On the Bay

When I was asked if I was interested in being a notetaker for the Coastal Farming Challenges workshops hosted by Maryland Sea Grant, I immediately said yes without fully knowing what my duties entailed. And I am glad that I did.

“Ah, man. I lost him.” Carter Ruby, a junior at Westminster High School, sighs and reaches into the 10-gallon aquarium tank again, a petri dish gripped carefully in his fingers. Beside him, junior Bella Diaz laughs and bends over her own petri dish, this one placed precisely on gridded paper.

Growing up on Cape Ann, north of Boston between Massachusetts and Ipswich Bays, Jim LaChance seemed to always have one foot on the land and the other in the water.

For such a small creature, mysids—Neomysis americana, also known as opossum shrimp—can be a big challenge to study in the Chesapeake Bay. This wouldn’t be a problem if they also didn’t pack such an outsized wallop in terms of their importance in coastal food webs.

Elissa Torres-Soto grew up six miles from the ocean, on the western side of Puerto Rico, snorkeling in blue waters and hiking along sandy beaches.