Veritas, Vol. 21, No. 10, February 2, 1981

              For the Faculty, Staff and Friends of the University of Miami
Mock crash provides
Don’t be alarmed. These helpless victims of the mock Pan Am Airways crash, many of whom were senior nursing students at UM, like Susan Zehler; left, were evaluating emergency rescue efforts and medical attention they received according to their pre-assigned injuries.
The county-wide effort involved major emergency groups from fire, aviation and public safety operations, U.S. Air Force, Coast Guard and Army units, emergency room and nursing staffs from several local hospitals to Southern Bell Telephone Co. and Pan Am Airways.
Nursing students from UM, Jackson Memorial Hospital School of Nursing and Barry College were among the more than 300 mock air passengers. Some were air-lifted to local hospitals, others were "dead on arrival,” while a number of walking wounded observed activities.
The names of all mock victims were fed into Pan Am’s computers and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the task of identifying them. It was the second time Miami International Airport held this exercise, considered one of the most comprehensive in the world. Airport officials from the U.S. and abroad attended this year’s "Operation Beta.”
Scholars and business experts to attend CAIS conference
Top international scholars, business leaders and political experts from North, South and Central America will address issues of concern to the "U.S. and Caribbean Basin” during a public conference, Monday and Tuesday, Feb. 23 and 24, on the UM’s Coral Gables campus.
Sponsored by the Center for Advanced International Studies, the conference will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days in the Brockway Lecture Hall, adjacent to the Otto G. Richter Library.
Dr. George S. Wise, CAIS director and conference chairman, says the topics include "Unrest in Central America and the Caribbean,” "Energy Resources of Venezuela and Mexico and U.S. Interests,” "Foreign Investment, Trade and Dependency,” and "Implications and Policy Options for the U.S.”
Expert scholars include Dr Luigi Einaudi, director of the U.S. Department of State Office of Policy, Planning and Coordination for the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, and Raymond Vernon, one of the foremost leading authorities on multi-national corporations and director of Harvard University’s Center for International Studies.
Also attending are Ernst Halperin, politics professor from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; Dr Vaughan Lewis, director of the Institute for Economic and Social Research at the University of the West Indies; Dr Constantine Menges, foreign policy analyst with Hudson Institute, Director for International Risk Assessments and editor of International Strategic Issuesr and Dr Lorenzo, Meyer, political science professor at El Colegio de Mexico.
Several UM professors will also participate in the conference; Dr James Foley, economics; Dr John P Harrison, Inter-American studies; Roy J. Hensley, economics; Carl Jacobsen, Soviet studies, Jaime Suchlicki, history and Latin America, and Julian Weinkle, international business and U.S.-Latin American studies.
From the business world comes a host of international representatives: Dr Luis Vallenilla, president of CA. Venezolano de Desarrollo, Venezuela; George Arbo
gast, treasurer, Central America, Esso-Interamerica; Robert Ross, president, Latin America Agri-Business Development Corp., and Robert Sherwood, general counsel for Pfizer, Latin America.
Other guests are Lt. Col. Thomas E. Snodgrass, U.S. Air Force Research Associate at the UM; Col. Adolfo Moncivaiz, U.S. Air Force; Dr Anthony Maingot, sociology professor at Florida International University, and Dr Rene Herrera Zuniga, political science professor at El Colegio de Mexico.
For more information, contact Dr Wise or Dr Weinkle at the Center; 284-4303.
Dr. Edwin S. Iversen, professor of marine biology at the UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and Dr Scott E. Siddali, research associate at the School, are developing techniques for mass-rearing queen conch (Strombus gigas), a mollusk prized by Bahamian and Caribbean islanders and shell collectors.
The conch, which is easily taken while browsing in the clear waters of tropical seas, is heavily overfished. It is the ingredient of delectable West Indian chowders, seviches and fritters. Vacationers from cold climates like to carry home these beautiful coiled pinklipped shells to remind them of sunny days and crystal waters.
Queen conchs are barely surviving all this popularity, and researchers in marine laboratories of the region have been studying the biology of the species to determine how to propagate it in large numbers. In Venezuela in the early seventies, and more recently in Turks and Caicos, individual conch larvae were brought through metamorphosis, changing from larvae to juveniles in the laboratory, but problems arose when attempts were made to produce juveniles in large numbers.
A year ago, the Wallace Groves Aquaculture Foundation of the Bahamas insti-
UM nursing student Françoise Heroux had a mock third-degree burn made to look like the real thing with tissue paper, vaseline and fake blood.	Angela Mu/r photography
tuted a two-pronged attack on the problem with Drs. Iversen and Siddali at the Rosenstiel School. The School pioneered studies 15 years ago that have led to mass culture of shrimp.
One objective of the research funded by the Groves Foundation is to find methods of hatching and raising larval conchs to the juvenile stage in significant numbers for release in nature to supplement natural stocks or for sea farming in enclosures.
During the summer spawning season in the Bahamas, fertile egg strands of Strombus gigas were gathered. When the eggs hatched, Siddali, who has a strong background in both the theoretical and the practical aspects of rearing shellfish larvae and laboratory facilities for culturing mollusks, placed the conch larvae in several tanks at constant temperatures and salinities, but in different concentrations and with different types of algal food. By the end of the summei; his experiments revealed requirements for culturing conch larvae in great numbers, and several hundred of his young conchs had dev eloped small coiled shells and dropped to the bottom to forage for food as adult conchs do. It was the first mass rearing of the queen conch under controlled supervision.
The second objective of the Groves project, to determine the feasibility of growing juvenile conchs to market size in enclosures, is being carried out by Dr Edwin Iversen. He is a specialist in population dynamics of fish and shellfish who, in 1968, wrote the first book about sea farming, Farming the Edge of the Sea.
With the help of Bahamian assistants, his team constructed pens of screening -five meters on a side in shallow waters of the Berry Islands where there is a firm, algae-covered bottom. Conchs less than 10 cm. in length were collected, tagged, and placed in the pens. Other small conchs were tagged and released near the pens as controls, and at other locations nearby. All tagged conchs were located and measured monthly to determine growth and survival
In so short a time, Dr Iversen is able to rep>ort only tentative conclusions, but he estimates that survival of conchs raised in pens and protected from their enemies will be much higher (57 percent p>er year) than in the wild (15 percent p>er year).
The work of Siddali and Iversen indicates that soon it will be p>ossible to produce great numbers of young conchs in a hatchery to raise to marketable size in shallow-water p»ens or to release to restock severly depleted natural populations.