Talk on the Wild Side
with Katie Laakkonen

Transcription

Vikki Locke

I am Vikki Locke with C2 Communications and this is Talk on the Wild Side. We’re going to talk about careers and conservation and it’s brought to you by the Florida Wildlife Federation. With us right now is Katie Laakkonen. Hi.

Katie Laakkonen

Hi. Good afternoon.

Vikki Locke

I’m doing great, you’re doing great, it’s good to see you. Like your background. You’re an environmental type of person. 15 years with the city of Naples. Love your website. And you’re going to tell everybody how a trip to the ocean actually hooked you on Marine Science.

Katie Laakkonen

Yeah. I actually grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and always knew I wanted to go into Marine Science. it was something innate in me and I would have these yearly family vacations to the east coast in Delaware, and I get to see the ocean once a year and it just intrigued me and captured me, so I just always knew I wanted to get under the ocean, in the ocean, and go into Marine Science.

Vikki Locke

Do you scuba dive?

Katie Laakkonen

I do.

Vikki Locke

Me too.

Katie Laakkonen

I got certified when I was 17. I went down to the Keys. There’s a Sea Camp on Big Pine Key where you can learn to scuba dive and I wanted to so badly that I went to Sea Camp and got certified.

Vikki Locke

Where’s your favorite place to scuba?

Katie Laakkonen

To dive? In Florida, really, the gulf is pretty awesome. There’s some great sights in the Gulf. I also enjoyed diving on the East coast but my favorite place is probably Australia.

Vikki Locke

Nice. That’ll be on my bucket list for when we can travel again.

A project that you’ve been working on or that you’re working on is oyster restoration. Tell us what that’s all about.

Katie Laakkonen

Naples Bay has lost 80% of its oysteries since the 1950s. Due to urbanization, altered hydrology, water quality degradation, dredging for navigation really took a toll on our oysters so we’re trying to get as much of this vital habitat back into the bay as we can. So we have undergone several oyster restoration projects, we created 23 new reefs in the southern part of Naples Bay. We have seen juvenile oysters start recruiting all over them, which is just great to see.

Vikki Locke

Juvenile oysters?

Katie Laakkonen

They’re called spat, so they’re floating around in the water and by placing hard substrate, in this case, it was a mix-up limestone rock and a shell from inland mines, is placed in in the bay, on the bay bottom, and by providing that substrate, the juvenile oysters floating in the water have a hard substrate to attach to. Over time they signal more oysters too attached and you get this new thriving reef that didn’t use to exist before.

Vikki Locke

Wow! Now, we know you love Marine Science, but you also love collecting data, right?

Katie Laakkonen

Yes, we also collect water quality data and several of our estuaries so it’s important to keep an eye on what’s going on pollutant-wise in our waterways and how much we can control the runoff coming into the waterways to keep them clean, so by monthly monitoring we can get a handle on how our waterway’s doing and in also connecting the waterways, like dissolved oxygen, the temperature, that those sort of things, and how they are affecting our habitats and our oysters.

Vikki Locke

Do you offer educational Outreach programs?

Katie Laakkonen

We do public Outreach and education. I wish we could do more. I wish we had a person dedicated to that. but I do presentations to homeowners groups and various clubs. A lot of times it’s on request, but we also work with the public too to engage the young through volunteer opportunities for example.

Vikki Locke

So volunteering is an important part of getting into what you’re doing, to Marine Science. Would you say higher education is equally as important?

Katie Laakkonen

I would. Volunteering and doing internships was key for me getting my foot in the door for my first full-time job in the environmental field, so I did an internship with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and that was with the boaters study that they were doing in Tampa Bay and I also, my senior year in college actually, I started working as a naturalist at a State Park in the Carolinas and I did a lot of education and outreach and I found that was something I really enjoy doing so that helped me honed where I wanted to go further in my career. So any type of skill that can be an internship or volunteer opportunity is one more thing on a résumé that causes you to stand out from someone else when employers are looking through these applicants.

Vikki Locke

So driving a boat, knowing how to do that could help?

Katie Laakkonen

Driving a boat, trailering, if you get experience water sampling, just any of those skills and I did my undergraduate in Marine Science kind of needing a break after four years in college I decided to go full-time into the job realm and that allowed me later on when I got my Master’s to integrate some research we needed for the city of Naples and integrate that into a Master’s; so it just so happened to work well for me to have a space in between undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Vikki Locke

Tell us about the best part of your job.

Katie Laakkonen

The best part is that no two days are the same. Every day is a new challenge I get to interact with the environment and help maintain that balance of human use while still maintaining the integrity of our environment, and I deal with everything from whether it’s terrestrial related, eagle nests, gopher tortoises to oysters, fisheries monitoring, see what’s living in the bay, how it’s being used. I feel truly honored to be able to use my undergrad and graduate degree for what I wanted to do.

Vikki Locke

And as I mentioned earlier, you do have a great website with a wealth of information and possible job opportunities. Why don’t you give that to us?

Katie Laakkonen

Our website is naplesgov.com. You can explore all the different departments on that website where our current projects are. There’s a link to the Natural Resources Division if you want to find out more about our oyster restoration or our water quality monitoring.

Vikki Locke

Thanks so much for being with us, Katie.

Katie Laakkonen

Thank you for having me; I appreciate it.

Vikki Locke

And thanks to the Florida Wildlife Federation for sponsoring Talk on the Wild Side and keeping the wild in Florida since 1936. Check out their website at floridawildlifefederation.org.