Current Research Projects

The eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, has historically been a species of tremendous importance to the Chesapeake Bay economically and ecologically and provides numerous ecosystem services, including water filtration, habitat and food for many other Bay species. Significant hatchery and aquaculture efforts are currently underway to recapture the economic and ecological benefits of a robust oyster population within Chesapeake waters, whether for human consumption or to promote improvements in water quality and benthic habitat. The presence of microplastics (MP) in Bay waters may negatively impact these efforts.

The Anacostia River is among the most polluted tributaries in Chesapeake Bay. With substantial algal blooms and bacterial contamination, it has placed those who recreate on the water at considerable health risk. The first phase of a recently completed, multi-billion dollar infrastructure project, the Anacostia River Tunnel, which will retain and divert sewage and storm water effluent is due to be operational by March 2018. The tunnel project is award-winning from the perspective of the engineering community, but the environmental outcome is yet to be determined. While it may be years before the full infrastructure project is complete or full ecosystem recovery is seen, changes in phytoplankton and bacteria should be clearly evident in these first two years of project implementation.

The recent exponential growth in established or planned US closed-containment Atlantic salmon production has been associated with over $1B investment into this aquaculture sector. The success of this dramatic expansion/investment in land-based, RAS salmon production requires a national, coordinated and interdisciplinary effort to ensure that current barriers are eliminated and efficiency and cost-effectiveness are attained. While major progress has been achieved in recent years in RAS technology, its scaling up may face biological, engineering, technological, economical and societal constraints that should be addressed via a fully integrated research, extension, outreach, education and workforce development network.

Rationale: To meet the increasing demands of the world’s growing population under sustainability constrains, optimization of aquaculture methods will be necessary to maximize cost-effective production and minimize ecological impact. One of the supreme strategies for large-scale commercial aquaculture operations is the use of infertile/sterile populations of farmed animals. Sterility carries environmental significance, as the infertile animals are not able to propagate and/or interbreed with wild stocks. In addition, sexual maturation is associated with a substantial decrease in somatic growth due to the diversion of energy into the development of the gonads.

We have developed an immersion-based method in fish to eliminate primordial germ cells (PGCs) by silencing a PGC-development-responsible gene, which resulted in the production of reproductively sterile fish. This proposal aims to transfer this fish sterilization technology to produce sterile diploid eastern oysters to avoid triploids mortality issues. The production of sterile diploid oysters without ploidy manipulation could retain the market advantage of sterile oysters and minimize performance compromise. We have identified several candidate genes in eastern oysters that are potentially indispensable for oyster PGC development. Our preliminary experiments by targeting one of the candidate genes, germ-cell-less (gcl), have yielded oysters that are in their third year.

Triploid eastern oysters are an important component of the Maryland aquaculture industry because of their fast growth and sustained high meat yield. Commercially, triploids are produced by mating tetraploid oysters with normal diploid oysters. Developing tetraploid stock is crucial to meeting the growing demand for Maryland triploid oysters. However, it is challenging to produce and maintain excellent tetraploid lines for the benefit of industry. In short, there is a clear and pressing need for triploid and tetraploid lines that have region-specific beneficial characteristics, especially tolerance to low-salinity environments. In this project, we will establish the first generation of tetraploid stock derived from Maryland local oyster populations.

Coastal ecosystems are vulnerable to short term anthropogenic changes such as nutrient loading and longer-term changes such as sea level rise. Together these changes can alter these systems in ways that change the ecosystem services these systems provide. For example, estuaries bury carbon over time which in turn is a major controller for a habitable atmosphere. Carbon can enter estuaries through a number of processes such as photosynthesis, respiration, air-sea exchange, terrestrial runoff, and groundwater input. As it gets buried, it will undergo a series of microbially mediated processes which terminates in the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

While existing research addresses many of the important issues of oysters in Chesapeake Bay (CB), the fate and effects of resuspended oyster biodeposits in aquaculture areas on the nutrient, light, zooplankton and phytoplankton dynamics have not been taken into account when the use of oysters in mitigation of eutrophication in CB is examined. Currently, models do not include the effects of biodeposit resuspension on the ecosystem, nutrient dynamics and light and experimental data are not available.

Though fish populations typical experience spatially varying mortality, abundance, and fishing pressure, stock assessments commonly model a population that is assumed to be well-mixed. When assumptions about population mixing are not met, these models can result in biased estimates. Spatial population estimates are particularly beneficial to the Chesapeake Bay as this region faces unique challenges as a result of climate change, fishing pressure, and land use within the watershed. Though the Chesapeake Bay supports many important commercial and recreational fisheries, few assessments have estimated abundance of fish within the bay. However, use of spatial models for fisheries management relies on the ability of these models to reliably estimate biological parameters.

The existence of spatial structure in populations of exploited marine fishes challenges our ability to develop reliable stock assessments. Using the northern stock of Black Sea Bass (BSB - Centropristis striata) on the US Atlantic coast as a model species, I will combine empirical and analytical approaches to explore the impacts of the spatial resolution of population and assessment models on the reference points generated by assessments. In this region, the distribution of BSB is highly structured during summer months when the fish are inshore, but the distribution is more widely dispersed when offshore in the winter.

Callinectes sapidus supports the most valuable commercial fishery in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Nationally, the average total dockside value of blue crab fisheries in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana and Texas approaches $200 million. Interstate live blue crab transport has increased due to seasonal cycles of crab landings in the Chesapeake regions and changes in allocation of immigration permits for guest workers. The risk of spreading shellfish pathogens through commercial transportation of live seafood has drawn increasing attention, while the potential for blue crab pathogens to be spread by commerce may be underappreciated.

Zooplankton are critical food sources for marine fish, and climate-driven changes in their abundance, diversity, and quality can have profound effects on larval recruitment and fisheries productivity in coastal oceans and estuaries. Despite the importance of prey for understanding variation in fisheries recruitment, accurate identification of zooplankton species remains challenging and a lack of information on prey quality and prey selectivity by fish may hinder the discovery of relationships between zooplankton and fish productivity. In Chesapeake Bay, two copepods, Acartia tonsa and Eurytemora carolleeae, are critical components of bay anchovy (Anchoa mitchili), larval striped bass (Morone saxatilis), and other fish diets.

Although external nutrient load reductions have been a primary management strategy for Chesapeake Bay restoration, internal ecological processes, such as seasonal nutrient retention in submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) beds, may also play an important, complementary role. However, we lack sufficient details about the factors controlling the magnitude of an important mechanism of SAV-mediated nutrient sequestration--particulate nutrient trapping--to make inferences about its importance relative to total loads to the system.

The Ostreid herpesvirus 1 (OsHV-1) and its microvariants are highly virulent pathogens that cause mass mortalities of oysters and pose a threat to the shellfish aquaculture industry globally. OsHV-1 causes economically devastating mass mortality events up to 100% in the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas). However, OsHV-1 and its variants lack host specificity and are known to infect a range of bivalve species and be carried by the European green crab (Carcinus maenas). There is a lack of testing and research on the East coast of the United States, including in the Chesapeake and Maryland Coastal Bays where aquaculture is an important industry for food production and restoration efforts.