by Shelby Brown
The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and the City College of New York (CCNY) have joined forces to launch a new participatory science project in the Chesapeake Bay. Chesapeake Water Watch is a collaborative effort aimed at filling in the gaps of traditional water monitoring techniques by using remote sensing and community involvement.
by Kristen Minogue
Actively restoring oyster reefs—beyond simply protecting them from harvest—can create big payoffs for habitat quality and the other species that flock to them. A new study from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), published June 10 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, compared restored, protected and harvested areas using photos and video footage from roughly 200 sites.
Roughly a quarter of Maryland’s oyster habitat lies protected in oyster sanctuaries. But only a small fraction of those sanctuaries have undergone full-scale restorations, with reconstructed reefs and new live oyster plantings. The new paper offers an easier way to determine if those restorations are paying off.
“You’ve got to actively restore something,” said Keira Heggie, lead author of the study and a technician in SERC’s Fisheries Conservation Lab. “But if you actively restore something and then let it go by its wayside, then you’re not going to know exactly if it’s still doing well.” Click to continue »
by Marisa Sloan, Northwestern University
The silver EQSphere measures dissolved carbon dioxide and methane, potent greenhouse gases, in the Rhode River on a rainy afternoon. (Photo: Marisa Sloan/Northwestern University)
Don’t be fooled—the EQSphere™ isn’t a silver softball or a tree ornament gone rogue. It’s a spherical equilibrator invented to continuously yank carbon dioxide, methane and other gases from three feet underwater into the air to be measured in real time.
Whitman Miller, a research scientist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, came up with the design with his head technician Amanda Reynolds while they were studying the effects of elevated carbon dioxide in marine ecosystems. He considers it an invention born of necessity, thanks to turbid and debris-ridden coastal waters, where it’s dangerous to deploy expensive instruments for very long.
by Kristen Minogue
Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) taken from the Choptank River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (Credit: Sarah Donelan)
Early exposure to tough conditions—particularly warmer waters and nightly swings of low oxygen—could leave lasting scars on oysters’ ability to grow meaty tissue. A team of biologists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) reported the discovery in a new study, published in the journal Ecological Applications.
Eastern oysters in Chesapeake Bay live mostly in shallow tributaries. It’s a rough environment for shellfish that can’t move. During hotter months, oxygen levels can swing drastically, from perfectly healthy levels in the day to near zero at night. To save energy, some oysters react by focusing more on shell growth than tissue growth. That could pose a problem for anyone involved in the seafood industry.
“What we all of course want to eat at the raw bar is the oyster tissue,” said Sarah Donelan, a SERC postdoctoral fellow and lead author of the new report. “Customers and restaurants might be less pleased if there’s less tissue in what looks to be a large oyster.”
by Kristen Minogue
Two decades ago, it was almost impossible to find eelgrass in Virginia’s South Bay—or many of the other small bays behind the barrier islands along the state’s eastern shore. After a barrage of disease followed by a powerful hurricane wiped them out by 1933, many thought the eelgrasses would never return. With the eelgrass went the brant goose, a popular waterfowl for sport hunting, and a lucrative bay scallop industry that had brought in millions of dollars per year.
“Because the bay scallop relies on the eelgrass as it’s growing up, it just completely disappeared and never came back,” said Jonathan Lefcheck, a marine biologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.
Today, a 20-year restoration has transformed South Bay and its neighboring bays into an oasis. But for the scientists leading the effort, restoring the eelgrass wasn’t enough. They wanted to find out if all the benefits eelgrasses provide would return as well. A new Science Advances report finally gave them their answer.
Click to continue »
by Isabella Eclipse
Video created by United Nations Environment Programme
Appearances can be deceiving. At first glance, the humble seagrass meadow resembles a weedy underwater lawn. A closer look reveals one of the most important—and threatened—marine ecosystems in the world. Unfortunately, conservation efforts have often overlooked seagrass habitats.
“For a long time, people saw seagrass as a nuisance,” explained Jonathan Lefcheck, a biologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. It had a reputation for clogging boat propellers and washing up on beaches. “Tropical resorts would hire people to dig up seagrass in front of their beach because people would complain,” he added.
Though public perceptions have been changing, many people today are still unaware that seagrass meadows are rich and vibrant ecosystems like coral reefs or rainforests. A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme hopes to change that. Released June 8 on World Oceans Day, Out of the Blue compiles the latest findings from around the world on seagrasses and the valuable services they provide. SERC biologist Emmett Duffy served on the steering committee and helped synthesize the report.
New study finds antibiotics from poultry farms can lead to drug-resistant bacteria in the water
by Kristen Minogue
Chickens stand in a Pennsylvania poultry barn. Crowded conditions in poultry barns increase the danger of a disease spreading through the flock, leading many poultry farmers to rely on antibiotics. (Credit: Steve Droter/Chesapeake Bay Program. Creative Commons License)
90 tons. That’s how much chicken manure—mixed with feathers, uneaten feed and leftover bedding—a Maryland poultry farmer scrapes out of a single barn each year.
Manure is just one of many issues poultry farmers on the Delmarva peninsula have to wrestle with. Poultry farming isn’t an easy industry, for the chickens or the farmers. To get started, a farmer generally needs to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a poultry barn to house roughly 45,000 birds. Companies like Purdue and Tyson supply the chicks, and pay the farmers based on how many pounds the flock puts on. To have any chance of making a profit, there’s enormous pressure to grow broiler chickens as fat and as fast as possible. A typical poultry barn can go through five to seven flocks a year. After each flock moves out, the farmers are left to deal with the muck.
“The folks that grow the chickens, it’s a really tough job that they do and hard to make a buck at it,” said Tom Jordan, an ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center who specializes in how farming impacts Chesapeake Bay.
Another thing that’s hiding in the chicken manure? E. coli bacteria. Some of these E. coli don’t cause disease. But others can inflict both chickens and people with diarrhea and other unsavory side effects, like urinary tract infections.
Some E. coli bacteria have become resistant to our antibiotics. This May, scientists reported that because chicken manure fertilizes farms throughout the Chesapeake, that antibiotic resistance can also spread in the water. Besides the already-prevalent problem of nutrient pollution, this could put swimmers and boaters who use the water for recreation at further risk.
“Right now, sometimes the poultry barns get cleaned and they immediately apply it on land, so it’s just fresh waste going directly on our land,” said Jay Graham, lead author of the new study and a public health researcher with the University of California, Berkeley. “So if it rains, then all that ends up in our waterways.”
Chalk Point Generating Station on the Patuxent River, near Aquasco, Maryland. The gas billowing out of this power plant has already passed through some emissions-cleaning technology, thanks to healthier air regulations. (Credit: Cindy Gilmour/SERC)
by Kristen Minogue
Marylanders can celebrate at least one environmental win this year. Since 2005, toxic mercury pollution in the state’s rain has dropped over a third.
The preliminary figure comes from three state monitoring stations: Beltsville, Frostburg and a weather tower in Edgewater, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). All three stations belong to the Mercury Deposition Network, a collection of roughly 100 sites tracking mercury across the U.S.
Maryland’s success partially stems from early regulations—most notably the 2006 Healthy Air Act. The act mandated reductions for some of the most dangerous pollutants in the atmosphere: nitrogen dioxides that create smog; the sulfur dioxide behind both smog and acid rain; and, of course, mercury.
“We’ve had a long time to see those changes happen,” said senior scientist Cindy Gilmour, who runs the mercury station at SERC. “Other U.S. states have not had those rules in place as long.” The federal government issued its first rule on mercury emissions in 2011, with the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for Power Plants.
SERC’s 120-foot meteorological tower has collected data on mercury levels in rain since 2007, one of three Maryland stations in the Mercury Deposition Network. (Credit: Kristen Minogue/SERC)
Gilmour launched SERC’s mercury monitoring program in 2007. At the time, SERC’s 120-foot meteorological tower was already collecting data on weather and other chemicals in rain.
“I thought it would be great to put mercury on top of that,” she said. She approached the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and suggested adding SERC as a third Mercury Deposition Network site in Maryland. “We said, guys, you’re just about to put mercury controls on power plants. This would be a great time to start looking at this.” The state has funded SERC’s mercury station ever since, as well SERC’s projects monitoring mercury and the neurotoxin methylmercury in streams.
For Gilmour, the falling mercury in rain marks a major milestone. But it’s only the beginning of a long journey. Slashing mercury concentrations in rain is one step; tracking it in streams and food webs is another. Her lab will continue watching mercury, to help ensure Maryland continues moving forward.
And while the improvements didn’t come cheap—Gilmour estimates pollution control systems cost roughly $1 billion for each large power plant—for taxpayers, more breathable air cost just a few extra cents per month.
“For a few cents on our electric bills over the last 10 years, we got this,” Gilmour said. “We also got reductions in asthma. We got increases in how clear our air is. The air’s less yellow and it’s more transparent.”
by Kristen Minogue
After nearly three decades in television, Fred Tutman left filmmaking to found the Patuxent Riverkeeper in 2004. For 16 years, the Patuxent Riverkeeper organization has empowered citizens to advocate for their right to a healthy environment. Today he’s also lending his leadership skills as a Director’s Circle volunteer with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centeer, and spoke on environmental justice this April at the Smithsonian’s Earth Optimism digital summit. Learn more about some of the Patuxent Riverkeepers’ greatest environmental wins, and how the green movement can evolve to meet the needs of a diverse future. Edited for brevity and clarity.
Fred Tutman (Credit: Audobon Naturalist Society)
What motivated you to be involved in conservation?
I thought that my future was going to be in radio, television, media communications. As an activist, because I’d always been an activist, I thought that was the best portal for me to change my corner of the world. And, you know, I did that for 27 years…But I was bored and didn’t feel like I was making a difference in all of these awful problems in the world we were making films about…
So I decided to go to law school, because I knew nobody who knew me thought I could do that, just because I hadn’t done that sort of thing before….It was a different world, a different life for me. It was really hard to reboot. I literally had to change my friends. Not because people were hostile to the work. They didn’t understand how it fit into my past endeavors. And so people were baffled by it. A midlife crisis, I think someone accused me of that. Click to continue »
by Kristen Minogue
Brown Chromis fish in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. (Credit: Emma Hickerson/NOAA)
The ocean is losing its breath. Two years ago, an international team of scientists known as GO2NE (the Global Ocean Oxygen Network) published a report in Science with a stark picture of oxygen loss in Earth’s waters: In the open ocean, the amount of water with zero oxygen has spiked fourfold since the mid-20th century. In coastal water bodies, places with dangerously low oxygen (2 milligrams per liter or less) have increased more than 10-fold. It’s a problem not just for animals, but for people and economies—especially those that rely on tourism or subsistence fishing.
On Dec. 7, a new report emerged from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The ocean could lose 3-4% of its total oxygen by the end of the century if nothing changes, with losses even higher in the top, biodiversity-rich 1,000 meters. Large fish like tuna, sharks and marlin are among the most vulnerable. In the closing chapter, led by Denise Breitburg of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, they created a massive blueprint for resuscitating the ocean.
We’ve pulled out the highlights below, but the key lies in cracking two global conundrums—nutrient pollution and climate change. Nutrient pollution happens when chemicals like nitrogen and phosphorus stream into the water and fertilize massive growths of algae, which suck oxygen out of the water. Climate change’s role is more subtle, but just as powerful: Warmer water can’t hold as much dissolved oxygen. Warm water also doesn’t mix as well, so oxygen from the atmosphere that’s abundant near the ocean surface doesn’t reach everywhere that needs it.
Fortunately, these two problems are linked. Cleaning up nutrient pollution can help solve climate change, and vice-versa—and the ocean will breathe easier for it. Here are eight highlights from the new report: Click to continue »
