The exhibits at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute are like the oceans — ever changing.

The Healthy Oceans Healthy Humans exhibit opens today, but BUEI director Wendy Tucker says that there is tons more to see.

“We have lots planned for the future, while we continuously change our exhibits,” she explained.

“This year we have added the prehistoric sea creatures and right now we are doing an exhibit called Healthy Oceans, Healthy Humans and that should be up.

“We want to have it up in time for our international advisors who arrive on the seventh, for our annual meeting.

“World Oceans Day is on June 8, so we want to have everything in place for that.”

“So we are very busy.”

Over the next few years, the Institute is planning changes to keep its members and visitors to the Island coming back.

“They really do notice and they remember — we have visitors’ books near the exit and they’ll write comments when they notice differences.

“Ninety-nine percent are very flattering. It is also helpful for us, because it gives us ideas, as it is amazing how many museum people coming through.

“They will say that they do such and such or they will ask for me. Lots of them like the exhibits and want to know who built them for us, so we are competitive with the rest of the world, which is nice. Often they like the quality of the exhibits and all the information and through our advisors, it keeps us current with all the information.

“The exhibits are very expensive, so we don’t do a major overhaul very often, but we will add to the exhibits.”

One of the other things they do is to tie in an educational component in with the exhibits.

“The exhibits drive the educational programmes and the educational programmes drive the exhibits,” Ms Tucker added.

“If I have an idea, I will speak to Crystal (Schultz) and say, ‘look I think it will be really neat if we do this, and can you fit it in.’

“And she might say, ‘Oh, if we change it a little bit this way, then it will fit in with what education is doing.’

“So we always try to stay relevant and make it interesting, because we want people to have fun. But we get a lot of repeat visitors, our members come back frequently, which is very nice.”

For the future, they are working very closely with the teachers.

“We want to capture the youth’s imagination too,” she pointed out. “So it can’t just be a plain exhibit on the wall.

“We are looking at some different ways for outreach and we’re coming up with a couple of good ideas that you will hear about in the next year or so.

“Because so many people are so busy and they just don’t have the time that we want to do more outreach programmes.”

In fact, if navigating your way anywhere, or just knowing your the planets in our solar system is something that you have always want to learn or know more about then the following paragraph might be of interest to you.

“This year we are doing star navigation and turtle tours for adults,” she said.

“For the turtle tours we take them out on a two-hour trip where the turtles are out by The Vixen near Daniel’s Head.

“We get a lot of our members’ families.

“With the star navigation, there has been quite a bit of interest. Someone will take them out and tell them about the stars.

“We also do the glow worm trip, that is really fun, and we cater to children

“That is going really, really well and we find that we are having more and more trips.”

With the growing popularity at BUEI, she added: “Our membership has increased substantially.

“We are really becoming part of the community.”

Ms Tucker added that some of the exhibits have brought locals back who had not been in since BUEI opened a decade before.

“We constantly change and rearrange,” she said.

One of the international advisors’ responsibilities is to critique the exhibits, explained Ms Tucker.

“They also talk about what they are doing and how we can make it relevant to us. One of our advisors, Steve Blasco, is giving a lecture on the Arctic and then in October he will be back to talk about the Bermuda sea level rise project.”

They also purchased a carousel for the children.

“It is really very cute and small, but it has a crown fish, a sea horse and a turtle, but it just captures the young children,” she said. “But we need to capture the love like the Aquarium, because we all grew up going to the Aquarium, so it would take years to grow into BUEI.

“We’d like to have children say, ‘oh, we grew up going to BUEI on Saturdays or Sundays’, it will take time, but we want to capture the little people — they are really sweet.

“We have an edutainment idea.”