Student honored for floating idea to save dolphins

Friday, April 25, 2003 | 3:49 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION: April 26, 2003

Although she lives in Southern Nevada's desert, 9-year-old Rachel MacKay loves dolphins.

And after learning that dolphins are endangered all over the world by fishing nets that trap and drown them, the Red Rock Canyon Elementary School fourth grader developed an suggestion on how to save her favorite mammals.

Her curiosity and persistence paid off when she was named Nevada's ambassador to the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom Kids' Summit 2003 in Los Angeles. The summit took place this week.

Her interest in dolphins was spurred in first grade, by a class field trip to The Mirage to see the dolphins swimming in the tank, she said.

She started research on the Internet on dolphins and discovered through the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom link that 500 animals in North America are either threatened or endangered.

She learned that dolphins often wind up caught in gigantic nets cast into the water to catch fish for markets.

MacKay wrote a one-page paper describing how dolphin calls recorded on a CD might lure the animals to the opposite side of a fishing boat, keeping them out of harm's way of the nets.

"I watched some shows with sharks and dolphins and they recorded some sounds and I got the idea from that," Rachel said. Of course, the CD would be played on a waterproof player, she added.

Rachel's mother said her daughter worked for a couple days on the essay.

"She did work really hard," Joan MacKay said. "We're excited for her."

Rachel and her father, Randy, attended the summit in Los Angeles on Wednesday and Thursday.

"We hang out together a lot," Rachel said of her close-knit family.

The whole idea behind Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom Kids' Summit is to motivate children to take action to protect threatened and endangered animals, Jim Fowler and Peter Gros, summit hosts, said.

Fowler and Gros, along with Marlin Perkins, were original hosts for the television show, "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom."

The essay contest allows children ages 9 through 12 to help preserve the natural world for future generations, Fowler and Gros said.

"We are very excited for Rachel, who will have a once-in-a-lifetime experience as Nevada's representative at Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom Kids Summit," Craig Stewart, general sales manager of Mutual of Omaha office in Las Vegas, said.

A winner from each state, along with a parent or guardian, visited the Los Angeles Zoo and took a VIP tour that gave them close looks at some of the 1,200 endangered or threatened animals who live there, Stewart said.

Rachel received a certificate of merit on April 16 in front of her school. The elementary school, near Upland and Alta drives, has kindergarten through fifth grade students.

Rachel said dolphins are not her only interest, however. She also likes to read fantasies and fairy tales by authors such as Gail Carson Levine and Mary Pope Osborne, and she's an enthusiastic bicyclist and checkers player.

So don't peg her as a future marine biologist.

"First, I'd like to be a mom, then a teacher, an artist and an author," she said.