1 • Chesapeake Quarterly

CHESAPEAKEQUARTERLYCHESAPEAKEQUARTERLY

The Ups and Downs of Bay Stripers

The Ups and Downs of Bay Stripers

been that entire stocks of these fishalways migrate together — if some go, allgo. But Secor and colleagues have foundthat a subset of white perch living in theBay never migrate. Instead, they spendtheir entire lives in their freshwater rivers.What’s more, the long-term survival ofmany fish populations could depend onsuch unexpected behaviors, Secor says.His work adds to a growing body ofresearch that suggests that, when it comesto understanding and conserving fish,diversity counts.

“We get insights into how fish differthat are very much more sensitive andvery much more sophisticated than fish-eries science had 120 years ago,” says TomMiller, director of the ChesapeakeBiological Laboratory. “But I do think itremains to be seen about what role theyhave in fisheries management.”

Birds Do It, Fish Do It

Migration heretics — animals whosetravels don’t match conventional wisdom— are far from a new concept in biology.The sight of geese flying south en massemay signal the start of autumn for many.But scientists have long known that birdsdon’t always migrate like they should.Small subsets of birds from many travel-ing populations, in fact, don’t migrate atall, instead staying behind in the territo-ries where they were born.

The phenomenon is called “partialmigration” — because only part of thepopulation migrates in any one year. It’sbeen recorded in a number of birdspecies, including red-tailed hawks andEuropean robins. But, until recently, noone had looked for it in marine fish.

That’s because, for many decades, fish - eries scientists largely glossed over diver-

David Secor keeps a collection ofear bones. The inner-earappendages, called otoliths, are

tucked away on a shelf in his laboratoryin Solomons, Maryland. He has samplesfrom bluefin tuna, white perch, and adozen other fish species. There’s even onefrom the largest striped bass ever caughtin the state. But right now, he’s holdingan otolith taken from a golden tilefish. It’swhite and about the size and shape of asmall seashell.

“Aren’t they beautiful” says Secor, afisheries ecologist at the ChesapeakeBiological Laboratory of the Universityof Maryland Center for EnvironmentalScience (UMCES). “See how sculptedthey are?”

And, yes, this otolith — which, like aseashell, is actually a mineral deposit, nota true bone — is notched all aroundwith small bumps and rivulets. For Secor,however, the real beauty here lies in theinformation this otolith carries.

Like a tree, each otolith containsinternal rings circling around its core.Count them, and you can see how oldthis tilefish was when it died. Moreimportant, chemical clues hidden withinSecor’s otoliths can also help scientistslike him trace the paths the fish took asthey migrated.

On the Chesapeake Bay, the migra-tions of white perch and striped bass arelikely as old as the estuary itself. Eachyear, they swim tens of miles, and some-times hundreds of miles, from the riverswhere they were born to salt water andback again.

But recent studies, and Secor’s ownotoliths, show that these migration pat-terns may be more complicated than pre-viously thought. The prevailing view had

2 • Chesapeake Quarterly

CHESAPEAKEQUARTERLYChesapeake Quarterly explores scientific, environ-mental, and cultural issues relevant to the ChesapeakeBay and its watershed.

This magazine is produced and funded by theMaryland Sea Grant College Program, whichreceives support from the National Oceanic andAtmospheric Administration and the state ofMaryland. Editors, Michael W. Fincham and JeffreyBrainard; Science Writer, Daniel Strain; ProductionEditor and Art Director, Sandy Rodgers. Send itemsfor the magazine to:

Maryland Sea Grant College4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 300University System of MarylandCollege Park, Maryland 20740301.405.7500, fax 301.314.5780e-mail: mdsg@mdsg.umd.eduwww.mdsg.umd.edu www.chesapeakequarterly.net

contents2 Lending an Ear

A small piece of a fish’s anatomy yieldsa big insight into migration.

6 Taking the Long ViewWhat causes the fall and rise and fall of fish populations?

12 The Oyster Dreams of W.K. BrooksHis great scientific discovery won him fame and notoriety in Maryland.

15 Maryland Knauss Fellows, 2013MDSG announces support for four fellows to work for federal agencies.

16 MDSG Personnel ChangesBonny Marcellino retires, Michael Allenis new assistant director for research.

Cover photo: Billy Callaway (at the tiller,standing behind one of his workers) is thethird generation of his family to fish for stripedbass out of pound nets in the Chesapeake andits tributaries. Page 3: Like the stump of afallen tree, this cross-section of a striped bassotolith, which has been meticulously cut andpolished, gives us a window into the fish’s life.Count the rings on this mineral structure andyou can see the striper’s age. Looking evencloser, scientists can spot clues to where thisfish had swum and when. PHOTOGRAPH: COVER,

DAVID HARP; OTOLITH ON P. 3, DAVID SECOR

April 2013

Volume 12, Number 1

Daniel Strain

LENDING AN EARWhite perch and striped bass

tell us about their travels

sity withinfish populations.

Instead, they treatedthose populations —

which in reality are made up of differenttypes of individuals with unique behaviors— as a single, unified lump. In fisheries-speak, such a homogeneous group iscalled a stock. And stocks, for the purposeof scientists, migrate as one and spawn asone. No partial migration allowed.

Such a concept made it possible forscientists to do the sorts of calculationsthat allowed them to set quotas and fish-eries seasons, Secor explains. But it stuck.“The stock became the population,” hesays. “And that view was fairly rigid formany decades.”

But some, like Secor, weren’t contentwith that. Before moving to Maryland in1991, Secor had spent a year studyingred sea bream, rabbitfish, and other aqua-culture fish in Japan. “It wasn’t as inter-esting to me looking at a tank with afish in it as it was trying to look outhere,” he says, indicating his office win-dow with a view of the Bay. “What’sintrigued me is what’s hidden.”

Like the lives of fish, he says. Take

white perch and striped bass. Theyfamously spawn in rivers around theBay, such as the Potomac and Patuxent,then swim to saltier waters as they beginto mature. The Bay’s white perch remainin the estuary, but striped bass venturefarther , eventually leaving to roam theAtlantic coast as far north as Canada.Each species of fish returns each yeararound springtime to spawn. But thosemigrations take place underwater andover many miles.

Secor and a generation of scientistslike him, however, began using newresearch methods, including new ways oflooking at otoliths, to open up thatunderwater world.

Still, figuring out what to do withthat new understanding is complicated.“We’re getting a wealth of informationnow,” says Steve Cadrin, who studiesnew ways of assessing the health ofstocks at the Uni ver sity of MassachusettsDartmouth. “But we need to sort outthis wealth of information. What of thesenew complexities are really important tous and which of them do we need toconsider to do a better job with ourfishery management?”

Volume 12, Number 1 • 3

Striped bass otolith(inner-ear structure)

White PerchMorone americana

White perch are one of the most abundantfish in the Chesapeake Bay, and they spendtheir entire lives there. These perch areclosely related to striped bass.

Distribution: White perch are found fromNova Scotia to South Carolina but aremost abundant from the Hudson River tothe Chesapeake Bay.

Key distinguishing markings: They aresilvery in color and frequently have irregular,dusky longitudinal lines along their body.

Size: Adults can grow up to 19 inches, butare more commonly found at about sevento ten inches.

SOURCE: MARYLAND DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES

Duane Raver

4 • Chesapeake Quarterly

Punk-Rock FishTo begin to answer those questions, Secorturned to white perch (Morone americana).These silver and spiny-finned fish are anangler’s dream in the Chesapeake. They’reabundant and never hard to find. Secorcalls them the white lab rats of theChesapeake. “I love white perch,” he sayswith enthusiasm.

So just over ten years ago, Secor andhis graduate students at the time, RichardKraus and Lisa Kerr, began collecting andexamining otoliths from perch caught onthe Patuxent River. Because of the waythey’re made, otoliths absorb some of thechemical signatures that are unique toparticular ecosystems, such as freshwateror saltwater habitats. And those cues cangive scientists hints to where a fish hasbeen and when.

One of the newest windows to thosesecrets comes from oxygen atoms. Everywater body carries two major types ofthis basic element, Secor explains, alighter version and a heavier version. Saltwater, however, tends to bear a lot moreheavy oxygen atoms than fresh waterdoes. So think of them like a ship’s log-book. If Secor sees a lot of heavy oxygenatoms in a particular otolith, for instance,he can be pretty sure his fish had spenttime in salty water.

Using this log, Secor found that perchhad more in common with birds thantheir scales would suggest. Most Patuxent

perch did make the circuitous trip fromthe upper Patuxent River toward theChesapeake and back again on a yearlybasis — just what you would read in aBay nature guide. But others, about threepercent, stayed where they were. Secorcalls these exclusively freshwater fish,which looked like any other white perch,“residents.” What’s more, that strategyseemed to get locked in for the fish’s life.Once a perch became a resident or amigrant, it usually stayed a resident or amigrant.

Drawing from that study, Secorexpanded his research to other majorrivers on the Chesapeake, from themouth of the Susquehanna south toVirginia’s James River. And in each, histeam found similar groups of residentsmixed in with migrating fish. How manyresidents the researchers found dependedon the river in question and what theweather was like that year. Residents, forinstance, were common in the upper Baybut rarer in Virginia. Migrants were mostabundant during drier years.

Secor had discovered his case ofmarine partial migration.

Scientists had previously known thatcertain species of salmonlike fish, such as

brook trout around Québec, showed simi-lar behavior. But Secor’s perch study wasone of the first to discover an example ofpartial migration in a non-salmon fish.He and his colleagues, whose researchwas funded in part by Maryland SeaGrant, published their results in a numberof journals, most recently in 2012 inEstuaries and Coasts.

And Secor, at least, wasn’t inclined topass his findings off as an accident. “Youcould say ‘Well, that’s just an anomaly,’ ”he says. But “it may be that these minor-ity behaviors are prevalent in othermarine fishes and.. .have some functionin the ecosystem and the population.”

In other words, weird behaviors domatter. To understand why, you need tofirst understand what the triggers for par-tial migration are.

And that, Secor says, may come downto the classic dilemma posed by theBritish punk band The Clash: should Istay or should I go? If you get all thefood you need living in a river, forinstance, there’s no reason to leave. But ifa river’s crowded and food is scarce, you’dwant to migrate, even if that exposes youto predators. And, in fact, he and his col-leagues found that perch born later in the

You could call him the otolith collector: David Secor admires a striped bass otolith. The inner-ear structures — which help fish sense their motion and orientation, much like our own inner earshelp us to balance — come in all shapes and sizes. Some are about as long as a guitar pick, whileothers, like those from bluefin tuna (bottom left), are much smaller. To analyze otoliths, you firsthave to slice horizontally to obtain a thin section (top left). PHOTOGRAPHS: ABOVE, DANIEL STRAIN; LEFT TOP,

VIRGINIA INSTITUTE OF MARINE SCIENCE; AND LEFT BOTTOM, DAVID SECOR

dorsal

ventral

anteriorposterior

How to slice an otolith

Volume 12, Number 1 • 5

year — or those most likely to facecrowding and food scarcity — usuallybecome migrants. Fish born earlier, how-ever, tend to be residents.

Secor suspects that the fish aren’tgenetically programmed to be one or theother — they’re merely reacting to theconditions they’re facing. In fact, there’sno evidence to suggest that residents onlyreproduce with residents or migrants withmigrants. Instead, when it comes time tospawn, they mix.

But Secor says that the perch popula-tion as a whole may need different kindsof individuals, some that stay and othersthat go. Think of them as the tortoiseand the hare from the nursery tale. Themigrants are the hares. They grow fastand reproduce a lot, thanks to the usuallyabundant supplies of food in the Bay’smainstem. So if you want your popula-tion to expand as quickly as possible,they’re your guys.

But migrants aren’t dependable. Asimple disturbance, such as a year of badweather, could wind up eliminatingmuch of the Bay’s prime food sourcesand, by extension, a whole season’s worthof migrants. Residents, however, live in amore stable environment, which allowsthem to continue to chug along duringboth good years and bad. They’re yourtortoises, and the offspring they producesustain the population over time. Eachstrategy, in other words, has something toadd to the overall population’s chances ofwinning the race for survival.

Secor dubbed this success through adiverse set of behaviors a “portfolioeffect.” In stock markets — the WallStreet kind — you never want to put allyour money into one company. Likewise,in the case of fish, a population shouldn’tdepend on only one strategy (also calleda life history) for succeeding in a threat-ening world. “When you have diverselife histories ...what you end up with isresilience,” says Graham Sherwood, aresearch scientist at the Gulf of MaineResearch Institute in Portland, Maine.

Sherwood studies similar behaviors inAtlantic cod, and he wagers that partialmigration may be much more commonin fish than many expect.

“The more you look at this, the more

ubiquitous it is,” Sherwood says. “Prettymuch every [animal] species does this tosome degree or another.”

Conserving Diverse Fish

That includes striped bass in the Bay, afavorite among watermen, says Secor,who’s been examining migration diver-sity in these fish, too. For stripers, whohave recovered from a steep decline inthe 1970s brought on by overfishing,partial migration isn’t simple. Preliminaryresults from Secor’s otolith analyses sug-gest that juvenile stripers don’t have justtwo migration strategies — staying orgoing. They have many. Some young

bass, for instance, begin migrating down-river as expected, then weeks later, forreasons that aren’t clear, make a U-turnand come back.

Because each of those migrationstrategies may be important to the long-term success of striped bass, Secor arguesthat it’s important to conserve that diver-sity — protecting fish across an array ofBay habitats.

These new research findings sur-rounding the diversity of fish stockscould one day influence how fisheriesmanagers set their policies. But diversityshouldn’t be considered in fishery regula-tions simply for diversity’s sake, says SteveCadrin of the University of Massachu -setts. First, researchers will need to fill inthe emerging picture of multi-facetedfish populations with additional details.Some behaviors, for instance, may bemore critical than others for sustaining aflagging population. And figuring outwhich are which could become one ofthe bigger challenges facing fisheries sci-entists over the next few decades. “Wedon’t want [management] to be so com-plex it’s impractical,” he says. “But wedon’t want it so simple that it’s noteffective .”

Some scientists are working to figureout new ways of quantifying the impor-tance of fish diversity. Cadrin, forinstance, collaborated with Secor andKerr to use mathematical analyses toinvestigate which of the Patuxent’s perch,residents or migrants, might be mostimportant for the populations. Asexpected, their results show that whilemigrants boost the fishery’s sheer num-bers, residents can keep the populationfrom collapsing during bad years. Thoseresults were published in 2010 in thejournal Ecological Applications.

Regardless, Secor says, there’s noturning back now. With modern analyses,fisheries science has entered a new era— one in which you can’t ignore thediversity within fish stocks. “Really thestatement that I believed when I wasgrowing up, that the life of sea animals ishidden, is really no longer true,” he says.

Which is a big revelation from a fewlittle otoliths.

strain@mdsg.umd.edu

Location%

Migrants%

Residents

Upper Bay 31 69

Potomac River 35 65

Choptank River 55 45

Nanticoke River 81 19

York River 68 32

James River 82 18

To bring in the Bay’s bounty, like thesestriped bass sold at Captain White’s SeafoodCity in Washington, D.C. (top), Chesa peakewatermen follow fish as they migrate upstreamand downstream each year. But sometimes thatgets tricky. Most white perch caught in thelower Chesapeake from 2005 to 2006 tendedto migrate as expected, according to estimatesby David Secor and his colleagues (table). But,more often than not, perch from the upper Baynever left the freshwater rivers where they wereborn. TABLE SOURCE: KERR AND SECOR, 2012; PHOTOGRAPH,

DANIEL STRAIN

White Perch: Migrants Vs. Residents

The Fall & Rise & Fall of Stripers& a Lot of Less-famous Fish

TAKING THE LONG VIEW

Michael W. Fincham

Don’t call him Ishmael. You’d never find Bob Wood in a Herman Melville novel. There’sno damp, drizzly November of the soul that would send him out to sea in search of aMoby Dick or even a menhaden. Wood did his boat time during graduate school:

day-long cruises on the Chesapeake Bay, dragging fish trawls, hauling up small fish, countingthem, tossing them back, recording data. Then doing it again. And again. And again.

He didn’t like it then, he doesn’t miss it now. There was the seasickness, but mostly it was aday lost to his dissertation work. And that dissertation work was where he did most of histrawling. He hauled out older fish surveys done by other people on other boats and even culledthrough records of long-ago fish catches by watermen who once upon a time went chasingafter stripers and blues, yellow perch and white perch and menhaden.

Wood was also chasing something. He launched another kind of fishing expedition, one thatcarried him through archives of climate data where he began hauling up records on high-pressure systems and low-pressure systems, rain events and snow storms, high-flow years andlow-flow years. He even began dredging up decades-old data on regional climate patterns withnames like the Ohio Valley High, the Azores-Bermuda High, the North Atlantic Oscillation.

He was chasing a connection: a big, Moby Dick-like connection. Could there be a link

Volume 12, Number 1 • 7

between those large-scale climate forcesand those sudden, unexplained boomyears when big numbers of new stripersand other Bay-spawning fish come surg-ing down the Bay’s major rivers? Whatabout other boom years that broughtlarge hordes of ocean-spawning fish likemenhaden sweeping off the continentalshelf and into the estuary?

Bob Wood never had an itch to goto sea, but his long obsession with cli-mate links eventually led him to a mys-terious force lurking out there in themiddle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s nowcalled the AMO, short for the AtlanticMultidecadal Oscillation. It’s a cycle last-ing 65 to 75 years during which sea-sur-face temperatures warm up for severaldecades before cooling down for severaldecades. Wood didn’t discover the AMO— but he did discover the connectionbetween the AMO out there in theAtlantic Ocean and fish species back inthe Chesapeake Bay.

And it took a while. By the time he

discovered the AMO connection, he wasno longer a graduate student, but thedirector of the Oxford CooperativeLaboratory, working for the NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA). He calls his latest breakthrougha teleconnection. “It means far-apart con-nections,” he says. “If you see things inone place, it seems to affect things inanother place.” A famous teleconnectionwould be the El Niño/La Niña cycle inthe Pacific. El Niño is a warming ofPacific waters that, among other effects,can bring rains to California and droughtto the Midwest. La Niña is a coolingperiod with opposite effects. The AMO issomething like that. It is a distant warm-ing and cooling of waters in the middleof the Atlantic, and according to BobWood, it is the force that largely controlsthe rising and falling of striped bass andmenhaden populations in the mainstemof the Chesapeake Bay.

And it’s a force over which we haveno control.

When the AMO gives us good yearsfor new stripers, it generally gives us pooryears for new menhaden. And menhaden,of course, are the fish that stripers love tofeed on. So the warming of the AMOwill give you a lot of stripers, but not alot of food. And vice versa. Good timesfor menhaden will often be poor timesfor stripers. A lot of food, but not a lot ofstripers.

That’s a twist worthy of the old godsout of Greek myths. Every gift they evergave us mortals carried a dark side. Asmere mortals trying to manage the natu-ral world, we instinctively try to maxi-mize all the fish that matter most to us. We want a Bay full of stripers and a Bayfull of menhaden. But that may not bean option.

Data from the Deeps — andthe Shallows

Bob Wood didn’t always get seasick onboats, but when he did, he toughed itout.

Striped bass, for thousands of years, havebeen coming back to the great spawning rivers ofthe Chesapeake Bay. And scientists, for decades,have been trying to figure out why striped bassreproduce so well during certain eras and sopoorly during other eras. Bob Wood (right) hascome up with a new theory that may answer theseold questions. PHOTOGRAPHS: STRIPED BASS ON OPPOSITE PAGE,

DAVID HARP; THIS PAGE, MICHAEL W. FINCHAM

8 • Chesapeake Quarterly

Like most graduate students in fish-eries science, he had to take his turnworking the trawl surveys that theVirginia Institute of Marine Science hasbeen running every year since 1955.Unlike most students, he didn’t lovebeing out on boats.

Summer trips were usually the worstfor Wood, a tall slender student with darkhair, a dark beard, and a delicate stomach.When the trawl boat would make a hauldown near the mouth of the Bay, thedeckhands would dump the catch on thebig, sloshing culling table, and Woodwould go to work sorting fish — withocean swells rolling under the boat, withdiesel fumes hanging over the deck, withjellyfish tentacles slapping at his face.Picking through the flopping fish, he’d tryto figure out which were larval anchoviesor alewives, yellow perch or white perch,which were white mullet, satinfish shiner,bigeye scad, or bighead sea robin.

When it got bad, he’d go over to theside of the boat and throw up. Then he’dlie down on the deck, summer or winter,and wait until the next trawl was done.When the net came up, he’d scramble upand take his place at the table again. Healways went back to the table. When itgot worse, when he got dehydrated andwent greenish in the face, the captain puthim ashore. He left him on a dock downnear Norfolk and called the lab to comepick him up. This only happened once,but it made Wood a legend around thelab.

Back in his office, however, grindingaway on his dissertation, Wood learned tolove the rich load of fish data the trawlsurvey hauled home. The survey hit allthe salinity levels of the estuary, coveringthe lower Bay, motoring up to the fresh-water reaches of its large rivers, andrecording all the fish species it caught:who’s coming on strong, who’s not, who’slooking healthy, who’s looking sick.Begun in 1955, the VIMS survey is nowthe oldest ongoing trawl survey in thecountry. It hits 1,224 stations a year andover the decades that adds up to morethan 240 species, 41,000 net hauls, and 20million fish samples.

Wood also had fish data from theshallows of the Bay. Both Maryland andVirginia had long-running net seine sur-veys designed to trap young stripersswimming near the shore. Marylandbegan its survey back in 1954, Virginia in1967. Both states focus on striped bass,the Bay’s most popular gamefish and, fordecades, one of its most profitable com-mercial catches. But in each state the sur-veys collect data on dozens of otherspecies as well.

Data from the deeps and data fromthe shallows, piling up decade afterdecade. The key questions, the raisonsd’être for all the surveys were these: who’shaving a good year for offspring, who’shaving a poor year, and what does thattell us about how many fish are comingnext year?

The Seesaw Signal

How many striped bass could be comingnext year has befuddled scientists fordecades. Their sudden and unpredictable

boom years can turn out twice as manyoffspring as the year before, sometimesthree times as many, sometimes 10 timesas many. More than 30 years ago, biolo-gists Don Heinle and Joe Mihurskycame up with a clue: cold, wet wintersbode well for a striped bass boom year .

Bob Wood came at the issue from adifferent angle. Before he was a fisheriesscientist, he was a climatologist whospent a lot of time looking at huge, noisydata sets jammed with multiple variables.If certain weather patterns brought onboom years for stripers, perhaps thosesame patterns were also bringing boomyears for other species at the same time.“I thought the patterns in nature are notone fish at a time,” says Wood. “If there isan environmental signal, it is probably notgoing to pick out a single fish.”

To probe all his data, Wood tried astatistical technique called PrincipalComponent Analysis. Designed to dig outpatterns buried in the data, this analytictool uncovered an unexpected connec-tion: whenever fish that spawned in theBay did well, fish that spawned in coastalwaters did poorly. And vice versa: when-ever coastal spawners did well, Bayspawners did poorly.

Wood discovered another surprise inthe data: these patterns lasted for severaldecades. Boom years for stripers, forexample, seemed to come in bunches, andso did bust years. And the pattern affecteda lot of fish: The Bay spawners includespecies like alewives, blueback herrings,white perch, yellow perch, shad, and, ofcourse, stripers. The coastal spawners whocome in from the continental shelfinclude spot, croaker, hardhead, weakfish,drum, and, of course, menhaden.

“I did not expect to see what I saw,”says Wood, who quickly gave his discov-ery a name: the CBASS recruitment pat-tern, short for Chesapeake Bay Anadro -mous, Shelf-spawning Species. That’s amouthful, perhaps helpful to scientists. It’sa Chesapeake seesaw: when one fishgroup goes up, the other goes down.

Was the seesaw signal real? His findingwas so unexpected Wood went back tothe table again, searching through other

Up and DownStriped Bass

Morone saxatilis

Striped bass inhabit coastal waters and arecommonly found in bays but may enterrivers in the spring to spawn. Some popu-lations are landlocked. The U.S. East Coastmigratory population is composed ofthree major stocks: Hudson, Chesapeake,and Roanoke.

Distribution: On the Atlantic coast,these fish range from the St. LawrenceRiver, Canada, to the St. Johns River,Florida, although they are most prevalentfrom Maine to North Carolina.

Key distinguishing markings: Thestriped bass is a silvery fish that gets itsname from the seven or eight dark, con-tinuous stripes along the side of its body.

Size: Striped bass can grow as long as 60inches.

SOURCE: MARYLAND DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES

Duane Raver

data sets, looking for more evidence ofthe seesaw pattern. Baltimore Gas andElectric Company, for example, hadrecords of how many fish were suckedinto their intake pipes at the CalvertCliffs Nuclear Plant. For that data Woodshad to pull mildewed paper reports outof old file cabinets in a musty basementand then copy the data by hand, a job hemanaged to find fascinating. “I actuallygot to see the pattern emerge, watch itgrow and develop,” he says. And whereverhe looked, in every data set he surveyed,the same seesaw appeared: when Bayspawners go up, coastal spawners godown — and vice versa.

His big surprise set him off onanother search: what could be causingthese alternating ups and downs? His firstinstinct was to look for some kind of cli-mate force just as Don Heinle, JoeMihursky, and others had done decadesbefore. They tied boom years for stripersto cold, wet winters and late springs. Themelting of ice and snow, they suggested,helped scour more detritus off the land,feeding the zooplankton that in turn feedtiny, newly spawned stripers. Timing iscrucial: if that surge of water and foodcomes late and lasts deeper into spring,then plenty of food will be in the riversjust when stripers are spawning. Survivalchances for their offspring can skyrocket.

For Wood, weather patterns were onlya starting point. His inner climatologisttold him there might be larger climateforces that create cold, wet winters andlate springs. The key, he suspected, couldbe regional patterns in atmospheric pres-sure, always measured as pressure at sealevel. “You can interpret everything fromsea-level pressure,” says Wood. Pressurefronts create huge air masses and movethem around. They tell the wind whichway to blow, they send us low-pressurezones that bring gray skies and bigstorms, they give us high-pressure zonesthat bless us with calm sunny weather.They could also be bringing us boomand bust years for fish species.

Wood had to go trawling again, thistime in a sea of climate data. He hauledup records of regional sea-level pressures

during every spawning day for 32 sepa-rate springtime Bay spawning seasons. Itwas another climatology approach nevertried before in fish-stock studies. And itpaid off. Wood was able to identify tworegional pressure patterns, the Ohio ValleyHigh and the Azores-Bermuda High, thatseemed to control boom years and bustyears for stripers and other Bay spawners.

If the Ohio Valley High dominates themid-Atlantic during March, then the see-saw lifts Bay spawners. Cold and wet win-ters last longer, loading the rivers withmore food for new fish. But if the Azores-Bermuda High shifts westward and domi-nates the Mid-Atlantic during March,then the seesaw lifts up coastal spawners.A warm, dry spring arrives early, settingup wind patterns that help carry moremenhaden and coastal fish across the con-tinental shelf and into the Bay.

This Chesapeake seesaw pattern washis first discovery, and it paid off in otherways: a Ph.D. in 2000, a post-doctoralappointment at the Chesapeake Biologi -

cal Laboratory, then fairly quickly a jobwith the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office.Shortly thereafter he was appointeddirector of NOAA’s Cooperative OxfordLaboratory. It was an amazing rise, saidanother scientist. Wood was a graduatestudent sorting fish on trawl surveys, andfour years later he was in charge of a fed-eral marine research laboratory .

Amid his fast rise, however, big ques-tions still lingered about his research. TheOhio Valley High and the Azores-Bermuda High seemed to be drivingthose fish populations — but what wasdriving those regional climate patterns?The big fish was still out there.

The Roller Coaster

In the year 2000, Bob Wood got his doc-torate and the Atlantic MultidecadalOscillation (or AMO) got its name. Thisocean cycle brings several decades ofwarming waters followed by severaldecades of cooling waters in the Atlanticbasin. A dozen years after it was named,the AMO remains loosely described andits effects widely debated.

The temperature swings can be small,but the cycle seems to have far-reachingeffects. An earlier warm phase of theAMO has been tied to the Dust Bowl ofthe 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s.Since the early 1990s, the AMO has beenin a warm, positive phase — and we’veseen twice as many big hurricanes,including Isabel, Ivan, Katrina, and Sandy.We’ve also seen some boom years fornew stripers.

When Bob Wood began readingabout the AMO, his inner climatologistcame alive again. “When I saw that it hadcycles, I said ‘Wow!’ Then I looked at thestatistical correlations,” he says, “and itwas amazing.” The recent ups and downsof the AMO seemed to correlate withthe ups and downs of fish populations inthe Chesapeake.

Proving an AMO connection, how-ever, took some more digging. Wood’sfish data went back 60 years, but the dataon the AMO ocean temperatures goesback 150 years, with some tree ring stud-ies tracing the AMO some 400 years into

Volume 12, Number 1 • 9

Down and UpMenhaden

Brevoortia tyrannus

Atlantic menhaden are one of the mostabundant fish species in estuarine andwestern coastal Atlantic waters. NativeAmericans in pre-colonial America calledthe fish “munnawhatteaug,” which means,“fertilizer,” and menhaden are probablythe fish that the indigenous tribes urgedthe Pilgrims to plant along with their corn.

Distribution: Nova Scotia, Canada, toCentral Florida.

Key distinguishing markings: Men-haden are silvery in color with a distinctblack shoulder spot behind their gill open-ing. They also have a variable number ofsmaller spots on their sides. Their caudal(tail) fin is deeply forked.

Size: The maximum size of Atlantic men-haden is approximately 15 inches.

SOURCE: MARYLAND DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES

Maine Department of Marine Resources

the past. To extend his fish data, Woodwent to fishing reports in old newspapersand anecdotes in histories of defunctsportsmen’s clubs. His breakthrough,however, was close at hand. On thelibrary shelves at his own Oxford labora-tory, he turned up an old book, publishedin 1964, that listed all the U.S. fish har-vests all the way back to the 1880s.

That gave an opening for Wood tofigure out how many new fish wereentering the estuary in decades past.Before long he had striper and menhadendata stretching back 120 years. In his newdata he found his old seesaw pattern:when stripers were up, menhaden weredown.

And in the AMO records, he had his

teleconnection. Striper numbers were ris-ing during warm decades of the AMOand sagging during cool decades. Andmenhaden were doing the opposite. Itwas the AMO that seemed to be drivingthe Ohio Valley High, the Azores-Bermuda High, and the fish populationsof the Chesapeake Bay. “For 30 to 35years, things will start getting better andthen go down again,” says Wood. “Andthen we’ll start the roller coaster ride allover again. You go up the hill and downthe hill, up the hill and down the hill”(see graph, opposite page).

What Wood finally produced was abig-picture theory, a picture that can bepretty “fuzzy,” he admits, but one thatcarries a good deal of explanatorypower. During a warm phase, air massesoff the ocean collide with cold fronts offthe land, and the clash creates wintercoastal storms. Nor’easters, sometimescalled “white hurricanes,” pull moistureoff the ocean, creating late-winter rainand snow across the Chesapeake water-shed. The end result during springtimesnowmelt and runoff is higher riverflow, more fish food in the rivers duringspawning, and an expanded nurseryzone for tiny new stripers.Voilà, a boomyear for stripers.

A boom year is not the only benefit:the AMO can bring boom decades. Sincethe AMO’s current warm phase heatedup in the early 1990s, striper counts inyoung-of-the-year surveys have jumpedstrongly in five years — with fewer bustyears in between. They shot up in 1993, ayear that brought a heavy mid-Marchsnow storm in the Mid-Atlantic region.They shot up after the blizzard of 1996,after the President’s Weekend storm of2003, and once more after the lateJanuary blizzards of 2011. We’ll see whatthe “Snowquester” storm of March 2013yields.

Wood’s theory can’t tell you whethernext year will bring a lot of stripers. “TheAMO is a general tendency,” says Wood.It can tell you the probability that awarm decade will bring more big stormsand those storms will bring more boomyears for stripers.

10 • Chesapeake Quarterly

The Highs and Lows behind Boom and Bust Years for Chesapeake Bay Fish

F ish populations are driven, inpart, by regional-scale weatherpatterns, and those patterns are

driven, in turn, by larger-scale climateforces with daunting names like theAtlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, theNorth Atlantic Oscillation, the Azores-Bermuda High, and the Ohio ValleyHigh.

The Atlantic MultidecadalOscillation (AMO) is the naturalcycle of long-term changes in sea-surface temperatures in the NorthAtlantic basin. Decades of warmerwaters in the basin alternate withdecades of cooler waters. Each warmphase can spread over thousands ofmiles (see red area in map at right),and it can last 20 to 30 years. Andeach cool phase can last that long andspread that far, creating a cycle lasting65 to 75 years. The temperature difference can be quite small, less than 1 degree Celsiusbetween a high point and a low point in the cycle, but that small difference can have hugeeffects on climate forces. The AMO interacts with regional air-pressure patterns to affectseasonal weather patterns, creating good years and poor years for fish reproduction.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) describes changes in the atmosphere abovethe Atlantic Ocean, changes that may cause or result from changes in sea-surface tempera -tures. The atmosphere near Iceland features a permanent low-pressure region that interactswith a permanent high-pressure region near the Azores Islands, creating a pressure gradientthat affects other regional weather patterns. When the difference between these regions isgreat (when the Icelandic Low is really low and the Azores High is really high), the resultsinclude stronger westerly winds, colder and drier weather over the northwestern Atlantic, butwarmer and wetter weather in northern Europe, parts of Scandinavia, and the eastern UnitedStates.

The Azores-Bermuda High, as its name suggests, is a high-pressure system thatmigrates back-and-forth between the Azores Islands in the eastern Atlantic and Bermuda tothe west. From January to June it migrates westward and usually dominates coastal weather inthe Mid-Atlantic during summer months. When it arrives early, the result can be warmer,drier, calmer weather and wind patterns that help newly spawned fish move from coastalwaters into the Bay.

The Ohio Valley High is a persistent high-pressure system over the eastern UnitedStates. In certain years, it can prolong winter conditions in the Mid-Atlantic, resulting in morerain and snow and runoff, thereby improving chances that the offspring of Bay-spawning fishwill find more food in the rivers.

The reddish zones above indicate the areaswhere sea-surface temperatures fluctuate duringthe AMO cycle. This map shows a warm phase.SOURCE: NOAA EARTH SYSTEM RESEARCH LABORATORY

Sea-S

urface Temperature V

ariation (° Celsius)

90N

45N

Eq90W 60W 30W 0

0.6

0.4

0.2

0.0

-0.2

-0.4

-0.6

And it can tell you why good yearsfor stripers can lead to poor years formenhaden. All those storms and windpatterns that supply food for stripers canscatter the offshore larvae of menhadenand other coastal spawners, making itmore difficult for them to move off theocean and into the estuary.

When the AMO shifts into a coolphase, menhaden do much better. Coolertemperatures create frequent high-pres-sure fronts, leading to fewer storms,calmer weather, and easier passage for fishmoving out of shelf waters and into theestuary. The menhaden picture is stillfuzzy, in part because it’s difficult to mon-itor the offshore migrations of all thoseshelf-spawning fish. “I’m not sure we’venailed down how most of these crittersmake it into the Bay,” says Wood. Thatwill take a lot of old-fashioned, on-the-water sampling cruises out in the rollingwaters of the coastal ocean. Wood has noplans to be aboard.

The Downhill Ride

If Bob Wood is on the right track, thenfisheries managers in Maryland and

Virginia will have to rethink theiroptions. The current warm phase of theAMO gave us a good run of boom years,but that run may be winding down.According to several reports, the warmingseems to be waning, turning downhilltowards a relatively cooler phase. TheChesapeake may soon see fewer boomyears for stripers.

And a lot of fisheries scientists, atleast, think Wood is on the right track.The AMO, nearly unknown a decadeago, is drawing a lot of attention in recentyears, according to Ed Houde, a promi-nent fisheries biologist at the ChesapeakeBiological Laboratory. “It’s a powerfulfactor that influences fish production,particularly the reproductive dynamics offish,” says Houde. “And Bob’s work isprobably the best of it here in theChesapeake region.”

Wood is no Cassandra crying doom,he is a scientist trying to forecast thefuture and he hopes managers will listen.To preserve striper populations, fisheriesmanagers will not have as many boomyears to boost fish stocks. But they willhave options.

One of them, if you buy Wood’stheory , would be reducing fishingpressure on stripers fairly early. Thatoption does more than avoid collapse.Boom years can still pop up during thecool era — albeit less frequently —and keeping a good number of stripersin the spawning rivers can magnifythose year classes. And there may bemore menhaden around for stripers tofeed on.

“We want to get back to this idealgood time with lots of striped bass andlots of menhaden,” says Wood. “Whenyou were a kid, your father caught allthose fish. And when you grow up, youexpect even more of that. The answer is:it may not be obtainable . ”

Trying to get the both of bestworlds at the same time, a Bay full ofstripers and a Bay full of menhaden,sounds a lot like old-fashioned hubris.You remember hubris: in the old Greekdramas that was always the fatal flaw.That’s what got the gods laughing.

— fincham@mdsg.umd.edu

Volume 12, Number 1 • 11

0.4

0.2

0

- 0.2

- 0.4

1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2011

+ menhaden menhaden+

+ striped bassstriped bass+

The Effect of the AMO on Striped Bass and Menhaden Reproduction

Stripers and menhaden ride the roller coaster: the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is an ongoing series of long-duration rises and drops insea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic as measured against a mean sea surface temperature (designated above as zero on the vertical axis). Severaldecades of warmer waters (red zones above) will be followed by several decades of cooler waters (blue zones above). Instrument-based evidence for theAMO goes back 150 years, but studies of paleoclimates find the AMO signal reaching back 400 years. Research by Bob Wood (illustrated in this graph)suggests that the warm phase also brings more frequent jumps in striped bass reproduction, while the cool phase brings better years for menhaden reproduc-tion. SOURCE: MARYLAND SEA GRANT FIGURE USING AN AMO GRAPH PLOTTED WITH DATA ON SEA-SURFACE TEMPERATURES DEVELOPED BY ALEXEY KAPLAN ET AL. (ADJUSTED TO REMOVE WARMING ASSOCI-

ATED WITH HUMAN ACTIVITIES)

Ave

rage

Ann

ual S

ea-S

urfa

ce T

empe

ratu

re

Var

iatio

n fr

om M

ean

(° C

elsi

us)

In May 1879 a young biologistboarded a steamboat in Baltimoreand headed for the Eastern Shore

town of Crisfield, Maryland. He hoped tospend the summer figuring out how oys-ters in the Chesapeake Bay managed tomake baby oysters. There were Frenchand German theories about oysters thathe wanted to test. And there was also ahope that science could help save aMaryland oyster industry that was facingits first major crisis.

William Keith Brooks was only 30years old, a short and stout man whooften needed a haircut and probablyarrived in Crisfield still sporting thebushy brown beard he grew back ingraduate school at Harvard. Hisemployer, the Johns Hopkins University,was only three years old, a privatelyfunded school designed to focus onresearch and graduate studies. For thebiologist and his new university, this sum-mer research foray would be a chance tomake names for themselves. It would alsobe the first effort to apply academic sci-ence to managing the fisheries of theChesapeake Bay.

Within two days of his arrival inCrisfield, Brooks would use a simplewatch glass and his ever-present micro-scope to make a discovery that wouldbring him both fame and notoriety inMaryland. His findings — and hisadvocacy for those findings — wouldraise hopes that oyster harvests could beincreased a hundredfold in the Chesa -

peake Bay. There was a snag, of course, alarge snag: under the 1884 Brooks planoyster fishermen would have to give upmore space in the Bay for oyster farmers.His plan, after kicking off 130 years ofdebate, is now getting its first large-scaletest in Maryland waters.

The crisis that brought Brooks toCrisfield in 1879 was the recent drop inoyster harvests in the Chesapeake Bay. Inthe decades after the Civil War, those har-vests exploded as watermen discoveredhuge oyster reefs in Tangier andPocomoke sounds, and the transcontinen-tal railroads opened new markets in thewest. Tongers and dredgers were soonbattling each other to mine those newoyster reefs, and both groups were bat-tling the Maryland Oyster Police. During

this ongoing scramble, Maryland harvestsrose from three million bushels a year in1861 to 14 million bushels in 1874.

Then came the big slump, the first ofmany: by 1879, the annual harvestdropped from 14 million to 10 millionbushels. Ten million bushels would be abonanza today when annual harvests usu-ally hover around one percent of that, at100,000 bushels, but oyster entrepreneursof the 1870s thought the seafood indus-try had gone over a cliff.

Could science save this seafoodindustry ? The head of the Maryland FishCommission hoped so, and he invitedBrooks to bring his graduate studentsfrom Johns Hopkins down to Crisfieldand set up a summer research camp inthe heart of oyster country. The yearbefore, Brooks had organized his firstsummer camp, calling it the ChesapeakeZoological Laboratory and basing itdown at the mouth of the Bay. To enticeBrooks to Crisfield, the Maryland fishcommissioner outfitted his team with asteam yacht equipped for dredging oystersand provided three barges that his teamcould use for both lodging and lab facili-ties.

One science question Brooks hopedto answer was: how do oysters reproduce?According to several French and Germanresearchers, oyster eggs were fertilizedwithin the shell of female oysters, and theembryos stayed safe inside long enoughto develop tiny shells. Brooks had beguntesting that theory during the previoussummer camp down at Fort Wool,Virginia. He spent much of his time thatsession prying open oyster shells withoutever finding a single baby oyster lingeringin the shell of a single female oyster.

12 • Chesapeake Quarterly

THE OYSTER DREAMS OF W.K. BROOKSDiscovering the Chesapeake: Profiles in Science

As a student, William K. Brooks studied atHarvard with Louis Agassiz, the Swiss scientistwho became one of the founding fathers of themodern scientific tradition. As a biologist onthe faculty of the Johns Hopkins University,Brooks became the first great oyster scientist inAmerica and an early (and unsuccessful) advo-cate for oyster farming in Maryland waters.CREDIT: COURTESY OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Could science save a seafood industry?Michael W. Fincham

This is the first article in aseries about the pioneers ofChesapeake Bay science.

At Crisfield he tried a new approach.On May 21,1879 he opened a dozenoysters and identified three females filledwith eggs and one male ready with ripesperm. Scraping out the eggs and sperminto a watch glass, he tried mixing themtogether. And then he set up his micro-scope. Within two hours, he could seethat sperm was fertilizing the eggs float-ing in the watch glass. “Nearly all myeggs,” he wrote, “had been started ontheir long path toward the adult form.”

His finding was revolutionary. Oysterbabies were not born inside the shell offemales as described by French andGerman biologists. With the Americanspecies, females released their eggs outinto the water where, if they were lucky,they met up with sperm released by maleoysters. The tiny oyster offspring thatemerged out of these meetups then hadto survive on their own in the water:there would be no safe harbor inside amother’s shell. “The young of our oyster,”wrote Brooks, “swim at large in the openocean.”

The scientific importance of his find-ings was recognized immediately. AGerman journal quickly published hisscience paper. A French scientific societygave him a medal. And in this country,journalists decided the Chesapeake oystershowed truly American traits. Our oysterwas “more adventurous” than theEuropean species, wrote one observer. Itwas more “independent,” wrote another.“It refuses to be tied to its mother’s apronstrings,” said a third.

His discovery, it now seems, was anexample of a classic paradigm shift in sci-entific theory. A paradigm is generallydefined as a set of unexamined assump-tions underlying an accepted theory,assumptions that affect the way scientistssee — or fail to see — evidence right infront of their eyes. Boxed in by a pre-existing theory about European oysters,Brooks kept looking for evidence in thewrong place. Only when he began think-ing outside the box — or in this caseoutside the shell — did Brooks make hisbreakthrough.

Paradigm shifts can be painful.

Brooks still had difficulty in believingwhat he was seeing. Before publishing hisfindings, Brooks spent much of his timein Crisfield trying to disprove his owndiscovery. After opening more than 1,000oysters without finding a single babyinside a mother oyster, Brooks finallyannounced, “I have accumulated enoughevidence to show beyond the possibilityof doubt that eggs are fertilized outsidethe body of the parent .”

In Maryland his discovery raisedhopes for huge oyster harvests in thefuture. Each female oyster, according tohis estimates, could release millions ofeggs, and Brooks could usually fertilize98 percent of the female eggs in hiswatch glasses and tumblers. Sciencewould still have to solve a number oftechnical problems before oyster culturecould take off, but Brooks believed,rightly so, that they were solvable. “Theseinvestigations,” said Maryland’s fish com-missioners, “have placed it within ourpower to multiply the oyster to an indefi-nite amount.”

Because of his fame the General

Assembly asked Brooks to lead theOyster Commission of the State ofMaryland, an effort to investigate anindustry suspected of overfishing thestate’s oyster reefs. His university gavehim paid leave, and Brooks went to worktrying to apply his biological findings toreorganizing a rambunctious oysterfishery .

The result was his in-depth commis-sion report on the problems and potentialof the oyster industry in Maryland.According to Brooks, most of the prob-lems stemmed from overfishing of thenatural bars, and most of the potential layin the expansion of oyster farming. Toprotect the existing oyster bars, Brooksrecommended a series of steps: haltingharvests during the breeding season, set-ting size limits, returning small oysters tothe reefs, and dumping shucked shellback in the Bay to create a base wherenew oysters could settle. If applied, thesewould have represented first steps towardsscientific management of the Bay’s wildfishery.

But Brooks had a bigger dream. Hewanted to apply the new understandingof oyster biology in ways that wouldunleash the hidden bounty of the Bay.The state should lease out tracts of theBay bottom, he said, allowing large pri-vate oyster farms in the deeper watersand smaller plots along the shoreline. Thepayoff, he promised, would be huge:while the sales from oyster fishingbrought in $2 million a year in 1880 dol-lars, the harvest from farming could bringin hundreds of millions, and the tax rev-enues, he estimated, could pay most ofthe cost of state government.

It was a bold plan, but it was immedi-ately bedeviled by bad timing. Brookspublished his final report of the oystercommission in 1884 — but the next yearbrought a harvest of 15 million bushels,the highest total in history. The state hadcalled upon Brooks, hoping his sciencecould save the oyster fishery, but theproblem seemed to have solved itselfwithout his science and without hisfarms. So said his critics, and they werenumerous and politically powerful.

Volume 12, Number 1 • 13

“Learn to draw,” Brooks told his students. Inthe era before microscopic photographs, Brooksdrew what he saw under the microscope orwhat he dissected on his lab table. He createdstunning and detailed illustrations of numerousspecies. The drawing above shows the internalanatomy of an oyster, including the hinge, thehinge ligament, the muscle, the pericardium,the gills, and the lips. CREDIT: DRAWING FROM THE

OYSTER, BY W.K. BROOKS, © THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY,

USED WITH PERMISSION

Brooks, however, kept pushing hardfor his plan. His friends describedBrooks as quiet and thoughtful — “theshyest man in Baltimore,” said one —yet he quickly launched himself into themiddle of a heated policy debate. Hemay, in fact, have been the firstMaryland scientist to step beyond thetraditional role of academic researcherwhen he became an advocate for oysterfarming and for science-based manage-ment of the traditional fishery. To reachnon-technical audiences, he wrote arti-cles for Popular Science Monthly, and in1891 he published The Oyster, a popularsummary that laid out in layman’s lan-guage the biology of the oyster and thepotential of farming.

Despite his advocacy, Brooks wouldsee little progress toward oyster farmingin his lifetime, even as his prophecies oflong-term declines for the wild fisherybegan coming true. Within five years ofhis report, the harvest was down to athird of its historic high, but the GeneralAssembly made no move to encouragefarming. Anti-leasing forces would man-age to cripple every pro-farminginitiative attempted, both throughpolitical power and poaching, not justduring Brooks’s era but during the next130 years.

Why didn’t oyster farming catch onin Maryland? In her 2009 book, TheOyster Question, historian ChristineKeiner suggests that Brooks misread theculture of Tidewater communities andunderestimated their political power. Hisadvocacy for private leasing set up aninevitable clash with long-standing beliefsof watermen, and it was a clash he wasbound to lose. Watermen held that theoyster grounds were a commons open toall, an idea reaching back to the MagnaCarta. Oyster farming, according toBrooks’s various critics, was “a monstrousproposition,” a conspiracy between “thescientific fraternity” and corporate cartels,a conspiracy that would privatize thepublic commons and reduce watermen towage slaves.

In pushing their beliefs, Marylandwatermen had political power that

reached far beyond their populationnumbers. Each county in the state hadone senator in the General Assembly, andin Maryland that meant the manyTidewater counties, though sparsely pop-ulated, could easily outvote the urbanareas and the nontidal counties.

There’s a sad irony in Brooks’s career.His discovery in the summer of 1879raised hopes that science could help savethe oyster industry, but the leasing debatemay have derailed the first efforts toapply science to the task of managing thetraditional oyster fishery. As harvests con-tinued to slide, the state legislature beganadopting some of his recommendations— but slowly and only over the objec-tions of watermen who remained politi-cally powerful and distrustful of scientists.By the time the legislators acted, thehorse was already out of the barn.According to the Baltimore Sun, the greatreefs were being strip-mined by 8,000tongboats and 2,000 dredge boats.During Brooks’s lifetime, much of theBay’s original oyster stocks wereremoved.

The loss of the great reefs did morethan devastate the economy of theTidewater region: it also altered the ecol-ogy of the Chesapeake ecosystem.Oysters, we now know, played a majorrole in the ecology of the Bay, filteringout much of the algae and plankton thatnow cause annual dead zones of low orno oxygen. Compounding the catastro-phe were two disease epidemics thatarrived in the 1960s, further depleting thealready depleted reefs. One hundred yearsafter Brooks published his book, oysterstocks were down to less than one per-cent of their historic numbers.

For the rest of his life Brooks wouldremain an advocate of oyster farming, buthe focused most of his academic research

on basic morphological studies of othermarine species, including tunicates, bra-chiopods, arthropods, and coelenterates.In his last years, his writings turned tophilosophical and metaphysical topics thatmany of his own students found obscure.In 1908, at the age of 60, he died after anine-month struggle with congenitalheart problems that had burdened him allhis life.

His ideas, however, outlived his ene-mies. Perhaps most important was hisbelief that science should be applied tomanaging the oyster fishery. Cull limitswere introduced, seasons were established,shell return was encouraged. Enforcementbecame more aggressive. Science-basedmanagement is now the stated goal forthe state agencies that regulate all theBay’s fisheries.

Another idea that survived was hisbelief in waterside marine labs. HisChesapeake Zoological Laboratory,created as an annual summer camp, wasthe first laboratory to focus some of itsenergies on the Bay. That makes it theforerunner for the half-dozen marineresearch labs that now perch along theshores and rivers of the Bay. And alongthe Choptank River, the Horn PointLaboratory operates a hatchery thatusually spawns half a billion disease-freeoysters a year, applying in large scalethe basic biology that Brooks firstworked out with his watch glass andmicroscope.

Brooks’s dreams about oyster farmingwould also survive. In 2010, the governorof Maryland — on the advice of yetanother oyster advisory commission —announced major plans to encourage oys-ter farming in the waters of Maryland’sChesapeake Bay. New legislationremoved long-standing legal blocks toprivate leasing of Bay bottom and estab-lished new oyster sanctuaries carved outof the traditional harvest grounds of thewild fishery. And more than a centuryafter Brooks died, the state of Marylandbegan to organize new workshops totrain watermen on how to finallybecome oyster farmers.

— fincham@mdsg.umd.edu

14 • Chesapeake Quarterly

His ideas outlived hisenemies, especially his

belief that science shouldbe applied to managing

the oyster fishery.

Maryland will support four Knauss Marine PolicyFellows in 2013 to work for federal agencies on issuesinvolving marine and coastal resources. The fellows, all

of whom studied at the University of Maryland, will focus ontopics such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, fisheries, andinternational affairs.

Jennifer Bosch is spending her fel-lowship year in the Office ofLaboratories and CooperativeInstitutes at the National Oceanicand Atmospheric Administration(NOAA). She plans to collaboratewith researchers and decision makersto help them create policies andother tools to solve environmentalmanagement issues.

As a doctoral student in marine ecology and environmentalscience at the University of Maryland, she has studied the bio-geochemistry and ecological impacts of the Chesapeake Bay’slow-oxygen regions or “dead zones.” She is analyzing shifts inbenthic invertebrate community structure and consequences fornutrient cycling processes.

As an undergraduate and later a marine scientist at RutgersUniversity, she developed and ran a satellite data system aboutsea-surface temperatures that remains widely used by scientistsand commercial and recreational fishers.

Nicole Bransome is the inau-gural Knauss fellow for theDepartment of the Interior’sOcean, Coasts, and Great LakesCoordination team. As a policyand communications specialist,she will coordinate Interior’swork on oceans across thedepartment’s bureaus and withfederal partners.

Bransome is pursuing a master’s degree in the MarineEstuarine Environmental Sciences program at Maryland. For herthesis, she is modeling restoration of diadromous river herring inMaine and the resultant potential recovery of their groundfishpredators, like Atlantic cod.

Originally from Maryland, Bransome found a passion formarine science while volunteering with National Park Servicebiologists on studies of tidepools in San Diego. She also spent ayear working for AmeriCorps in the Maryland Park Service.

Carrie Soltanoff is serving in the National Marine FisheriesService Office of International Affairs at NOAA. Her portfoliowill include shark and Atlantic tuna conservation, bycatch reduc-tion, and regulation of foreign fishing vessels. She will produce

briefing materials and policypapers for meetings and nego-tiations on international issues.

Originally from upstateNew York, Soltanoff completeda master of science degree inthe Sustainable Developmentand Conservation Biology pro-gram at Maryland.

She served as a Peace Corpsvolunteer for two years in

Ecuador, where she conducted work for her thesis about shiftingenvironmental baselines among fishermen — the idea that eachgeneration of fishermen has a distinct view of the current state offish populations — and the implications for management of amarine reserve.

Metthea Yepsen is working inNOAA’s Restoration Center inthe Office of Habitat Conser -vation as a policy and sciencecoordinator on the office’sDeepwater Horizon oil spillrestoration efforts. She will assistin ensuring that science andadaptive management are inte-grated into restoration initiatives .

Yepsen received an M.S. degree in environmental science andtechnology from Maryland with a focus on wetland ecology andrestoration. For her thesis research, she worked on a U.S.Department of Agriculture project to evaluate the effectiveness offederal wetland conservation practices and restoration in agricul-tural areas. To measure ecosystem services provided by wetlands,she compared plant communities in natural, restored, and farm-land sites in several Mid-Atlantic states, including Maryland.

Yepsen completed a bachelor’s degree in the humanities,studying diplomatic history. Her career path changed when shejoined AmeriCorps in Hawaii, where she peformed conservationwork. Those experiences sparked an interest in a career in envi-ronmental science.

The Knauss Fellowship, begun in 1979, is designed to presentoutstanding graduate students with an opportunity to spend ayear working with policy and science experts in Washington,D.C. Fellowships run from February 1 to January 31 and pay ayearly stipend plus an allowance for health insurance, moving,and travel. Applicants must apply through the Sea Grant programin their state. For more information, visit:

• Maryland Sea Grant Program, Knauss Fellowships:www.mdsg.umd.edu/education/knauss/

• National Sea Grant Program, Knauss Fellowships: www.seagrant.noaa.gov/knauss

Volume 12, Number 1 • 15

Knauss Fellows in Maryland for 2013

Marcellino Retires asAdministrative Director

BonnyMarcellino,assistant directorfor administrationat Maryland SeaGrant, has retiredafter 15 years ofservice.

Marcellino’stenure was marked by several initiativesto modernize the administrative systemsthat enable Maryland Sea Grant to sup-port research, education, and outreachabout coastal resources. Under her leader-ship, the program was an early adopter ofnew tools in electronic systems and grantsand data management.

For example, Marcellino workedclosely with our IT and research staff todevelop software for online proposaldevelopment, submission, review, andapproval that was heralded for its innova-tion in the Sea Grant network. In addi-tion, Marcellino’s success in electronicmanagement was nationally recognizedand led Maryland Sea Grant to be one ofa handful of programs selected by NOAAto test a beta version of a new evaluationtool, which evolved into the agency’sNational Information Manage mentSystem (NIMS) and later the Planning,

Implementation, and EvaluationResources (PIER) system.

“She was innovative and a terrificadministrator, one of the finest I’veworked with across many different jobs,”said Fredrika C. Moser, director ofMaryland Sea Grant. “We will miss herexpertise and professionalism and thecritical role she played in grants manage-ment for our program.”

Allen Is New Assistant Director for Research

Maryland SeaGrant has namedMichael Allen asits new assistantdirector forresearch. Allen,who served since2012 as the col-lege’s research andeducation coordinator, will bring years ofexperience as a research administratorand freshwater ecologist to the position.

Allen will oversee the management ofMaryland Sea Grant’s diverse researchportfolio, which includes studies to betterunderstand the dynamics of the Chesapeake Bay and its watersheds andthe sustainable use of Maryland’s naturalresources.

He will also manage the college’s

graduate research fellowships and its sum-mer research program for undergraduates,Research Experiences for Undergrad -uates (REU). Each year the REUprogram places promising undergraduatestudents from across the country inresearch labs on the Chesapeake Bay towork with scientist mentors to designand conduct their own research projects.

Allen hopes to expand Maryland SeaGrant’s outreach to undergraduate andgraduate students, particularly to peoplewho traditionally have been underrepre-sented in the marine science community,such as women and members of minoritygroups.

Before joining Maryland Sea Grant,Allen worked in two positions at the U.S.National Oceanographic and Atmo -spheric Administration (NOAA). As a SeaGrant Knauss Marine Policy Fellow, heserved as an analyst for the agency’sOffice of Laboratories and CooperativeInstitutes. Later he worked as a contractorin the agency’s Office of Planning, Policy,and Evaluation. He developed nationalresearch policies and programs for theagency and coordinated a 150-personworkshop in Florida to explore the sci-ence behind the devastating DeepwaterHorizon oil spill.

Allen received his Ph.D. in ecology,evolution, and conservation biology fromthe University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2009.

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