On the Bay

I’m on the edge of a bench with my life vest zipped and buckled. I have a small red point-and-shoot camera and a pair of petite binoculars that I think looks pretty stylish — for the birding set. Twenty-four of my fellow voyagers carry cameras with ginormous lenses, binoculars twice the size of mine, and spotting scopes on tripods.

Phillips Creek Marsh lies on the final seaside stretch of the Delmarva Peninsula in Virginia. It is a swath of wetland grasses with patches of reeds and warped remnants of a boardwalk. Pines fringe the uplands, and a flock of seabirds socialize on a distant mudflat to the southeast. The sky on a Thursday in mid-May was an overcast milky blue.

Maryland Sea Grant and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science are working with researchers in Puerto Rico to determine what is causing the coastal lagoons to glow.

It’s a fascinating project, and the devastation of Hurricane Maria has made the work all the more challenging.

Scientists have long used physical models that simplify the complexities of real environmental systems in order to make informed predictions of future change.

Give students a fish, and they can eat for a day.

Give students 10 striped bass, a laboratory with re-circulating water tanks, and a box full of feed, and you can teach them how a planet is increasingly feeding itself.