Fellowship Experiences

I am not sleeping well, constantly stabbed by old corn stubble as I roll from side to side in my tent. Finally, first light comes around 6 a.m. on an early September morning. I unzip my tent, stick my head out, and stare out into the soybean abyss. Welcome to a farm field that is the field laboratory for my research project.

I learned about a story-telling method called “And, But, Therefore” that helped me explain my scientific work well. Then I helped apply this approach — at a NOAA workshop attended by the agency’s leaders.

“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.