Knauss legislative fellowships in Congress help build careers — and they're fun and educational. See our video and fact sheet for details.
On the Bay
Scientists Investigate a Salamander’s Defense Against Deadly Fungal Disease
Ashley Goetz •
On a cold night in March 2024, a team of Smithsonian researchers set out to unearth salamander secrets. Could the clue to the spotted salamander’s resistance to a deadly fungal disease reside in its skin microbiome or mucus secretions?
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Bringing Aquaculture to Agriculture Classrooms
Chris Flight •
A year-long collaboration resulted in a teacher-friendly guide for aquaculture in the classroom. The guide is designed to help educators take the first steps to set up a recirculating aquaculture system, without feeling overwhelmed.
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Sea Grant Fellows Bring Coastal Science to Capitol Hill
Ashley Goetz •
Meet our 2025 Sea Grant Knauss Fellows. During this year-long fellowship, graduate students are matched with hosts in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. They bring their marine and coastal science expertise to policy that impacts oceans, coasts, and the Great Lakes.
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Finding My Reef: Building Community in Environmental Justice
Ariana Strasser-King •
When I began my internship at Maryland Sea Grant, I didn’t know where I would fit in. But no matter what I was engaged in, I found myself drawn to people and initiatives fighting for something bigger than themselves—the well-being of communities whose voices too often go unheard.
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Rain Gardens Make the Most of Nature’s Water Filtration Power
Madeleine Jepsen •
Harford County Watershed Stewards Academy students are learning how to protect and restore their local portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. They recently installed a rain garden.
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Featured Fellow
Nina Santos
Nina Santos is a Ph.D. student at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. For her dissertation, she is focused on small shrimp-like crustaceans called mysids – an understudied yet important part of many estuarine and coastal food webs.
Featured Research Project
Developing a habitat model for mysids, an important link in Chesapeake Bay food webs
Mysids are important mesozooplankton prey for many species of fish in Chesapeake Bay and are an important link in transferring energy from lower to upper trophic levels. Mysids also serve as biological vectors for benthic-pelagic coupling due to their diel vertical migration and omnivorous prey-switching behavior, which makes mysids important regulators of food web architecture. Despite their central role in coastal food webs, surprisingly little is known about mysid ecology and dynamics in Chesapeake Bay.
