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:

Subunit Meeting 5/27/15, End-to-End Ecosystem Models

Source: Fulton et al. 2010

The UM AFS Tidewater chapter student subunit met on May 27th to discuss a journal article from Dr. Elizabeth A. Fulton of CSIRO Marine Research in Tasmania Australia titled "Approaches to end-to-end ecosystem models" originally published online in the Journal of Marine Systems in January 2010.

The meeting opened with a discussion of our upcoming social event for Fishery Professionals in the D.C. area on June 18th at 5:00PM at Denizens Brewing Co. in Silver Spring, MD.  We hope to have a large showing from the Chesapeake Biological Laboratories and look forward to meeting other fisheries scientists next month!  Other upcoming events include the Bernie Fowler Wade-in on June 14th from 1:00-5:00 at Jefferson Patterson Park, and the ongoing seine survey conducted by the Secor lab.  Everyone from CBL is invited and encouraged to participate in both of these events.

In our discussion of the assigned paper, we noted how as fisheries scientists, we do not often consider the biogeochemical dynamics in our models.  But any ecosystem model is built on the underlying hydrodynamics and nutrient cycling and incorporating these aspects can help introduce complexity and specificity to the model.  When we assume that the population is intricately related to some secondary covariate, we can reduce the amount of data we need to collect, making these models even more feasible.

To implement these models effectively though, we should be wary of two things.  First, adding additional parameters may not necessarily lead to a "better" model.  We might be able to develop a model that matches the data to the letter, but it would then be unhelpful for making future projections nor would it be applicable for broader contexts.  Secondly, when we have models with this level of intricacy and this multitude of inputs, we need to make sure that we are asking the right questions and in the right way.

Satisfied with our comprehension of the paper, we discussed what we'd like to meet about next.  Ultimately, we agreed to read "Don't Be Such a Scientist" by Randy Olson.  At the end of the summer we will again re-convene and talk about how we can be better science communicators within our communities.

Change is Here

As of March 2015, the AFS University of Maryland Subunit has new government!  Running opposed, the members voted in:

President: Brian Gallagher
Treasurer: Grey Redding
Secretary: Emily Liljestrand

The members of the new government endeavor to maintain the quality of meetings, outreach, and to continue the traditions of this organization.  They also intend to have a greater online presence and increase the volume of blog posts and news dissemination.

Student Research Profile: Migration in white perch

Student Research Profile

Name: Brian Gallagher

Degree Sought: M.S.

Advisor: Dr. Dave Secor

Brian Gallagher (poorly) holding a large white perch caught this past spring.
At the top of the picture, you can see Dr. Dave Secor's finger.

            For a long time, fisheries scientists thought of migration in fish populations as more or less uniform; that is, fish from the same population will have very similar migration patterns, give or take a few “outliers.” This focus on dominant trends meant that individuals who displayed unusual migratory behavior received very little attention from researchers. In the last few decades, however, more attention has been paid to these outliers as scientists have continually detected the presence of two or more distinct migratory groups within many different fish populations. This type of migratory behavior is termed “partial migration,” and the migratory groups are (usually) called “contingents.”

            My research is looking at a model species of partial migration in fishes, fondly referred to by my advisor as the “rats of the estuary,” the white perch (Morone americana). A heap of previous work done in the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay consistently detected two contingents of white perch: one which migrated between brackish and freshwater habitat, and one which resided in freshwater for the entirety of its lifespan. Looking into this further, researchers found that the prevalence of each contingent in each year class was related to environmental conditions and that growth during the larval period largely determined whether fish became resident or migratory. Contingents also experienced differences in growth later in life, such that migratory fish grew faster than their resident counterparts, but at the cost of exploiting a more uncertain environment (think of the tortoise and the hare). Finally, characteristics of both contingents were incorporated into an age-structured population model, which showed that having both migratory behaviors present in the population made it more stable over time and more resilient to perturbations.

Electron micrograph of a white perch otolith. At each point (white squares)
an instrument measures the chemistry of the otolith, which can in turn be used
to reconstruct the migratory behavior of individual fish.

            Extending from this impressive foundation, the goal of my thesis work is to validate partial migration in white perch within the Hudson River Estuary. The presence of partial migration in a different system would indicate that this behavior may be a general phenomenon in white perch, and perhaps warrants investigation in more species. Using otolith microstructure, otolith chemistry analyses, and a long time series of environmental data, I will be exploring potential causes and consequences of partial migration, with the previous work done in the Chesapeake serving as a baseline. Once I get an idea of how the environment influences migratory behavior, and how the characteristics of the contingents differ, the final goal is to apply a similar model as the one mentioned previously, but include projected regional warming trends to see how the population is likely to respond to climate change in the future.

            Who would have thought those “outliers” could have such a big impact?

Guess Who’s Back? (Back Again…)

Hey everyone! We’ve been out of contact on this blog for quite some time now. Back in September, the AFS Tidewater Subunit at CBL had some new faces take over executive duties; they are Alex Atkinson (President), Andrea Sylvia (Secretary) and Brian Gallagher (Treasurer). Since March, the subunit has met three times, each time discussing a recent paper in fisheries science.

More recently, the subunit helped organize and set up a display at the Bernie Fowler Wade-in on June 8th and the St. Mary’s County Crab Festival on June 14th. At both of these events, we talked to folks about some of the research focuses here at the lab, particularly fish and shellfish in Chesapeake Bay. In addition, the CBL seine survey, which has been run by Dr. Dave Secor’s lab for 15 years now, kicked off in May and will continue every week until October.

We’re hoping to be more active on the blog up in the coming months, and we hope to report back soon with posts detailing the research currently being done by our subunit members. We hope to get one student research summary posted every two weeks, so stay tuned!

Nicole Selected As A 2013 Knauss Felllow

Former president, Nicole Bransome Mehaffie, has been selected for a 2013 Knauss Marine Policy fellowship.  She will serve as the Inaugural Knauss fellow for the Ocean, Coastal and Great Lakes Coordination Team in the Office of Policy Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Interior.  She’ll coordinate ocean, coastal and great lakes policies between Interior’s diverse bureaus including U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Park Service, to name a few. Her position will support the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force and the National Ocean Council in its implementation of the National Ocean Policy.  Nicole is excited for the unique opportunity to see how the federal government manages fisheries and a diversity of other natural resources.  The fellowship begins February 4, 2013 and runs through January 2014.