The first thing Brooke Welch saw when she arrived with her parents, Christian missionaries, at what would be their new home in Ecuador, was an enormous tarantula on the wall next to the front door.
She thought it was cool.
“Everything was just fun to us,” says Welch, of the four years she and her and her three younger sisters spent living on the edge of the rain forest and coming to know its tropical critters.
Everything. The sloths and parrots that became their pets. The monkeys they rescued from becoming someone’s next meal. The neighborhood kids, from whom they learned their rudimentary Spanish. And the bugs. All kinds of bugs.
But it wasn’t the beginning of Welch’s interest in creatures of all shapes and sizes, nor of her commitment to making sure human carelessness doesn’t wipe them off the face of the Earth.
The aspiring marine biologist says she has always had a passion for science, especially the ocean, despite having spent her early years in land-locked Archer, east of Gainesville. It was sparked by her father, an entomologist, and her mother, “a spider expert,” who met while working in a pet store. Fueling that passion were trips to Cedar Key and Anna Maria Island with her grandparents when she was a toddler.
But it was the time spent in Ecuador, from the age of 8 to 12, that sparked her other passion — cleaning up the human trash and debris that spoil an environment and threaten its wildlife.
“Their trash management system down there was horrible,” she says, grimacing. “Basically, they just left everything by the side of the road.
“That raised my awareness for just how much trash there is and how fast it can pile up.”
When her family moved to Sarasota three years ago, it was an opportunity not only to submerge herself in the aquatic world — “Being so close to the beach has been a blessing” — but also to start backing up her beliefs up with action.
She became at intern at Mote Marine, began volunteering at Save Our Seabirds and Keep Sarasota County Beautiful and applied for a grant through the Youth Ocean Conservation Summit that would cover the costs of running a monthly beach cleanup. The grant pays for the reusable bags, gloves and “grabbers” she and her cohorts use to de-trash the sands at Lido, after which they snorkel along the rock jetty to disentangle and gather discarded fishing line that can present a hazard to wildlife in the area.
She’s also found time to take courses at State College of Florida for a jump on college, write ecologically oriented blogs for Florida Marine Life and Sarasota Ocean Preserve, snap photos with the underwater camera she got for Christmas last year and take a scuba certification class that prompted her birthday wish for next year — scuba gear. (Last year she asked for and got a book, “The Biology of Sharks.” Reading is her favorite hobby and if you have any questions, she is a more useful resource than Wikipedia.)
“I like having my time filled,” she says with characteristic understatement.
She doesn’t neglect her family either. Apart from her parents, she also likes to spend time with her sisters — Courtney, 14, who’s the computer graphics/math whiz in the family; Natalie, 12, who likes cooking, cats and fashion design; and Valerie, 10.
“I’ve had the biggest influence on her because she’s the youngest,” Welch says. “The others are not that interested in trash.”