Dinner Key Island Cleanup with DISCOVERY Yacht Aventura

Overview

On the morning of May 31st, 2025, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted a collaborative island cleanup thanks to the help of DISCOVERY Yacht Aventura and her captain, Bill Fernandez. Our Community Engagement Associate, Lillian, and our Educational Outreach Associate, Jack, met up with seven of our Junior SeaKeepers at the docks of Matheson Hammock Marina where we explained the plan for the morning before heading out to Dinner Key Island C in Biscayne Bay. Upon arriving at the island, we handed out supplies and quickly spread out around the manmade island, venturing from the walking trail to the submerged mangroves near the island’s edges. After just an hour of work, our team managed to remove more than 120 lbs of trash from the popular picnic and party island! Dinner Key Island is marked with multiple signs as a Leave No Trace Island, yet each time we have returned our team finds it inundated with copious amounts of trash, particularly microplastics and sheet plastics. Removing this trash is imperative as the island hosts many nursery systems including shallow mangroves and seagrass beds. After our cleanup, our students had the chance to see these ecosystems up close through participating in a seagrass walk and conducting some biodiversity assessments using hand nets. Our JSKs were naturals, managing to find multiple crabs, shrimp, fish, and even a baby seahorse among the seagrass! We give a huge thank you to our JSKs for their hard work as well as to Captain Bill Fernandez for his time as well as for making this event possible. We are endlessly thankful for all of our kind DISCOVERY Yachts and their teams for helping facilitate coastal cleanups and marine science projects, and we look forward to more events with D/Y Aventura out on our beautiful Bay!