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NORWALK, Conn. Improving the health of Long Island Sound is on the minds of the staff at the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk, and a federal grant of nearly $35,000 will help.
The aquarium's Creature Encounters program, a social marketing and public-education initiative that uses live animals and displays to explain simple ways that visitors can be stewards, will be expanded with the Long Island Sound Futures Fund grant of $34,890.
The award is one of 39 that pooled $1.6 million from the Environmental Protection Agency, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. Recipients organizations as well as state and local governments in Connecticut and New York more than matched the awards, so a total of $3.3 million will be available for various projects to restore the health of the Sound.
"We're grateful to receive the Long Island Sound Futures Fund grant and excited to be able to continue to offer Creature Encounters," Jamie Dickinson, the aquarium's deputy director of development, said in a statement. "From surveys, we know that Creature Encounters have helped visitors understand their role in the Sound's health. In fact, last year, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they had changed their behaviors because of the program."
Begun in 2010, Creature Encounters are offered on weekends during the year and daily during the aquarium's busy summer months. The goal is to engage visitors in reducing the Sound's nonpoint source pollution such pollution as plastic litter, excess fertilizer from lawns, and phosphates from car owners who wash their vehicles at home. Those pollutants run off the land and eventually flow into the Sound but do not originate from one source that can be pointed out thus, the term "nonpoint" source pollution.
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