Hello dear readers, and happy holidays!

Emily Mead, a local high school student, is sponsoring a campaign for the children on Kanton Island. When the expedition team visited the Kanton Island school, the students gave us a list of items that they need. In the spirit of the holiday season, I encourage you to donate!

Items (or funds for items) can be dropped off or mailed to the New England Aquarium, attn: Regen Jamieson, Conservation Department; 1 Central Wharf, Boston, MA 02110.


Photos of the Kanton Island school and kids (photos: L. Madin)

Emily's summary and list are as follows:

Kanton is the only inhabited island out of the eight that make up the Phoenix Islands. The Phoenix Islands are located in the country of Kiribati. Kiribati is in between Australia and California. Kiribati includes 33 islands in three different island groups, 277 square miles of land, in 2 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. The Phoenix Islands include 11 square miles of land. The Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), including its archipelago and surrounding waters, is 157,626 square miles, making it the largest protected area in the world and about the size of California. Kanton is included in this area, and needs your help. The teachers of the school on Kanton requested some materials, to educate their students more and teach them about the oceans surrounding them. So, by helping them in any way makes a big impact. We greatly appreciate your generosity, and happy holidays!

Materials Requested:
Crayons
Scissors
Stapler
Pencils & Pens
Dictionaries
Markers Glue
Rhymes
Poems & Songs
Posters of the internal and external parts of fish
Posters of types of fish and reefs
Wall clock
Dolls

Thank you!

Items (or funds for items) can be dropped off or mailed to the New England Aquarium, attn: Regen Jamieson, Conservation Department; 1 Central Wharf, Boston, MA 02110.

The last of the Phoenix Islands "Greatest Hits" highlights.#10: Future PIPA ExpeditionsOkay, I admit it. I have been stalling on this last post. The truth: I have no idea how to end this blog. How do you put a neat, satisfactory end on something so wild? Anything I write will be anticlimactic. With this in mind, let me simply offer you some stats to let you know how where things stand as of this very moment:

...15 Expedition members, now spread all over the globe
...15 amazing NAI'A crew members (based in Fiji) 
...100+ bags of luggage transported to and fro
...400+ SCUBA dives completed on the 2009 expedition
...4 blue water dives
...3 ROV excursions
...11 days on-site in PIPA
...11+ days in transit (5 in very rough seas)
...500+ species of fish documented
...200+ invertebrate species documented
...3+ scientific publications in progress
...5000+ photos of PIPA (see previous posts for highlights)
...65 blog posts
...12,000+ blog readers (Thank you!)
..........408,250 km2 of protected ocean (PIPA remains on of the world's largest MPA)

And the experience ..... priceless.

Thank you all so much for reading and journeying with us. Special thank you to Jeff Ives (the New England Aquarium blog guru) for all of his support. Special thank you to all of the fellow bloggers who posted, students who participated, and readers who commented. To those silent readers - thank you - we hope you had as much fun reading as we did writing. It was a blast. I still don't know how to end this blog (mea culpa), so I'll leave you with some comforting thoughts:

1. The next PIPA expedition is slated for 2011. Stay tuned, and we'll keep updating this blog to let you know exactly when.

2. We'll post 2009-PIPA related press, publications, lectures, and outreach efforts here on this blog. These will include a book, a National Geographic article, a movie, scientific publications, and press.

3. This blog will not disappear (it will remain on the Aquarium website), so you can re-visit the 2009 expedition at any time. With 65 posts to go through, it will certainly keep you busy to go back to the beginning! Plus, the New England Aquarium is never idle - there are always amazing adventures all over the globe (including at 1 Central Wharf, Boston!), so check out the other blogs to see what's going on.

So, thank you! And don't forget to live blue.

Happy holidays,

-Randi