Long Journey for Nautiluses Ends Well
A sleep-deprived Greg Barord explains how nautiluses are being hunted for their shells.
Central Campus senior Jessica Witherly didn’t come to Iowa willingly. She moved here four years ago from Texas with her family. She wanted a career in marine biology and her parents were moving her about as far from the coast as you can get. What she found when she got here quickly changed her mind about Iowa.
“In Texas they have big, wonderful schools, but they don’t have anything like this,” Witherly said, gesturing to the expansive room housing dozens of large aquariums. The Central Campus aquarium is one of the premier high school facilities in the country, and just one reason Central Campus is considered one of the top career and technical education programs in the nation.
Today, it has five new residents; deep sea creatures called nautiluses, members of an ancient lineage that has existed in the oceans for nearly 500 million years.
“It’s really exciting,” Witherly said. “I was trying not to jump up and down.”
New Marine Biology educator Greg Barord would have also been jumping up and down, if he hadn’t been awake for the past 28 hours.
The 31-year-old doctoral candidate has been studying nautiluses for the past 10 years, diving with them and helping other scientists track their declining numbers. It took months for him to arrange for their arrival in Des Moines. But the increasingly rare and temperature-sensitive nautiluses, after traveling thousands of miles from the Philippines through Japan to Chicago, were held up in U.S. Customs.
To avoid any more risk to the creatures, Barord got in his car after school and drove to Chicago to get them.
A team at the Shedd Aquarium met him at midnight, changed the water in the bags and made sure the nautiluses were still safe to travel. Barord then got back in his car and made it back to Central Campus in time to meet his first students the following day.
“You just have to deal with it,” Barord said, still five hours away from a chance to nap.
The tired smile on his face made it obvious the trip was worth it.
“I wanted the opportunity to continue my research with high school students,” Barord said. He chose Central Campus because, “This is right up there with university level places. Definitely ahead of any high school I’ve seen. I knew I wanted to be a part of it.”
Barord writes about his research on his Facebook page, The Nautilus Files. But he won’t nudge you toward it like he will push you toward another website. Started by an 11-year-old boy, savethenautilus.com raises money and awareness about the disappearing nautiluses.
“It’s a great website where you can learn about how to save the nautiluses,” Barord said.
And saving nautiluses, as you now know, is Greg Barord’s passion.
