CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARBULLETIN.COM Damien Memorial School teacher Jill Sarchet fed stingrays yesterday at Sea Life Park as part of an interactive lesson for biology honor students.

Underwater education

A Damien teacher swims with stingrays to give her students a real-world application of studies

It was an unusual role for a high school biology teacher -- swimming in a tank with stingrays.

Jill Sarchet treated her honors class at Damien Memorial School to a "Stingray Ballet" yesterday at Sea Life Park.

She dove into the 300,000-gallon aquarium and swam with five brown stingrays and two spotted eagle rays.

It was like going home for the 27-year-old Colorado native, who worked at Sea Life Park from 2001 to 2003, then at Oceanic Institute where she did aquaculture research with shrimps.

She swam once or twice a day in a "Stingray Ballet" at the marine park and was facilitator for a "stingray encounter," showing children and adults how to interact with the creatures.

She said they have a bad reputation because of their name and people are scared of them but "they're just very curious, quiet, peaceful animals.

"I loved watching the expression on faces as I swam by with the animals ... showing the softer side of the animals," she said. "They're massive and to swim around with them and dance around the tank with them is a great experience for me."

She said she "cried in my mask" when she did her last ballet with the animals while working there and "it was all very natural" to return to it yesterday. "It was hard to get out."

She said the 23 students in her honors class, including five eighth-graders and the rest freshmen, "were blown away, I think, seeing their teacher swimming around in the tank with giant stingrays."

CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARBULLETIN.COM Students Colin Honeker, 13; Sean Shimuzu, 14; Scott Mailheau, 15; and Kervin Apostol, 14, looked on as their teacher swam with the rays.

He said stingrays "look really awkward. Other than that, they seem really friendly. The shape, especially the eagle ray, I haven't seen that before."

Sarchet said the outing was a reward for the students and an opportunity "to apply what we learned in the classroom to something in the real world." They just finished a unit on evolution, natural selection and adaptation, she said.

She dove in with a fannypack full of fish, took the stingrays off the bottom, led them around the tank by hand and fed them to show those watching.

She demonstrated how stingrays use their bony plates to open clams and bite into shrimp.

"They ate healthy," Jordan observed.

Sarchet said such field classes are important for students because, living in Hawaii, they should learn about and respect marine life.

Three of her honors students don't know how to swim and at least four or five have never snorkeled so the unusual field class was a chance for them to experience the animals and their behaviors, she said.

Sarchet said she came here from the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in field biology and a six-months internship to work with dolphins at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Lab. She went from there to Sea Life Park, then Oceanic Institute.

Working with the animals was fun but with Hawaii's high cost of living, "I needed to find a real job and stop playing around with animals," said the first-year Damien teacher.

She needed to find something allowing her to stay in science so teaching was "good opportunity to bring in my background and share with students," she said.

"If you enjoy the experience, you won't ever forget it," Jordan said.