Fellowship Experiences

“Do you mind if we check your rain gutters for mosquitoes?” was a phrase that my field crew and I used a lot this summer. Our research took us door to door in the Petworth neighborhood in the District of Columbia and in Bladensburg and Columbia in Maryland. We wanted to ask residents what they knew about controlling mosquitoes in their yards.

It’s 9 am. The tide is just beginning to ebb. Greg Silsbe and I are loading up the small motor boat at the Horn Point Laboratory’s boat landing. Working quickly to avoid becoming stranded in the shallow basin with the outgoing tide, we transfer our gear from the back of Greg’s car to the bow of the boat. Greg parks his car while I undo the dock lines.

If you caught a blue crab on the Chesapeake Bay during the past year or so, you might have seen one with a pink plastic tag attached to its shell. I’m part of a scientific research team who asked fishers and watermen to report those tags, and I am glad to report that those calls and e-mails are contributing to a better understanding of the Bay’s blue-crab population and how to sustain it.

Daytona Beach, 2011: I was at the biennial conference of a scientific society, the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation. It was my first year in the United States and my first public talk in English. I remember standing on the stage, looking out at a room full of people; they all knew more about zooplankton and spoke better English than I did. Although I used to be a debate team captain and have won awards in speech contests — in Mandarin — I panicked and my brain went blank. I stumbled through my presentation so badly that even I didn’t understand what I was talking about.

It was a typical summer afternoon back in June 2015 on Solomons Island, home to the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. I was sitting on the front porch of my office building, reading a book about menhaden, when I looked up. I noticed Ph.D. student Suzan Shahrestani jaunting across the yard towards our pier. When I asked what she doing, she said she was about to conduct her “jellywalk.”