Mediterranean mussels, acorn barnacles and anemones crossed the Pacific on this buoy found in Long Beach, Washington, in February 2017. (Photo: Nancy Treneman)
by Kristen Minogue
On March 11, 2011, a 125-foot tsunami struck Japan’s Tōhoku coast, triggered by a massive earthquake just hours earlier. The cost in human life and property damage was devastating. When it receded, it set in motion another chain of events—one scientists are still watching unfold eight years later. It’s a story of millions of pieces of plastic that journeyed across the ocean, and the plants and animals that rafted with them.
Northern saw-whet owls are the smallest owls in eastern North America. Because of their secretive natures, for a long time scientists didn’t even know they migrated. Project Owlnet is changing that. (Credit: Carl Benson)
Melissa Acuti is a chronic gambler. But the wagers she makes don’t involve casinos, poker chips, slot machines or even money. Instead, she’s willing to sacrifice hours of sleep checking nearly invisible mist nets in the forest. The prize: A tiny saw-whet owl, the smallest (and arguably cutest) owl in eastern North America.
“Everybody has that—playing the lottery, Bingo, that little, ‘I might win,'” Acuti said one frigid November evening in 2017. “This is my ‘I might win,’ when I catch an owl.”
By day, Acuti works for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. But for four to six weeks in October and November, when saw-whet owls begin their migrations, she stays up until midnight or later to band them. It’s part of a continent-wide effort called Project Owlnet, in which scientists attach tiny bracelets to the owls’ feet to track their journeys. For the last two years, Acuti has run a Project Owlnet station at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland, and convinced dozens of citizen scientists to join her.
“Just the anticipation of what you might find is very exciting,” said Lenore Naranjo, who joined Acuti for six nights this year with her husband, Ralph. “And the camaraderie of everybody waiting and tromping out together to look and check.” Click to continue »
Jon Lefcheck (right) at Swansea University in Wales with colleague John Griffin. Lefcheck taught a course on mathematical modeling in Wales in 2017. (Photo courtesy of Jon Lefcheck)
Jon Lefcheck has spent most of his life on the East Coast. But as the new coordinating scientist for the Marine Global Earth Observatories (MarineGEO), he’s about to get a crash course in doing marine biology on the other side of the country and the other side of the globe. In this Q&A, learn about some of the weird discoveries and creatures he’s encountered so far, and why the coasts make society tick. Edited for brevity and clarity.
You were the first person in your family to go to college. What motivated you to push yourself in that way?
I always liked school—oddly enough, yeah, I know. I liked science. I pushed my parents to send me to private high school so that I could get more into my studies, and they were hugely supportive the entire way. I think that was their dream, that they would have a kid that would grow up to go on to college. My father said he wanted me to be a doctor when I was born. He meant medical doctor, so I’m not sure how he feels. But, you know, Ph.D.
Volunteers Bruce Birdsell (right) and Joe Hasuly teach students how to seine for fish in the Rhode River. (Credit: SERC)
When Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) volunteer Bruce Birdsell was retiring, he attended a SERC Open House and learned about volunteer opportunities. Eventually, he signed on with SERC’s education program, where he has been a volunteer for the past six years.
According to Bruce, volunteering aided the transition into retirement. In addition to helping fill a newly open schedule, it was refreshing to work outdoors after a career in corporate management.
As an education volunteer, Bruce assists with several activities in the Shorelines Connections program, a field trip for third- through 12th-graders. This program gives students hands-on experience in watershed modeling, exploring oyster reefs, using seining nets to catch fish and invertebrates, and examining plankton under microscopes. He also leads canoe trips, guiding students along Muddy Creek and the Rhode River as they look for wildlife and discuss SERC research.
“The real reward is when you get the ‘aha moment’ from the kids,” he says. When this happens, their excitement over seining or other activities becomes visible. “You can see in their reaction that a lightbulb has gone off.” Click to continue »
The United States may be officially pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, but scientists are still brainstorming ways the country could meet its original goals. Mother Nature can lend a far more powerful hand than we thought, if given the chance.
Led by The Nature Conservancy, a team of scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and other organizations looked at 21 “natural climate solutions,” like restoring forests and wetlands or planting cover crops. According to the report published Wednesday in Science Advances, these tactics could knock an estimated 1.2 trillion kilograms off the U.S.’s yearly carbon emissions—just enough to hit the country’s 2025 targets for the Paris agreement. And they come with a range of side benefits, including increased yields for farmers and decreased risks of catastrophic wildfires.
But to work, they would also require a serious rethinking of how our society values carbon. Today, saving 1,000 kg of carbon is worth about $10. To provide enough incentive to make these solutions widespread, the authors estimated those credits would need to go for at least $100 per 1,000 kg.
We’ve highlighted eight of these solutions below, but you can read about all 21 in the full report.
Restored forests could save an estimated 307 billion kg CO2. (SERC)
Sustainable logging can save another 267 billion kg CO2. (Jonathan Billinger)
Grasslands like this Kansas prairie store carbon in the soil. (Kim La Pierre)
Planting cover crops like crimson clover also preserves soil carbon. (USDA)
Zimbabwe students fertilized these spinach plants with urine. (Peter Morgan)
Methane digesters help farms capture methane from animal manure. (USDA)
Tidal wetlands emit less methane when joined to the sea. (Gary Peresta/SERC)
Smaller, prescribed burns help prevent larger, catastrophic wildfires. (USFWS)
Article contributed by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Using environmental DNA (eDNA) to track the presence of fish in waterways is emerging as a powerful tool to detect and understand the abundance of species in aquatic environments. However, relatively few studies have compared the performance of this emerging technology to traditional catch or survey approaches in the field.
Researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center field tested using eDNA—tracking the presence of fish by identifying DNA that has been left behind in the water—to detect river herring in tributaries of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. They found that tracking and quantifying herring DNA from the environment corresponded well to more traditional field methods and has great potential to assist future monitoring efforts of river herring abundance and habitat use.
“Sampling a single river, you need a net, crew, permits, it can be expensive,” said study author Louis Plough of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “The eDNA approach is an alternative where you just take water and you get an idea of the abundance of fish.” Click to continue »
Posted in Ecology, Fisheries, Publications | Comments Off on eDNA emerges as powerful tool for tracking threatened river herring in Chesapeake Bay
High school sophomore Nia Zagami and her classmates collected data on conserving threatened pink pink orchids, which brought her in front of an audience of scientists at the Native Orchid Conference this year. (Credit: Tony Zagami)
While preparing two students to speak at the 2018 Native Orchid Conference held at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center this summer, citizen science coordinator Alison Cawood assured them that their presentation on pine pink orchids would be low stress.
Sitting in the back of the conference room and smoothing over their dresses, the students felt otherwise.
“I feared that I would not be smart enough to share the data, and that I would mess up or look clueless,” said Nia Zagami, a sophomore at Sherwood High School and presenter at the conference. “Knowing that I was just a high schooler who was expected to speak in front of scientists and orchid enthusiasts really made me nervous.”
The nerves didn’t fade until Zagami, joined by fellow Sherwood sophomore and presentation collaborator Sudha Sudhaker, walked to the front of the conference room and adjusted her microphone multiple times. And then, the pair eased into their normal student voices to explain their own data and what citizen science means to them. An audience of blank stares began grinning.
Zagami and Sudhaker had recently finished their second semester of Honors Biology under teacher Laura Dinerman. Although Honors Biology is a common science course for underclassmen at Sherwood, Dinerman’s 60 students taking the course during spring 2018 did something decidedly less common: a professional conservation experiment. Dinerman’s class measured the growth of the pine pink orchid (Bletia purpurea). Though common in the tropics, in the continental U.S. the pine pink orchid grows only in Florida, where it’s threatened. The students grew the orchids under different soil nutrient conditions (fungi, fertilizer or unchanged soil) in their classroom, as part of a citizen science project led by the Smithsonian.
Roughly half of the species living in the San Francisco Bay are newcomers, brought (often unintentionally) by humans. The Bay has been an international shipping hub for over a century, and it’s accumulated biological detritus from around the world. But not everything that’s brought here sticks: It’s something of a mystery why some species proliferate in an alien environment while others die off.
Intern Kenyan Pappe pulls up a fouling panel at a local marina. (Jenny Parr/SERC)
This summer, two interns at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s West Coast branch (SERC-West), investigated how one invader cements itself in the environment during environmental chaos. Jenny Par and Kenyan Pappe looked at the golden star tunicateBotryllus schlosseri, a type of marine invertebrate that often lives around marinas.
by Carmen Ritter, SERC Fish & Invertebrate Ecology Lab intern
Picture that tiny town that one friend always tells you they’re from, with the single post office and the neighbors that know every detail of your personal life. Now picture that, on the water, even smaller. Welcome to Wachapreague, Virginia.
Wachapreague sits on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and claims to be “The Flounder Capital of the World.” The locals are some of the friendliest people you could find, and nearly everyone in the area fishes. I wasn’t there for recreational purposes, though.
This summer, I visited the Virginia Institute of Marine Science Eastern Shore Lab (VIMS ESL) with about 20 scientists from around the country to conduct a bio blitz documenting the biodiversity of Chesapeake Bay. The blitz was organized by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and MarineGEO (the Marine Global Earth Observatory). While most scientists were from the Smithsonian and other research institutions surrounding the Chesapeake Bay, some flew in from Florida, Washington State or Puerto Rico. After gathering for a meeting on the first evening, we all prepared the lab space for samples and headed to bed. The blitz officially started first thing Monday morning.
There’s a war of attrition playing out on the coastlines of the San Francisco Bay that is in a ponderous class of its own. A tiny snail, called a rough periwinkle (Littorina saxatilis), might be pushing its native counterpart, the checkered periwinkle (Littorina scutulata), from the beaches it once called home. But no one is quite sure why, or even how quickly it’s spreading.
Adrielle Cailipan examines a handful of invasive periwinkles. (Philip Kiefer/SERC)
Adrielle Cailipan, a recent graduate of San Francisco State University, is spending her summer internship in the world of periwinkles with the West Coast Lab of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). She’s working not only to document the spread of the rough periwinkle, but also to understand what makes the invader so successful.
