The Becker Rose Café hosted Professor Drew Harvell who began the discussion by showing images of the collection of glass invertebrates created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. She had side-by-side comparisons of the glass sculptures compared to real life images of the invertebrates and most of the time, I thought that the glass sculpture was the real-life image. These glass sculptures were a way of documenting the invertebrates found at the time. In 1882, President Andrew Dickson White authorized the purchase of over five-hundred Blaschka models. Over time, with the inventing of cameras and advances in photography, appreciation for the glass models decreased and the glass models were eventually placed in storage. It was Professor Harvell who discovered the models and has been leading the project to restore the models, a very long and tedious process.

Professor Harvell also screened a new film Fragile Legacy, which talks about how fragile the ocean ecosystem is. It compared some of the Blaschka models to the invertebrates found in today’s oceans. Hearing how the “common” octopus is no longer found today shows the drastic changes the ocean ecosystem has undergone, which humans are largely responsible for. Humans are polluting the oceans every day and awareness for pollution is not as great as it should be. In a science class in my high school, we discussed the effects of pollution. We discussed the “Great Pacific garbage patch” which is the size of Texas and at least 100 feet deep. There is about six kilograms of plastic for every kilogram of plankton; the plastic is not going to breakdown in the lifetime of the great-grandchildren of the people who threw them. Such pollution and other factors hurting the ocean ecosystem are responsible for the endangerment and extinction of many invertebrates. It is important to recognize the damage we have done and come up with ways to preserve the beauty of ocean ecosystems that is the invertebrates.