A Night at a Brewery

On June 18th, 2015, the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory student subunit of AFS- Tidewater, among other faculty members, attended a networking event at Denizens Brewing Company in Silver Springs, MD, generously sponsored by the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists, and the Potomac Chapter of the American Fisheries Society.

Students got to mingle with local professionals, including about 20 minutes with Dr. Richard Merrick, chief scientist for NOAA fisheries!  We were exposed to many different departments, companies, and research fields, and collected several business cards that might come in handy further down the line.  One of our students, Alex Atkinson, got to meet previous Knauss Fellows, which is great considering her recent decision to become a 2016 fellow herself (more on this later this month).  We'd like to thank all the organizers and representatives, with particular gratitude to Andre Buchheister, Pat Lynch, and Abby Lynch. 

We look forward to future interactions with both the sponsoring organizations and further chances to meet those who might soon become our coworkers (if we are so very lucky).  See below for photos from that event:

Stephen "Grey" Redding

Alex Atkinson, Emily Liljestrand, Aimee Hoover

Maryland Crab Festival: An Interactive Outreach Experience

 Last Saturday June 13th, members of the AFS subunit volunteered at the 30th annual St. Mary's Country Crab Festival on behalf of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratories.  When we weren't touring around to stalls with hot dogs, ice creams, and crabs by the dozen, we were stationed at the CBL booth, offering kids the opportunity to see a plastic model crab, learn how to tell a male and female crab apart, assemble a puzzle of local fish species, or come face to face with a juvenile crab, extracted the day before from the bay itself.  These were among those collected by PhD student Hillary Lane as part of her ongoing project to study the effects of pH and salinity on their development.

See below for some more photos of the event including children enjoying the displays and the final crab race of the evening. A big thank you to the organizers of the Crab Festival, the Leonardtown Lions Club for allowing some of our members to come out to their event and help support science education and outreach: