Research Projects

Despite remediation attempts, the Anacostia River harbors legacy pollutants that remain a hazard to human and ecosystem health. Contaminants found in fish also biomagnify and bioaccumulate, impacting wildlife up the food chain and preventing safe fishing and recreation in the Anacostia River. Endocrine disrupting compounds are of particular concern, as detriments to reproductive success threaten the viability of native fish populations. Impacts to female reproduction are well-documented across fish taxa, but descriptions of sperm-related effects are limited.

Mysids are important mesozooplankton prey for many species of fish in Chesapeake Bay and are an important link in transferring energy from lower to upper trophic levels. Mysids also serve as biological vectors for benthic-pelagic coupling due to their diel vertical migration and omnivorous prey-switching behavior, which makes mysids important regulators of food web architecture. Despite their central role in coastal food webs, surprisingly little is known about mysid ecology and dynamics in Chesapeake Bay. This study proposes to develop a first-of-itskind mysid habitat model for Chesapeake Bay to understand how factors such as depth, temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen concentration affect mysid distribution and abundance in the Patuxent River, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay (CB) restoration is at a critical juncture. Just two years out from a 2025 deadline, water quality goals will likely not be reached. This is in part due to a struggle by local governments to prioritize nutrient reduction efforts with limited resources. There is also an increasing recognition by the CB Partnership that initiatives should focus on restoring shallow-water ecosystems near the land-water interface: habitats that are insufficiently monitored but highly relevant to societal use and the restoration goals of local governments.

This proposal seeks to significantly enhance phytoplankton monitoring capacity while harmonizing data collection and management by leveraging high-throughput plankton imaging systems and engaging a variety of researchers, state agencies, and stakeholders in Chesapeake Bay. As the base of aquatic food webs, phytoplankton abundance and diversity are sentinels for healthy coastal ecosystems and directly impact fisheries and aquaculture. Imaging systems are especially warranted in Chesapeake Bay as decreases in long-term monitoring programs (due to time commitment to count samples), loss of regional taxonomy expertise, and lack of new scientists trained in taxonomic identification collectively threaten our ability to provide critical data to inform science-based management decisions.

The soft-shell clam, (Mya arenaria, hereafter: Mya) a once important Maryland fishery, has declined to near insignificance for reasons believed to stem from certain epizootic pathogens and parasites and physiological stresses resulting from rising sea temperatures. More recently, commercial oyster aquaculture experienced significant growth resulting from genetic improvements. In 2022, the Morgan State University Patuxent Environmental and Aquatic Research Laboratory successfully demonstrated large-scale breeding of Maryland wild Mya within a shellfish hatchery setting, establishing a first milestone toward developing Mya as a potential aquaculture product. Subsequently the team used these Mya seed to investigate the suitability of several novel subtidal culture methods.

Coastal resiliency against rapid relative sea-level rise and other environmental changes is one of the biggest challenges facing managers globally and especially in Chesapeake Bay (CB). Most efforts to stabilize shorelines now include natural and nature-based features, such as living shorelines (LS), yet questions remain about their performance over time. This study takes advantage of previous studies in mesohaline CB to study LS with a spectrum of ages: 4 LS with ages 2-4 (previous data) and 7-8 years (this study), and 4 nearby LS with ages ~10 (previous data) and ~17-18 years (this study).

Baltimore City is a coastal city with 61 miles of coastline that supports international commerce, maritime activities, waterfront businesses and tourism/recreation. Despite this active and flourishing waterfront, underserved coast-adjacent South Baltimore neighborhoods including Brooklyn, Curtis Bay, Cherry Hill and Brooklyn Park have limited access to landscapes adjacent to the City’s coastal waterfront. This limited access prevents residents from actualizing the physical and mental health benefits of these “blue spaces” and limits the equitable distribution of climate change resilience benefits from urban heat island mitigation.

The Chesapeake Bay mouth plume is an important yet understudied system that transports large amounts of nutrients and organic matter to the continental shelf. The role of this dynamic plume in structing the population and diet of juvenile fish species that migrate through and (or) reside in this ecotone for at least part of their juvenile stage is largely unknown.

Rationale: Blue crab harvests and populations are highly variable in Maryland. Viral disease is a possible cause of blue crab mortalities, but  little is known about viruses in crabs. Interstate transport of blue crabs may introduce new viruses into the bay.

Ecosystem-based management approaches require an understanding of how environmental conditions interact with living ecosystem components to influence the productivity of harvested species. This project is structured around the central hypothesis that the intensity, duration, and spatial extent of hypoxia will have important and measurable effects on the benthic invertebrate community that anchors much of the Chesapeake Bay demersal food web and contributes to the diet of many economically and ecologically important fishery species. In addition to this central hypothesis, we will evaluate the ecological trade-offs resulting from simultaneous stimulation of food availability and habitat loss (e.g., hypoxia) associated with nutrient loading.

The Maryland shellfish aquaculture industry has grown rapidly in the last decade. However, the industry currently consists of only a single species, the Eastern oyster. The monoculture approach leaves the industry vulnerable to disease, climate change, and market fluctuations which pose threats to sustainable industry growth. The soft-shell clam (Mya arenaria) is a commercially important shellfish species harvested in Northeast U.S. coastal waters. This species can grow and reproduce in low salinity waters, which makes it a strong candidate species for culture in Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay. Further, several Maryland growers have stated their interest in culturing this species.

The potential for net nitrogen removal due to oyster aquaculture is strongly related to the transport and fate of oyster biodeposits. Biodeposits exported from aquaculture sites may enhance denitrification rates elsewhere while mitigating the impacts of organic matter over-enrichment at the aquaculture site, and/or suspended biodeposit organic matter may be denitrified in the water column. Both processes are currently not well understood. We propose a 6-wk ecosystem experiment in six shear-turbulence-resuspension-mesocosm (STURM, Porter et al. 2018a) tanks with tidal resuspension to address these questions. Three tanks will receive daily oyster biodeposit additions to mimic an aquaculture site and three tanks will not in order to represent background natural conditions.

Management efforts to reduce nutrient pollution have prompted the recovery of submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) in the Chesapeake Bay (CB), particularly in the Bay’s tidal fresh and oligohaline waters. Unfortunately, benthic filamentous cyanobacteria have also become increasingly common in some of the areas where SAV is expanding the most. Although the prevalence of cyanobacteria is increasing globally, it is relatively uninvestigated in CB where it may threaten the stability and resilience of recovering SAV, disrupt the nutrient balance of SAV beds, which are generally thought to be nutrient sinks, and potentially affect recreational and commercial activities if they produce toxic compounds.

Urbanization has negative environmental impacts, including increasing the export of eutrophying pollutants, such as nitrogen, that reach downstream water bodies. In response, efforts are underway to use “green” stormwater infrastructure (GSI) that enhances infiltration of stormwater and increases retention and removal of pollutants. However, the effectiveness of GSI regarding nitrogen is questionable: there is evidence that some GSI provides no more nitrogen (or sometimes, less) retention than traditional stormwater management. The reason for this apparent limitation of GSI is uncertain and is the focus of the proposed research.

Oyster aquaculture is a rapidly growing industry in Maryland’s Chesapeake waters which stimulates economic activity and may provide a host of ecosystem benefits. A potential concern associated with the intensification of the oyster aquaculture is the local production and accumulation of oyster biodeposits, which can lead to a porewater sulfide accumulation and declining bioturbation, symptoms of declining ecosystem function. Sulfide is naturally removed from the seafloor by the interactions between bioturbating infauna and sulfide oxidizing bacteria. Here, we propose exploring the feasibility of using benthic microbial fuel cells (BMFCs) to accelerate sulfide oxidation in areas of high biodeposit accumulation, below oyster aquaculture cages.

Shoreline erosion is a major issue globally and in Chesapeake Bay, leading to increased shoreline-stabilization efforts. Recent efforts have focused on living shorelines living shorelines as the preferred method to reduce erosion, but questions remain regarding their effectiveness and potential impacts to adjacent shallow-water benthic habitats over the long term (~10 years). These are pressing management issues in the Chesapeake Bay, where two key open questions challenge widespread adoption of living shorelines: 1) how well living shorelines reduce erosion and persist over time; and 2) how installation impacts SAV habitat and distributions over time. While we have examined these questions at some Chesapeake Bay sites, we have been limited to one design type.

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.

Salinization is increasingly affecting many watersheds, significantly impacting drinking water resources and infrastructure, reducing stability and resilience of aquatic ecosystems, and potentially hindering stream and river restoration efforts. Salinization is related to deicer use on roadways with additional contributions from accelerated weathering of impervious surfaces, water softeners, and sewage. The concentrations of chloride observed in many urban streams in Maryland now exceed the limit of 250 mg/L established by the U.S. EPA for chronic toxicity to freshwater life. These observed ranges and extreme fluctuations in salinity can mobilize nitrogen, phosphorus, base cations, and toxic metals from sediments to streams due to enhanced ion exchange and solubility.

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.

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.