Clean water is precious to Sweden.
So when students from there saw the microscopic crabs and sea slugs squirming around in the Inner Harbor water, they recoiled.
“It looks disgusting,” said one 15-year-old girl in Sweden through a videoconference with a group of Carroll County high schoolers.
“That?s the reaction most people have about the Inner Harbor,” joked Adam Frederick, a marine education specialist with Maryland Sea Grant College who supervised the conference Tuesday morning.
“Most people have a hard timebelieving anything lives in the Inner Harbor. But when you look at something like this, it?s full of activity.”
On a big-screen TV at the University of Maryland Center of Marine Biotechnology building, a close-up video feed showed microscopic organisms growing on a plastic disk floating in the harbor.
The project was part of the state?s Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics program meant to challenge students and prepare them for college.
Students from Carroll County high schools sank disks into waterways around their homes and schools in recent months, pulling them out to photograph and identify the organisms living in different environments, and to compare their results with what students in Sweden discovered.
“I find it interesting that the majority of things we found on our slides were relatively small compared to things you found,” said Greg Brauning, a senior at Westminster High School. “We found a whole bunch of algae with clams and snails. Did you guys find any of that?”
“Sometimes ? mainly barnacles and clams,” one of the four Swedish girls responded from the University of Goteborg.
In Sweden, high school courses are more advanced and focused, and students are expected to succeed, Frederick said. One Swedish student said of the presentation: “It?s fun, much more than ordinary school ? reading and things.”
