 2003 and he has always had a fascination with nature.
“At that time, he was finishing graduate school at the University of Maryland while teaching a laboratory class investigating scientific qualities of water. After a short career as a high school biology and animal behavior teacher, he found his way into outdoor education. For 4 years he supervised a waterfront nature center on the Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore, and when an opportunity came up to move to Oakland to work for East Bay Regional Park District, he and his wife, Jessica, relocated to live near the nation’s oldest water bird sanctuary. James’ Mobile Fish Exhibit and Mobile Visitor Center programs visit about 30,000 students and families throughout the East Bay each year. When asked what he does for a living he likes to jest “I drive a fish tank on wheels.”
(Above Right: James’ science classroom–notice the aquariums in the background!
Left: Ranger James visits schools throughout the East Bay with his Mobile Fish Exhibit. The program, and others he supervises, are provided free to public schools by the East Bay Regional Park District. For more information click this link: http://www.ebparks.org/
James grew up in the Northeast, surrounded by woodland ponds, marshes, and beaches where he learned to swim and cast a fishing pole. Around the corner from his family’s small piece of suburbia was his grandmother’s 19th century farmhouse where he would plant and tend to vegetable gardens with his great uncle. In a place much like many others that have continued to lose ties with their agricultural heritage, James was encouraged from an early age to care for the land by playing and learning outdoors.
One of his favorite memories from early childhood was when his grandmother gave him his first aquarium. Up to that point he had enjoyed keeping goldfish and snails in a bathtub in her backyard garden. He was just seven years old, and he loved mucking around outside. At age 12 he installed a garden pond at his own house (see photo at right, James sitting by his pond). As the youngest member of the local aquarium club, he wrote an article about his success getting Siamese fighting fish to breed. The hobby was something of an obsession – his baby fighting fish were raised in plastic cups that lined his dresser drawers. Meanwhile, into the rest of his bedroom he crammed about ten aquariums. By the time he left for college the backyard pond had become a water garden claiming half of his parents’ backyard.
James still enjoys gardening and taking care of fish. His newer hobbies also have a scientific side. He brews his own beer and wine, keeps four healthy hives of honeybees (see photo at left), and enjoys cooking and preserving his own pickles, jams, and jellies. He’s even won awards for his honey and nectarine preserves. All of these hobbies can be compared to working in lab-like settings, either through observing and manipulating animal behavior, or maintaining sanitary conditions to avoid contamination from unwanted bacteria. James especially enjoys woodworking, and he uses geometry to draft plans to build furniture like bookshelves and bed frames.
James’ favorite teaching memory is from his days at the nature center in Maryland. During evening canoe trips, he would bring a container and fill it with marsh gas. The stinky bubbles (mostly Hydrogen sulfide) are the byproduct of natural decomposition of seasonal shoreline grasses. It’s about as flammable as the gas used to cook on kitchen stoves. As the sun went down over the marsh, he would set aflame the gas in a big poof! This would lead to a discussion about electricity and fossil fuels, and of course, climate change. “Floating out there in the canoe, watching eagles teach their young to hunt while endangered least terns dove for fish, everyone was unplugged for a moment from modern life. You felt connected to the natural world, that place our species has relied on forever,” he says. “And then, not too far from us, there were these two huge smokestacks- a coal-burning power plant that towered over the water. It was a simple lesson. Everything’s connected. Everything depends on something else, so tread lightly.”
James says, “Every kid deserves a good foundation in science and nature. I love video games as much as the next guy, but I know they don’t just magically appear on the screen, just like our food doesn’t magically come from a supermarket. The most important thing to know and understand is that everything we do, no matter how small an act we think it is, affects something or someone else. We all depend on one another. And there’s no better teacher of that simple lesson than Mother Nature.”
(Below, from left to right: Chatting with Orion, the Spotted Puffer, while volunteering to maintain a 55,000 gallon tank at Riverbanks Aquarium during college; With Jetsum at the same Aquarium; Ranger James at work at an East Bay Regional Park)
