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Intern Logs: A Bloody Welcome

Tuesday, June 17th, 2014

by Dejeanne Doublet, terrestrial ecology intern

Photo: Dejeanne Doublet inspects a red oak in BiodiversiTree. (Credit: SERC)

Dejeanne Doublet inspects a red oak in BiodiversiTree. (SERC)

Ecological research usually doesn’t evoke thoughts of Stephen King horror movie scenes. Working with plants and animals in the open air shouldn’t provoke nightmares of being drenched in blood. Green is a very different color from red.

However, fellow intern Megan Palmer and I learned on our first week that sometimes, just sometimes, Stephen King references are the best way to describe a day’s work in the field. During our first days at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Palmer and I were asked to do something that made my non-red-meat-eating stomach turn.

“Go spray pig’s blood on all our trees,” Dr. John Parker, the lead terrestrial ecology scientist and our boss told us during one of our first meetings with him. He was referring to the 24,000 tree saplings planted last summer as part of a 100-year experiment on biodiversity, fittingly called BiodiversiTree.

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The Strange, Controversial Way Plants Trap CO₂

Wednesday, June 11th, 2014

by Kristen Minogue

Swamp Rose Mallow surrounded by blades of Schoenoplectus, a sedge in Drake's marsh experiment. (SERC)

Swamp Rose Mallow with blades of Schoenoplectus americanus, a sedge in Drake’s marsh experiment. (SERC)

Plants are among the world’s best carbon sinks, but there’s a side to the plant-CO2 love affair that’s rarely discussed. When carbon dioxide rises, plants cling to it more, releasing less back into the air—and until recently, scientists couldn’t figure out why. With a new paper published June 11 in Global Change Biology, ecologist Bert Drake believes he finally has the answer.

The process is called respiration, and it’s one of the most overlooked parts of the carbon cycle. Unlike photosynthesis, in which plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, respiration reverses it. And plants respire constantly. Much of the CO2 plants take from the atmosphere for photosynthesis finds its way back via respiration from plants and soil. Which leaves a major question: How much carbon can the world’s ecosystems store as CO2 rises and climate changes?

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Learning by Digging: Archeology Project Explores Colonial Life

Tuesday, June 10th, 2014

Scientists, students, and volunteers unearth late 17^th– and 18^th-century objects behind Sellman House

by Sarah Hansen

Volunteers excavate a new pit at the “Shaw’s Folly” site behind Sellman House.

On a sunny June afternoon at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, students and volunteers are hard at work in a cornfield behind the Sellman House. Some shovel soil out of pits. Others screen it with giant sieves, looking for artifacts. Still others use trowels to smooth the bottom and sides of the pit, hoping to reveal differences in soil coloration and texture. This scene will repeat every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday from about 9a.m. to 4 p.m. until June 20. Guided by Laura Cripps, acting Chair of Social and Cultural Sciences at Howard Community College, and Jim Gibb, head of SERC’s Archaeology Lab, the group is excavating a site that contains objects and building materials that provide a window into 17^th– and 18^th-century life.

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Posted in Archaeology, Land Use, Publications, SERC Sites and Scenes | 1 Response »
Tags: archeology, citizen science, volunteers

Volunteer Tribute: Alice Dollmeyer

Thursday, May 8th, 2014

by Kristen Minogue

Photo: veteran volunteer alice dollmeyer (left) teaches visitors about oysters at serc's annual open house. (Credit: Smithsonian Institution)

Veteran volunteer Alice Dollmeyer (left) teaches visitors about oysters at SERC’s annual Open House. (Smithsonian)

After 23 years volunteering outside, Alice Dollmeyer has seen some filthy things. The dirtiest thing she remembers handling at SERC is an oyster basket pulled up from the docks. When she first began, the oyster trays didn’t hang but sat on the bottom of the Rhode River, and would often come up covered in black mud.

Since then Dollmeyer has done just about every education job a SERC volunteer can do. She has lead canoe trips, helped children pick up crabs and run all five stations of the Estuary Chesapeake program for visiting schools. She’s also shown up for every docent workday, a day of housekeeping which, as education specialist Jane Holly describes it, “You get your arms as dirty as possible cleaning up everything to get ready for the field season.”

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Posted in Classes and Events, SERC Sites and Scenes | 1 Response »

Ancient Native American Compost Still Enriching Forests

Wednesday, April 30th, 2014

by Kristen Minogue

Photo: An open pit exposes a 3200-year-old shell midden. Native Americans used middens as trash piles for oyster shells, animal bones and pottery. (by Torben Rick/Smithsonian)

An open pit exposes a 3200-year-old shell midden. Native Americans used middens as trash piles for oyster shells, animal bones and pottery. (Torben Rick/Smithsonian)

More than 3,000 years ago, Native Americans dined on shellfish from the Chesapeake Bay, and the leftovers from those feasts are still benefiting modern-day forests.

Native Americans inhabited the Chesapeake Bay area more than 13,000 years before the first Europeans dropped anchor. During the Woodland period (3,200 to 400 years ago), they ate eastern oysters and threw the shells, along with animal bones, pottery and other shellfish remains, into trash piles called shell middens. Those piles enriched the soil with nutrients, promoting hot spots of native diversity along the Chesapeake shoreline.

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Nonnatives in Your Garden:
A Curse or a Blessing?

Tuesday, April 29th, 2014

by Kristen Minogue

Three nonnative flowers in Maryland. Left to right: Queen Anne’s Lace, Moth Mullein and Lesser Celandine. (Susan Cook-Patton)

“I just want to plant something that will grow in my yard. If a nonnative species grows better than a native, why shouldn’t I plant it?”

It’s a valid question, one that SERC postdoc Susan Cook-Patton remembers hearing from her father while still in high school. In the quest to preserve native plants, it’s become almost taboo to talk about the benefits of nonnatives. But not all nonnative plants are rampant invaders, and sometimes they could be good for gardens as a whole. Cook-Patton broke down the pros and cons of gardening with nonnative species at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s first evening lecture on April 15. Here are a few to consider when deciding what to put in your garden:

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Posted in Classes and Events, Ecology, Invasive Species, Land Use, Programs, SERC Sites and Scenes | 1 Response »

Before It Was Cool: The Father
of Marine Invasions

Thursday, April 24th, 2014

by Kristen Minogue

Jim Carlton tracked invasive species in the ocean for years when most scientists thought the sea was “invasion-proof.” (Anna Sawin)

There’s no official “father of marine invasions biology.” But if anyone could compete for the title, Jim Carlton, director of the Williams College – Mystic Seaport Program, would almost certainly top the list. More than 50 scientists from the U.S., Canada, Italy, Argentina and New Zealand voiced some version of that view, when they descended on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center for a three-day symposium in April informally dubbed “Jimfest.”

Like so much in science, his career began by sheer accident. In 1962, 14-year-old Carlton stepped on a strange worm while picnicking with his family in Lake Merritt, a small lagoon near San Francisco Bay. A few weeks later he discovered the same worm in an exhibit at a local nature center. The label identified it as a tubeworm from the South Seas. “This thing in my backyard as it were, not far from my house, in this estuarine lagoon, how could this thing be from the South Seas?” Carlton remembered thinking. “So I got fascinated by that concept.”

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Posted in Classes and Events, Invasive Species, Programs, SERC Sites and Scenes | 1 Response »

Diversity Helps Forests Resist Deer

Tuesday, April 8th, 2014

by Kristen Minogue and John Parker

White-tailed deer. (Photo courtesy of John Parker/SERC)

White-tailed deer. (John Parker/SERC)

In deer-populated forests, tastier plants can avoid being eaten if they are surrounded by less appealing plants. But with deer gone, diverse plots become weaker and plants are better off sticking to their own kind.

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Curiouser and Curiouser: A Motor at the Front?

Tuesday, February 18th, 2014

by Heather Soulen

A Chesapeake Bay NOAA mullet skiff. Note the moter near the bow. (SERC)

A Chesapeake Bay NOAA mullet skiff. Note the motor near the bow. (SERC)

With its motor located near the bow (front) of the boat, the modern-day mullet skiff could have been a character in Lewis Carroll’s novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Similar to the unpunctual rabbit, vanishing cat and hookah smoking caterpillar, it seems illogical…or does it?

Commercial mullet fishing in 1955. (Monts de Oca, C. Morris courtesy of State Archives of Florida)

In the early 1900s, the mullet skiff was originally designed for use in the commercial mullet fishery of the south. Popular for its simple construction, flat-bottom dory style hull with vee entry, and rounded stern (back) design, the mullet skiff was ideal for operating in shallow waters while carrying heavy loads of fish. However, during Prohibition, entrepreneurs souped up their mullet skiffs with straight-8 engines (precursor V8s) to run rum from the Bahamas and Cuba to the states. Since then, many mullet skiffs have undergone less scandalous modifications and have evolved to have an outboard motor in a well near the bow.

Why place a motor here? For three important reasons: 1) It places the motor higher in the water for maneuvering in shallow water, 2) it leaves the stern (back) open to work a net, and 3) it eliminates the risk of net entanglement in the propeller. So, with “the wrong end in front,” the mullet skiff was the perfect choice for the near-shore predator study our field crew conducted this summer throughout the Chesapeake Bay.

Predators of the Not-So-Deep

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Posted in Ecology, Fisheries, Invasive Species, SERC Sites and Scenes | 2 Responses »

Beauty and Beast: Reeling in the Mute Swan

Thursday, January 30th, 2014

by Kristen Minogue

Eleven-year-old Lucy Paskoff knows something about the hazards of filming wildlife. She and fellow home-school student McKenna Austin-Ward spent weeks documenting one of Chesapeake Bay’s most destructive pests: the mute swan.

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Shorelines

Life and science at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

SERC Sites and Scenes

...now browsing by category

Intern Logs: A Bloody Welcome

The Strange, Controversial Way Plants Trap CO₂

Learning by Digging: Archeology Project Explores Colonial Life

Volunteer Tribute: Alice Dollmeyer

Ancient Native American Compost Still Enriching Forests

Nonnatives in Your Garden:
A Curse or a Blessing?

Before It Was Cool: The Father
of Marine Invasions

Diversity Helps Forests Resist Deer

Curiouser and Curiouser: A Motor at the Front?

Beauty and Beast: Reeling in the Mute Swan