On the Bay

“Got your boots?” Roman Jesien, lead scientist at the Maryland Coastal Bays Program (MCBP), greeted my colleague, Cayla, and I. Cayla Cothron, a climate resilience extension associate at North Carolina Sea Grant, and I had just finished the Mid-Atlantic Sea Grant Regional Meeting in Ocean City, Maryland.

I’ve taken a bit of a roundabout path to get where I am now in my education and career. Before graduating from high school in 2019, I focused most of my time on artistic endeavors: studio art classes, designing a literary magazine, and spending hours after school rearranging and programming theater lights.

Patricia N. Vidal Geraldino was in her first year of undergraduate studies at Puerto Rico’s Universidad Ana G. Méndez when an opportunity came along that changed everything. A biology major planning to study pharmacy, she was invited to attend a meeting of Centro TORTUGA (Tropical Oceanography Research Training for Undergraduate Academics).

The overwhelming interest in one of our recent social media posts made us curious about how the Chesapeake Bay interacts with winter weather.

In its simplest form, growing oysters is a matter of getting baby oysters (spat) on shell, placing them in some kind of containment—whether resting on the bottom or hanging in the water column—and letting them do their bivalve thing, filtering water and growing.