Chesapeake Quarterly Volume 1 Number 22 • CHESAPEAKE QUARTERLY CONTENTS 3 Seeds of Change Buried in the Bay 10 The Core of a Life Profile:A Scientist’s Career 12 At the Top of

CHESAPEAKEQUARTERLYCHESAPEAKEQUARTERLY

Paleoecology and the BayDigging up the PastDigging up the Past

Paleoecology and the Bay

MARYLAND SEA GRANT COLLEGE • SUMMER 2002MARYLAND SEA GRANT COLLEGE • SUMMER 2002

2 • CHESAPEAKE QUARTERLY

CONTENTS

3 Seeds of ChangeBuried in the Bay

10 The Core of a LifeProfile:A Scientist’s Career

12 At the Top of Her GameGrad Student Scores at Science

14 Mentoring Tomorrow’s ScientistsREU Summer Fellowships

15 Et Cetera Newsletter on Research and the BayDocumentary Wins Emmy

16 Calendar

Pioneer in Paleoecology

We often hear that sound man-agement of the ChesapeakeBay is based on “good sci-

ence.” On the other hand, we seldomhear very much about the scientiststhemselves, many of whom have spentyears, decades, even their entire adult livestracking what to many of us would seemvery narrow parts of the universe. In thisissue of Chesapeake Quarterly we focus onone of those scientists, Grace Brush, whohas taken the long view — the history ofthe Bay’s ecosystem as recorded in thepages of its sediments. Buried in the Bay:Seeds of Change delves into the science ofpaleoecology as it follows Brush into thefield in search of ancient traces of Pfies-teria piscicida, a potentially toxic micro-organism virtually unknown until the1980s.

Brush has been part of another aspect of history as well in her determination tobecome a researcher at a time when few women were encouraged to join the ranks ofserious scientists. The Core of a Life chronicles Brush’s career from college studies inNova Scotia to advanced education in Chicago and at Harvard University, and detailshow she managed to establish a significant career and raise a family despite the obsta-cles. Today things have changed — percentages of women graduating from college andenrolling in graduate school have risen sharply — a trend evident in Brush’s two femalegraduate assistants. Despite these advances, some argue that barriers remain — oftenquite subtle — for women who pursue long-term careers in the world of scientificresearch.

The pipeline of well-trained women in science-based careers has improved consid-erably — an important factor has been the Research Experiences for Undergraduates(REU) program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and locally adminis-tered by Maryland Sea Grant (see page 14). Over fourteen years, women have generallymade up more than half of each summer’s class of undergraduates who have come towork directly with researchers at the University of Maryland Center for EnvironmentalScience and the Academy of Natural Science Estuarine Research Center. Many of themhave gone on to graduate work in the marine sciences.

In coming issues of Chesapeake Quarterly we will continue to examine the contribu-tions of researchers who have helped us better understand the Chesapeake Bay.As weconfront a number of complex challenges — the control of non-native species of fishand shellfish and the use of increasingly sophisticated computer models to help manageBay restoration — we will continue to rely on the hard work of dedicated researchersand scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the coast and its complexnatural environment.

— The Editors

Chesapeake QuarterlyVolume 1, Number 2

Chesapeake Quarterly is published fourtimes a year by the Maryland Sea GrantCollege for and about the marine research,education and outreach community aroundthe state.

This newsletter is produced and funded bythe Maryland Sea Grant College Program,which receives support from the NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration andthe state of Maryland. Managing Editor andArt Director, Sandy Rodgers; ContributingEditors, Jack Greer and Merrill Leffler. Senditems for the newsletter to:

Chesapeake QuarterlyMaryland Sea Grant College4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 300University System of MarylandCollege Park, Maryland 20740301.403.4220, fax 301.403.4255e-mail: [email protected]

For more information about Maryland SeaGrant, visit our web site: www.mdsg.umd.edu

On the cover and opposite page: GraceBrush has taken hundreds of core samples offthe bottom of Chesapeake Bay and its rivers.In these photos, she works with two youngscientists,Angie Arnold and Holly Bowers,getting ready to plunge yet another piston coreinto the bottom of yet another river. Photosby Skip Brown.

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SEEDS OF CHANGEBY MICHAEL W. FINCHAM

Buried in the Bay

SUMMER 2002 • 3

Light gray clouds are mov-ing low above the Chica-macomico River, diffusing

the daylight, darkening the slug-gish water, desaturating all thegreens in the marshes and woodsfringing the river.As she carrieslong plastic pipes to a small boat,Grace Brush keeps glancing atthat shifting sky. Clouds like this could be carrying rain.

She’s a 71-year-old paleoecologist who’s come a long way toget here to this lonely boat landing in the soggy marshlands ofthe middle Eastern Shore of Maryland, and she’s hoping to getin a good day’s work on the water without getting drenched.

Brush left Johns Hopkins University around 7 a.m. in a largeblue van loaded with her odd gear and a crew of three youngscientists.They rattled through Baltimore’s morning rush hour,crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge with its wide view of theupper mainstem, then cruised east across Kent Island on a six-lane highway flanked by shopping malls and discount outlets.Turning south they followed four-lane Route 50, running pastflat farms and huge billboards for Ocean City. At Easton, andagain at Cambridge, they cruised through a long gauntlet of fastfood franchises and chain motels and gas stations.

At the Nanticoke River, they pulled off the highway into thesmall riverfront village of Vienna and hooked up with two state

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SEEDS OF CHANGEBY MICHAEL W. FINCHAM

Buried in the Bay

workers towing a trailered boat.In caravan now they went bump-ing off down two-lane countryroads that seemed to run straightback in time. Driving past smallfarm fields, stands of forest andopen swatches of flat marshlandgashed by narrow, twisty creeks,they were soon deep into the old

tidewater Maryland of a hundred years ago.At Drawbridge, an isolated creek crossing, they parked next

to the only building in sight, a long, garage-like shed that washome to a boat-building business — and a boat ramp.The stateworkers backed their skiff down into the river, and Brush andher crew began laying five pipes neatly along the bottom of theboat.They look like irrigation pipes or the sections plumbersinstall in the foundations of new buildings, but these are trans-parent tubes and Brush will be plunging them into the bottomof the Chicamacomico River. For more than 30 years, she hasbeen using see-through pipes like these to look into the past, allthe way back to when the foundations of the Chesapeake werefirst laid down. Out of her work has come an eventful storyabout historic changes in the Bay.

On this trip the paleoecologist is tackling a contemporaryquestion: how long has Pfiesteria piscicida been living in Chesa-peake Bay? Only five years ago, in September 1997, this stretch

Year by year, century by century, earth and leavesand seeds have been settling layer by layer into the

sediments along the Bay’s bottom.Paleoecologist Grace Brush has been hauling up those sediments and using them to unlock the

long-term memory of the Chesapeake.

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of river near Drawbridge became brieflyfamous when the Chicamacomico wasthe third river closed by the governor ofMaryland because of sick fish and suspi-cions about Pfiesteria piscicida.Thisdinoflagellate, a one-celled microorgan-ism with two tails, is thought to releasetoxins around fish, and medicalresearchers found evidence those toxinscould also cause mental confusion inhumans, especially short-term memoryloss. Medical findings like these led toriver closings, massive news coverage, andongoing controversies about the role ofchicken farms in causing Pfiesteriablooms.After months of heated debate,the state legislature passed new regula-tions requiring all Maryland farmers toreduce runoff into the state’s rivers.

Which came first — the chicken orthe microbe? Brush sought funding fromthe Maryland Sea Grant College forexploratory research.“We want to findout whether Pfiesteria is a recent kind ofphenomenon,” says Brush.“Or has itoccurred sporadically over time?”Pfiesteria’s multiple life stages include botha free-swimming cell that darts throughthe water as well as a tough, seed-like

cyst that buries itself in the sediment. IfPfiesteria was blooming here before indus-trial chicken farming became popular,then Brush might be able to find rem-nants of its cysts.

As she and her crew pull away fromthe dock, the clouds slide open briefly,flashing slivers of blue. At the helm ofthe 19-foot skiff is Cue Johnson, a stateworker from the Maryland Departmentof Natural Resources who helps coordi-nate river monitoring for Pfiesteria. Lankyand laconic, he answers questions aboutthe region as he guides the boat pastopen marshes broken by stands of woods.“These are primarily hunting areas,” saysJohnson.“A lot of wealthy people ownbig stretches of this.” Only an occasionalhouse can be seen behind the trees andthen a farm building off beyond themarshes. It’s easy to see why the low-lying landscape of eastern DorchesterCounty has been called “the Evergladesof Maryland.”

The river, in its empty reaches, seemsto flow back in time through a changelesslandscape — but that’s an illusion.Theseare not the same waters and woods whereNative Americans hunted.The skiff is

gliding past stands of second, third andfourth-growth woods, dominated now byloblolly pine that grew up after centuriesof land clearing for farming and timber-ing removed most of the hardwood treesthat were here when the colonists came.Before the Europeans, Native Americansaround the Chesapeake hunted in woodsthat also held hemlock, oak and hickory,trees that did well nearly 1,000 years agoduring a two-century dry spell. Earlierstill, trees like sweet gum and black gumdominated many of these woods during along wet stretch reaching back nearly6,000 years. If you look all the way backsome 9,000 years ago to the long begin-nings of the Chesapeake Bay, you’ll findhemlock and pine flourishing and oakincreasing as the last Ice Age retreated andthe sea came creeping up into theserivers.And if you look back further still toa colder time 12,000 years ago when icesheets still covered parts of Pennsylvania,you’ll find plenty of spruce and fir, north-ern trees long gone from these lands.

Most of us, of course, can’t look backthat far, but Brush can.And that 12,000-year chronology of forests in the Chesa-peake watershed has been constructedlargely out of years of work by her andher graduate students. In 1969 when shefirst arrived in the region, Brush begantaking narrow cylinders of mud out ofrivers around Baltimore County. Shedrove to the sites of old water-poweredmills that once jutted into rivers alongthe fall line of the Piedmont Plateau.After these aged mills collapsed, theirruins helped dam up decades of sedi-ment, and when Brush, trained as apaleobotanist, went looking in those sedi-ment traps, she found seeds and pollen inwell-preserved layers.Why not try thesame approach elsewhere around theBay? “I thought this was a techniquewhereby we could study the history ofthe estuary,” says Brush.

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The idea was simple, even elegant. Riversediments all around the Bay might holda long-term record of changes in theChesapeake.Year by year, century by cen-tury, rains have been falling, and earth

Core samples are marked with date and location, as Angie Arnold is doinghere, then taken back to the laboratory, where they are opened and the painstakingprocess of analyzing the contents of each layer of sediment begins.

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and leaves and seeds have been washing and blowing off the landand into the rivers and mainstem of the estuary. Century by centu-ry, all that stuff has been settling, layer by layer, centimeter by cen-timeter, into the sediments along the bottom.Those sedimentscould hold hidden within them remnants of what once grew onthe land and lived in the water.They could hold the long-termmemory of the Chesapeake.

If the idea was simple, the work was not. Back in her lab, Brushwould slice her cores lengthwise, cut out a number of one-cen-timeter cross sections, and then chemically wash each sample toisolate the pollen grains and seeds. She would pick patientlythrough her samples, one centimeter at a time, counting what shefound, naming what she could, then move on to the next centime-ter, slowly working her way down through time.What Brush hadto create, largely through lab work and brain work, was a way ofreading that record — and putting dates on it.That would taketime, scanning electron microscopes, carbon-14 dating techniques,library research — and a lot of graduate students.

About 20 minutes downstream from Drawbridge, Cue Johnsoncuts the motor, letting the boat drift.Angie Arnold, one of Brush’scurrent graduate students at Johns Hopkins, lifts a pipe and beginsto assemble something called a piston core sampler.A slim brunettein a baseball cap, she works quickly, screwing a metal clamp aroundthe tube and attaching a metal push rod useful for forcing thecylinder down into the river bottom. Brush threads a rope downthrough the tube, ties it to a plug (she calls it a piston) and thenpromptly jams the plug/piston back into the end of the tube, creat-ing a seal.The piston core sampler, assembled, looks like a low-tech, home-made contraption, and it is.The plastic tube came froma building supplier and the metal clamp from a machine shop.

Today the paleoecologists from Hopkins have a couple of high-tech helpers with them in the boat.Watching and helping whenthey can are Holly Bowers and Torstein Tengs from the Universityof Maryland Biotechnology Institute.They work in the lab of DavidOldach, a medical doctor and an infectious disease specialist withthe Institute for Human Virology, who devised a gene probe thatcan find Pfiesteria in water and sediment by detecting its DNA. Histest, created quickly after the 1997 Pfiesteria episodes in Maryland, isnow widely used for analyzing samples collected along the EastCoast. Oldach’s research assistants are down on the river with Brushbecause they want to find out whether his probe can find Pfiesteriaremnants that may have been buried decades or centuries earlier.

Tengs, a young buzzcut Norwegian, is here for another reason.Plunging a piston core into the bottom is muscle work.“OkayTorstein, now you know why we brought you along,” laughsBrush. Leaning above the water, he and Holly slide the core sam-pler into the water, probing for the bottom.Then Torstein lifts upon his toes, hunches his shoulders and shoves down hard on thepush rod, grunting, as the tube punches down through the mud.Bowers leans over the water, holding the tube steady, and next toher Arnold kneels on the gunnel pulling steadily on the rope, slow-ly dragging the piston plug up through the core. Inside the pipe,the plug creates a vacuum, holding the sediment in place, much

Captured in a core, pollen grains and seeds, diatoms andphytoplankton all signal changes that have taken place on landand in the water. This schematic lists some of the data thatBrush has found in samples in the upper Chesapeake and theshifts they reflect.

What plants and animals were in thewater twenty years ago — or a thousand? Poring oversediment cores, Grace Brush has unearthed vestiges ofwhat was once abundant in the Bay and its watershed,from diatoms to dinoflagellates, along with clearevidence of the great land clearing that followedEuropean colonization. Photo courtesy JohnsHopkins University.

SUMMER 2002 • 7

like a finger over a straw. Down belowthe dark water, the tube sinks into thebottom, slowly filling with sediment.

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These sediments down along the bottomof the Chicamacomico could hold seedbeds for future Pfiesteria blooms. Pfiesteriais one of several algal and dinoflagellatespecies that can drop out of the watercolumn, switch into a cyst form and thenwait in the sediment until the conditionsare right to emerge again.Along theNew England coast, a species calledAlexandrium, a cause of paralytic shellfishpoisoning, moved down from the north-ern Gulf of Maine to create seed bedsalong Cape Cod. In the Gulf of Mexico,Gymnodinium breve, a cause of neurotoxicshellfish poisoning, forms seed beds alongthe shores of Texas and Louisiana.

On September 13,1997, this stretch ofthe Chicamacomico was the scene ofsome kind of toxic bloom followed byother kinds of disturbing results. On awarm, windless morning, seven stateworkers arrived in Drawbridge to find aheavy mist rising off the river and hun-dreds of thousands of fish swimmingerratically, most of them menhaden.When three of the workers went out in aboat to take fish trawls, they found redlesions on every fish they hauled out.Whether Pfiesteria could be causing theselesions is a question still hotly debated,with some fish pathologists naming otherbacterial and fungal species as the likelyculprits behind lesions like these.Nevertheless, all the water samples takenthat day would show Pfiesteria-like organ-isms in large numbers.

What happened next was later docu-mented in the Journal of Toxicology andEnvironmental Health. Most of the workersat the river that morning were quicklystruck with flu-like symptoms — includ-ing four workers who never went out onthe water.While standing on the bridge,they apparently inhaled toxins that wererising off the river during a bloom event.The immediate symptoms includedburning eyes for four of the workers andheadaches or sore throats for six.Withinthe next three days, four workers also

reported unusual exhaustion and mentalconfusion. Six of the seven sufferedcrampy abdominal pain, nausea or diar-rhea. Could this kind of bloom eventleave a seed bed behind?

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The three young scientists slowly haulup Brush’s core sampler, then heave thedripping pipe up out of the river andaboard the skiff. In the lower half of thetube they can see about two feet ofunbroken sediment.The sediment stick-ing out of the bottom looks like a darkgoulash flecked with rust-colored bits ofgrass.

Arnold kneels quickly and with herhand seals the tube until her boss can popa red plastic cap on the bottom.Thenmore muscle work as the young Nor-wegian yanks and yanks on the rope run-ning down through the tube, working thepiston plug up the pipe, pulling up againstthe vacuum. When it finally pops, he getsa quick whiff of that marsh-rot stinkfamiliar to field workers who go muckingthrough wetlands.Arnold quickly caps thetop and Bowers wraps both ends withduct tape.While Grace snaps photographsof the site,Arnold labels the tape.

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When Brush first began picking throughher early cores, she found seeds andpollen in great numbers, often hundredsin a single centimeter of mud.They hadbeen blown into the river by wind orwashed in by rain. Instead of taking rootas trees or plants, these seeds settled intothe sediments, leaving a layered record ofthe trees and vegetation that once hadcovered the land. But how ancient werethese seeds? The great puzzle was how to

put dates on all the layers in hercores.

Ragweed pollen providedone of her breakthroughs.

When Brush worked her waythrough her core samples, she would

find — at certain levels — suddenjumps in ragweed counts.Anyone withthe right kind of allergies knows that rag-weed pollen in the air can lead to swollensinuses, itchy eyes and sneezing fits.Theweed itself is an opportunistic plant thatgrows fast in broken ground, whether itbe plowed farm fields or urban construc-tion sites.Although there’s a lot of rag-weed around in modern life, there wasprobably little around to bother NativeAmerican hunter-gatherers.When shefound those sudden jumps in ragweedcounts in her cores, Brush was looking ata signal left by the first large-scale clearingof the land. European settlers had arrivedand with their axes and hoes had left theirsignature on the new land and on thesediments in its waters.Those clumps ofpollen gave Brush a piece of core shecould point to and put a date on. She hadfound her first “event horizon” in themud.

There would be other key horizons:the first use of plowing, the first use ofchemical fertilizers, massive deforestationfor large-scale grain farming, reforestationon abandoned farmland, the disappear-ance of chestnut trees, even the testing ofnuclear weapons (the cesium horizon).All these eras left their marks in the mud,marks that could be dated.The simplertechniques included counting pollen; themore complicated included measuringthe decay rates of radioactive isotopes.Once she could time-date several hori-zons, Brush could begin calculating sedi-mentation rates for different eras of histo-ry in different parts of the Bay.

Core by core, paper by paper, Brushslowly built a reputation as a pioneer inChesapeake Bay science. Geologists hadalready been using sediment cores fordecades to study the ocean and search foroil.And scientists had already begunusing pollen patterns in sediments oflakes to reveal the history of land-use

Brush publishedgroundbreaking

research showing thatragweed pollen left a clearsignal in estuaries, a signal

that could be used to datehistoric land changes in the Chesapeake.

changes in the upper Midwest andelsewhere. What Brush did waspioneer that approach in theChesapeake, persisting in the faceof early doubts about its usefulnesshere.An estuary, after all, is not alake. Since river waters are mixingwith ocean waters in an estuary,sediments could be washing outto sea. If not, they could beunreadable as a result of mixing bytidal flux and resuspension andgeneral bioturbation.“No onethought that the estuary could beused for this type of work,” saysBrush.

But with the findings from hercores, she was able to publishgroundbreaking research showingthat ragweed pollen left a clearsignal in estuaries as well as lakes.According to the late DonPritchard, a pioneer in Bayoceanography, her early resultssurprised her colleagues by show-ing “how much we can learn bylooking at the bottom.” Her rag-weed signal, he said, would helpestablish dates for historic changesin the watershed — both on theland and in the Bay. “That is just agreat marker. It is just wonderfulto use that,” explains Thomas M. Cronin,leader of new sediment coring project bythe United States Geological Service.“She was the first to do this type of workin the Chesapeake Bay.”

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And she found a lot more than seedsand pollen in her cores: there weremicrofossils of diatoms and dinoflagel-lates, copepods and cladocera — goodevidence for the phytoplankton and zoo-plankton food webs once found in thesewaters.Also in the mix were fossil piecesof the Bay’s early bottom dwellers, fromworms to clams and oysters and under-water grasses. Over three decades and 300cores, Brush has been writing a first draftof the history of environmental change inthe Chesapeake.

For centuries, the greatest force forchange was climate. In the sediments

Brush found shifts in animal and plantpopulations that corresponded with cli-mate swings like the Warm MedievalPeriod which lasted from 900 to 1200A.D. and the Little Ice Age which fol-lowed it. Beginning with European set-tlement, human life on the land began,slowly at first, to force changes in thewater.“The core records show that earlyagricultural activity had very little effecton the sediment,” says Brush “The firstfarming was simply clearing some forest,girdling trees and planting tobacco inhills as the Indians had planted corn. Itwas later when people were shifting tograin farming and crop rotation that soilerosion in the estuary began to reallyincrease.”As more farmers cut down treesand plowed up the soil, sedimentationrates would double, then double again. Inthe upper fresh-water reaches of the trib-

utaries, the rates could run tentimes higher than in pre-Colonialyears.

And that changed everything.With increased sedimentation,dozens of shipping ports began tosilt up. Bay waters became darker,letting less light through to bot-tom grasses.With the decrease inforest cover came a decrease indiversity of phytoplankton, thefloating plants that form the baseof the Bay’s food webs.Withheavy use of fertilizers, underwa-ter grasses actually increased atfirst, especially in the upperreaches of the Bay, only todecline and nearly disappear dur-ing the 1970s.

In her cores, especially in thediatom records, Brush and formergraduate student Sherri Cooperfound clear evidence of the mostpowerful change of all: the shiftfrom a system dominated by bot-tom-dwelling plants and animalsto one dominated by floatingplankton. Phytoplankton declinedin species diversity but increaseddramatically in total numbers, andthat increase altered the dynamicsof the system. Fed by fertilizers

and animal waste and sewage, the annualblooms of phytoplankton were blockingmuch of the sunlight needed by bottomgrasses, a key habitat for small fish andcrabs.With blooms now exceeding thegrazing rates of zooplankton, large die-offs of phytoplankton were sucking oxy-gen out of the water column, leaving inthe sediments a record of anoxia thatBrush and Cooper were able to docu-ment in their cores. Oysters, clams,worms, underwater grasses, even migra-tory fish could no longer flourish in thesedark dead zones that were spreading nowalong the bottom of the Bay. Bottompopulations kept declining, and floatingpopulations kept increasing, especiallyalgae and dinoflagellates.

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The clouds sloshing across the skiesfinally unleash their rain on the Chica-

8 • CHESAPEAKE QUARTERLY

The DNA of Pfiesteria shows up on a geneprobe developed at the Institute of Human Virology. HollyBowers checks the photo of a DNA gel for evidence of Pfiesteriain the Chicamacomico River.

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SUMMER 2002 • 9

macomico. A light shower drifts alongthe river first, sprinkling Brush and hercrew as they try and fail to punch a fifthcore sample down into a hard patch ofbottom. In brackish waters like these,Brush tries to bring home five or sixtubes to make sure she gets one coherentcore sample.At the boat ramp, the rainlets up while the scientists unload theirlong tubes, then a drenching rain ham-mers down as they head home in theirblue van along slickening roads, wipersflicking.

The lab findings from these rainy-daycores are puzzling. Back at JohnsHopkins,Arnold and Bowers go to work,looking for DNA and dates for Pfiesteria.They slice each core lengthwise, crack itopen to examine the stratigraphy, thenwork down the split core, cutting match-ing one-centimeter slices.After Bowersdrives her samples across town to DavidOldach’s laboratory at the Institute forHuman Virology, she is able to detectPfiesteria DNA in only one core out offour from the Chicamacomico.

With that news,Arnold and Brush goback to their samples from that samecore, trying to figure out the dates forthose first appearances of Pfiesteria. Aftereyeballing and counting grains and seeds,Arnold is able to date one pollen horizonaround 1700 and another around 1880.The Pfiesteria DNA, however, is almostright at the top of the core.That’s puz-zling because many scientists believe acreature as complicated as Pfiesteria, withmultiple life stages and complex feedingstrategies, must have an ancient evolu-tionary history.The Pfiesteria “horizon” inthese first Chicamacomico cores, howev-er, is so recent it looks like Pfiesteria justshowed up yesterday.

There are similar results from otherwaters. Brush and her collaborators findthe DNA of recent Pfiesteria in one corefrom the Pocomoke, one core fromIndian River Bay in Delaware and onecore from the middle of the ChesapeakeBay.This last core, donated by ThomasCronin’s group at USGS, holds over 20feet of sediment, reaching back 18,000years into the age of the last glaciers.

With this, their longest core, they test 14separate slices, taken every 10 centime-ters, back down to 1860 and slightlybeyond. But Pfiesteria shows up onlytwice: at the 1980 level, and then onceagain at the 1940 level.

From these first cores, it is clearPfiesteria was around before the recentexplosion in industrial chicken farming— but possibly not in great abundance.Brush doesn’t want to read too muchinto these early findings. “When itdoesn’t show up, it doesn’t mean thatPfiesteria wasn’t there,” she says. On theirlongest core they tested only 14 slices outof the last 150 years, roughly a 1-in-10sampling. If they could afford to testevery centimeter, an expensive proposi-tion, Pfiesteria DNA might show up inmore of those untested, in-between slices.So far, however, it is proving somewhateasier to find Pfiesteria in recent ratherthan in ancient sediments.

And those recent sediments may holdother troublesome species. Since thePfiesteria episodes of 1997, a number ofother, sometimes-toxic species have beendiscovered in the Bay for the first time.The Bay is now home to microorganismslike Chattonella, a red-tide algae thatcaused fish kills in Japan and Norway;Microcystis, a cyanobacteria that forms ablue-green algae scum that makes animalssick; and Dinophysys, a dinoflagellate thatcaused oyster bed closures in thePotomac in 2002. Oldach’s lab is alreadydeveloping a gene probe that will test forthe DNA of Chattonella, a test that couldbe later be applied to Brush’s archive ofPfiesteria cores.

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Brush and her young collaborators mayend up documenting yet another subtleshift in the changing ecology of theChesapeake.As they work these newcores, their goal is to analyze howchanges in land use affect water qualityand alter dinoflagellate communities(including Pfiesteria). Her earlier coreshelped verify the historic shift from a Baysystem once dominated by bottomdwellers to one now dominated by float-ing plants and fertilized by heavy nutrient

inflows. Her recent cores could showwhether all those floating species andnutrients are supplying food and energyfor toxic blooms, allowing species oncescarce to flourish in the contemporaryBay. Then Brush, the persistent pioneer,will have written yet another new chap-ter in her history of environmentalchange in the Chesapeake.

For More InformationChesapeake BayThe Chesapeake: An Environmental

Biography. 2001. John R. Wennersten.Maryland Historical Society: Baltimore.

“The Chesapeake Bay Estuarine System.”1995. Grace Brush. Pages 397-416 in:N. Roberts, ed., The Changing GlobalEnvironment. Blackwell: Oxford, UK.

The Chesapeake Bay: Geologic Product ofRising Sea Level. http://pubs.usgs.gov/factsheet/fs102-98/

Discovering the Chesapeake: The History ofan Ecosystem. 2001. Philip D. Curtin,Grace S. Brush, and George W. Fisher,eds. Baltimore:The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.

Effect of Climate Variability and HumanActivities on Chesapeake Bay.http://pubs.usgs.gov/factsheet/fs116-00/

The Pfiesteria Files. A Maryland Sea Grantdocumentary that examines the “Pfies-teria hysteria” that gripped much of themid-Atlantic in 1997. Available in VHSvideo format. www.mdsg.umd.edu/store//pfiesteria_files/index.html

Pfiesteria and Harmful Algal blooms, Mid-Atlantic Sea Grant programs web site.www.pfiesteria.seagrant.org/

Calvert Marine Museum, paleontology ofthe Chesapeake. www.calvertmarinemuseum.com/paleontology.htm

Women in Science

From Scarcity to Visibility: Gender Differencesin the Careers of Doctoral Scientists andEngineers. 2001. The National Academyof Sciences: Washington, DC. www.nap.edu/books/0309055806/html

The Door in the Dream: Conversations withEminent Women in Science. 1999. ElgaWasserman. A Joseph Henry Pressbook for the National Academy Press:Washington, DC.

Women Changing Science: Voices from aField in Transition. 1995. Mary Morse.Perseus Publishing: Cambridge, MA.

PROFILE

10 • CHESAPEAKE QUARTERLY

There are four scien-tists in a small boaton a rainy day on

the Chicamacomico River— and three are women.That may be more commonnow, but it was rare whenGrace Brush began hercareer. She became a scientistin an age when women werenot encouraged to enter sci-ence and were seldom sup-ported by fellowships, grantsand assistantships. Her career,like one of her classic sedi-ment cores, was laid down inlayers — uneven, interruptedlayers that show some of thechanges in the social ecologyof science.

She came into science sideways.A native of Nova Scotia, thepetite redhead graduated from a small college in Antigonish withsome coursework in plants and paleontology, but a degree ineconomics.With that background she was able to land theunlikely position of lab assistant in a small coal geology laborato-ry in Nova Scotia.“My job was to make thin sections of coaland keep things clean,” she says.As she was making slides, shelooked through the microscope and saw structures caught in thethe coal. Digging into the research literature, she realized she waslooking at the remnants of ancient spores.“So I asked my bossesif I could study them,”says Brush.“And they said sure — inbetween making thin sections.” From her part-time studies shewas able to show how fossils could be used to identify whichcoal seams were best for mining.

That work kicked off her long academic odyssey.The Cana-dian Geological Service quickly sent her off to the University ofIllinois for graduate work in coal paleobotany and just as quicklyBrush discovered that her intellectual love was going to be evo-lutionary paleobotany. She returned to Nova Scotia to help setup a new laboratory, then headed off to Penn State where shediscovered that her romantic love was going to be Lucien Brush,another graduate student.They married and then, like a lot ofgraduate school wives in the 1950s, she took her husband’s nameand began following him around from college to college and jobto job.

When the newlyweds both applied to Harvard for doctoral

work, Brush found that being awife could be an even biggerdrawback than being a woman.Awife, so the thinking went, wasprobably not going to be a seriousscientist. “Most of the people atHarvard weren’t going to put allthe time and effort into trainingsome woman who would notcontinue in the field,” explainsBrush.“It was a logical sort ofthing at the time.” On the basis ofher work in Canada, however,Brush was accepted and mentoredby Elso Barghoorn, a paleontolo-gist famous for discovering evi-dence of the earliest life on earth.“Barghoorn did not distinguishbetween the scientific capabilitiesof men and women,” says Brush.

“He accepted me as a graduate student, and I have always felt adeep loyalty to him.”

By earning a Ph.D. in science in 1956, Brush had alreadydone something unusual for the era. In 1960, women receivedonly 6.3% of the 6,000 Ph.D.s awarded in science and engineer-ing by American universities.And many of those newly degreedwomen would have trouble finding full-time jobs or tenure-track positions in academe.A widely-cited study from 1975found that women in science faced “a triple penalty.” They firsthad to overcome barriers to entering science.Then they had tolive with the psychic fallout — like self-limited aspirations —that can result from perceived discrimination.And finally womenhad to struggle with actual discrimination in finding funding,fellowships and jobs.

With their new Ph.D.s from Harvard, Lucien and Gracemade a hard pact about work and marriage.“We would gowherever Lucien would get the best job opportunity, but Iwould always be able to keep up my interest,” says Brush.“Basically I wanted to do paleobotanical work.” The logicbehind the pact was practical.“With a family, someone has to bethe major bread winner,” she says.“Someone has to be the mostcompetitive person in their area — or nobody is going to winout in the job arena.” Lucien would find jobs at the U.S.Geological Service, the University of Iowa, Princeton, and finallyJohns Hopkins University in Baltimore. And Grace would fol-low, looking for part-time jobs and research support, struggling

THE CORE OF A LIFEBY MICHAEL W. FINCHAM

Brush’s career, like one of her classic sediment cores, was laid down in layers — uneven,

interrupted layers that show some of the changes in the social ecology of science.

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Using paleoecology, Grace Brush has led the waytoward a deeper understanding of how the Chesapeake haschanged over time. In her career, she has also helped to closethe gender gap — when Brush received her doctorate in 1956,only a small fraction of American Ph.D.s in science and engi-neering went to women, compared to 32 percent in 1995.Photo by Skip Brown.

to make progress in her work amid allthe interruptions from moving, marriageand children.

The results were mixed.At the Uni-versity of Iowa, for example, she immedi-ately got a half-time faculty position,even though she was now a mother.“Noquestions asked about man or woman,”says Brush.“It was a wonderful chance, Icould work part time, I had children, Icould get research money.” When thecouple moved back east to Princeton,however, her reaction was culture shock.“There were no women students or fac-ulty whatsoever,” laughs Brush.“Andsome people were surprised that a wifewould want to pursue an independentcareer.” When she was finally given labo-ratory space, she surprised people againby including salary money for herself ongrant proposals.“I said I needed moneyto pay for baby sitters.”

For Brush,a dogged persistence wasclearly one of the keys to overcoming the“triple penalty” women faced in science.“In order to get what you need to pursuea scientific career, you had better forgetyou are a woman,” she says.Though therewere often suspicions about the commit-ment of women scientists,“subtleties inthe atmosphere,” she tried not to seethem.“If I’d let that become a factor,then I’d have withdrawn from theresearch I loved so much.”

The marriage pact produced earlycareer frustration for a young woman sopersistent about her science.“I resented itsome of time. I thought why am I doingthis,” she admits.“But this was an agree-ment we made — and I’m glad we stuckwith it.”The payoff included a 40-yearmarriage, three children and a career thatwould redeem her old mentor’s faith inher — a triple play as rare in science as inbaseball. Planted finally at Johns Hopkins,at first with part-time support, she beganbuilding her reputation as a pioneer in thepaleoecology of Chesapeake Bay.AtHopkins she moved from part time to fulltime, mentoring men and women andwinning teaching awards. In 1990 she wasfinally promoted to tenured full professor.In 1994 her husband and long-time intel-lectual partner died from lung cancer.

How much has the world changedsince Brush began her career? Perhapsnot as much as you might expect — atleast according to a recent report by theNational Academy of Sciences, titledFrom Scarcity to Visibility.The big changeis that women in 1995 were earning 32percent of the Ph.D.s in science andengineering.That’s a huge jump from the6.3% awarded back in 1960.And by 1995women were holding over 30 percent ofthe faculty positions in many fields.“Interms of hiring, it certainly is a lot differ-ent,” says Brush.“Opportunities are madeavailable to women.” For a number ofyears, organizations like the NationalScience Foundation, private foundationsand many universities have been sponsor-ing gender-based programs to help newwomen scientists with funding, fellow-ships and mentoring.

There’s a reason for all those pro-grams, however.According to theNational Academy of Sciences, womenstill lag behind men in competitions forresearch assistantships, lab space, tenure-track jobs and salary raises.They are lesslikely to hold full-time jobs and morelikely to leave science, often out of “self-discouragement.” Scientists who studygender disparities write about factors likethe scarcity of women mentors, the prev-alence of male-dominated professionalnetworks, and a science culture thatstresses “masculine” values like competi-tion over “feminine” values like coopera-tion. According to the Academy report,the “triple penalty” is still in play, thoughnot as strongly, for women in contempo-rary science.

Women are also more likely to carrymost of the responsibility for child-rais-ing, a common interruption of thedegree track and the tenure track.Andfor Brush and many other researchers,that remains the issue that most compli-cates life for a woman who would be ascientist. “Sometimes I think we’ve comea long way, and sometimes I’m not surehow far we’ve actually come,” says Brush,“because when it comes to providingwomen support for child raising, it is stillvery, very difficult.”

If you stare at it long enough under amicroscope, a grain of hickory pollenlooks a lot like a basketball, an old

ball beaten out of round from too manybounces and dotted with a nubby grainthat’s nearly worn smooth. Oak and wil-low look like collapsed basketballs, goneshapeless and airless. But ragweed, roundand spiky, looks like trouble.You can lookat it and start sneezing.

Angie Arnold, a 25-year old grad stu-dent, spends most of her work time sit-ting at microscopes, endlessly eyeballingtiny round shapes that could be oak orwillow or hickory pollen that has beenburied in the bottom of Chesapeake Bayfor decades or centuries.Working withher advisor Grace Brush,Arnold extract-ed the pollen from sediment cores hold-ing hundreds of years of Bay mud. Shekeeps a sharp watch for ragweed in par-ticular because ragweed pollen — an irri-tating allergen for most people — canalso be a sign of large-scale land clearing.It’s a key to dating these cores and corre-lating changes on the land with changesin the Bay. This pollen has left a recordin the sediment, andBrush and her stu-dents are using thatrecord to assemblean environmentalhistory of the Bay.

Even before shebecame a grad stu-dent,Arnold hadalready left a recordof her own in the history of JohnsHopkins University.As a four-year starterat point guard and shooting guard for thewomen’s basketball team, she played moreminutes, made more free throws andhanded out more assists than anybodybefore her. She also ended up second onthe all-time list of scorers, averaging 15.5points per game for her four-year career.

12 • CHESAPEAKE QUARTERLY

Hickory

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land Sea Grant Research Fellowship. SeaGrant Research Fellows receive a stipend,tuition remission and training under sci-entists working on Sea Grant projects.The scientists, in turn, get help with fieldand lab work. Over the last 25 years,Maryland Sea Grant has funded the grad-uate work of dozens of degree-seekingstudents, many of them women.

Grad students, ofcourse, handle muchof the grunt workin most researchprojects — andmarine science isno exception. Forthe last four yearsArnold’s job has beento trek out withBrush and haul up sediment cores fromthe rivers, marshes and mainstem of theBay; back in the lab, she helps crack openthe cores and then sits down to the longlabor of figuring out what’s buried in theold mud. In each core there can be thou-sands of remnants and hundreds ofspecies, ranging from trees, grasses and

weeds to algae, diatoms and dinoflagel-lates. She has to put a name on those oddshapes, at least to the genus level whenshe can, and then count them. Next toher microscope are her key referencesources: the publications and Ph.D. disser-tations of graduate students who sat atthese scopes before her. Scientific knowl-edge, like sediment, accumulates overtime.

These are time-consuming tasks, butthey are only the pre-game warmups.Like a point guard running down courthoping to shoot, a scientist who wants toscore in the research game has to see thepatterns at play in the data unfolding infront of her. In core slices from theChester River dated circa 1700,Arnoldhas been seeing some provocative patternsamong one-celled protists down at thebottom of the food chain. She found thathigh-salinity species were declining at thesame time that fresh-water species wereincreasing.“This change of species,” shesays,“suggests changes in runoff, morefresh water coming in.” Out of all thatdigging, eyeballing and data crunching,Arnold is slowly crafting her own disser-tation on some of the historic changes inthe food webs of the Chesapeake.

For Arnold, it’s now late in the grad-school game. Withcomps out of theway, she’s focusedon finishing herdissertation, find-ing a job andplanning a wed-ding. She hopes towork in environ-mental restoration,perhaps with a consulting company thatpays better than a fellowship. Her othergame plan is to find a teaching/coachingjob that could combine her first love(basketball) with her second (environ-mental science). Last winter, in the mid-dle of her research, she still managed tomoonlight as assistant coach with thewomen’s team at Johns Hopkins.As sheworks away at her microscope, some-where in the back of her brain, a basket-ball is still bouncing.

Ragweed

Willow

TOP OF HER GAMEFellow Scores at Science BY MICHAEL W. FINCHAM

That’s a lot of points for someone whoplayed mostly point guard, but Arnolddeflects any compliments.“Once youlook at how much I shot,” she laughs,“you say she should be scoring a lot.”

In her senior year, she scored a lotwhen it counted the most. In the middleof March Madness, the annual basketballplayoffs of the National Collegiate Ath-letic Association, she led her team intothe Sweet Sixteen all the way to the EliteEight. In her last college game Arnoldwent out big, counting 27 points on 10-

for-18 shooting.Aweek later, she got a

compliment shecouldn’t deflect:She was namedthe best woman

player in Americaunder 5’6” by the

Women’s BasketballCoaches Association.

Early in her graduate career,Arnoldfound a new game, paleoecology, and anew coach, Grace Brush. And soonenough she won a new award, a Mary-

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This summer marks the fourteenthyear of Maryland Sea Grant’sundergraduate fellowship pro-

gram, an effort that has brought collegestudents from Maine to Hawaii to theChesapeake Bay to participate in marineresearch. Supported by a grant from theNational Science Foundation, theResearch Experience for Undergraduates(REU) program pairs students with sci-entist-mentors at three estuarine researchlabs, the Horn Point Laboratory and theChesapeake Biological Labora-tory — both part of the Univer-sity of Maryland Center forEnvironmental Science — andthe Academy of Natural ScienceEstuarine Research Center.

The National ScienceFoundation began the REUprogram to provide undergradu-ates with a realistic sense of thescientific enterprise — the aimwas to have them work inresearch labs with senior scien-tists as a way of promoting grad-uate education in the sciences.Atthe same time, NSF encouragedparticipation of women, minorities andthe disabled.While participation inMaryland’s program by minorities —African-Americans, Hispanics, NativeAmericans — and the disabled has beenlimited, that is hardly the case forwomen. Female applicants have outnum-bered male applicants two to one, as hastheir participation.

Why so many female applicants?Many students applying for fellowshipsare biology and environmental sciencemajors, which include a preponderanceof women.At the same time, Sea Granthas worked to recruit undergraduateapplicants in chemistry, physics andmathematics.

The REU program gets students outof the classroom and into an intenseresearch environment.Working with theiradvisors, they develop a specific research

project and, at summer’s end, presenttheir findings in a seminar and researchpaper. Projects range over diverse issuesrelated to the Chesapeake, among them,estuarine processes, chemical contaminantcycling, fisheries, physical oceanography,the benthic environment and submergedaquatic vegetation.

Nearly 175 students have now partici-pated in the Maryland Sea Grant pro-gram, 110 of them women. Over theseyears, quite a few students have co-

authored peer-reviewed papers and pre-sented their findings at national scientificmeetings. During this time, NSF review-ers have given high ratings to theMaryland program, which began with 10students in 1989, then was awarded fund-ing to support 12 students each summer,and beginning in 1999, 14 students.Thissummer is the first of another three-yearaward.

The summer fellowships have provena key influence for many students whohave gone on to graduate school inmarine and environmental sciences. JimHagy, an REU student in 1990, forexample, returned to the ChesapeakeBiological Laboratory and recently com-pleted his doctorate and is now at theEPA Gulf Breeze Laboratory. JillStevenson, an REU student with JeffCornwell at the Horn Point Laboratory,

came to CBL to work with David Secor,received an M.S. in fisheries, then wenton to work at the National Ocean andAtmospheric Administration; she is nowDeputy Director of Fisheries at theMaryland Department of NaturalResources.

“The REU program was a hugeinfluence on the career path I decided topursue,” says Krista Karlsson, a 1996 fel-low from George Washington Universitywho went on to graduate studies in fish-

eries at Louisiana StateUniversity.“It helped me focusmy interests in marine science.My advisor Dave Secor and histech were both major influ-ences on my development as aresearcher.” Karlsson’s com-ments typify those of mostREU students who were sur-veyed several years after theyfinished their undergraduatedegrees.

Numbers of former fellowshave completed or are pursu-ing Ph.D.s, though it remainstoo early to assess the direct

effects that REU programs such asMaryland’s have on improving thechances of academic careers for women.

For more about the REU program,student fellows, their projects andpublications, see www.mdsg.umd.edu/Education/REU or contact Dr. FredrikaMoser, 301.403.4229, x 16.

REU 2002 Student Fellows

Paul Allen, Salisbury University. MortalityIndex Determination for Eastern Oyster,Crassostrea virginica, Seed Transport.Advisor: Donald Meritt, HPL.

Sarah Bjork, University of Maryland CollegePark. Effects of Osmotrophy on Growthand Pigmentation in Storeatula major.Advisor: Hugh MacIntyre, HPL.

Elizabeth Day, Hampshire College.The Effectsof Contaminated Sediments on EnergyAllocation and Phenotype Diversity in the

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Summer 2002 REU students pose before the orientation cruiseat the beginning of their fellowships.

MENTORING TOMORROW’S SCIENTISTS

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Grass Shrimp Palaemonetes pugio. Advisor:Chris Rowe, CBL.

Carrie Fleming, University of Kentucky.TheEffects of Toxicity on MicrozooplanktonGrazing of the Dinoflagellate Karlodiniummicrum. Advisor: Diane Stoecker, HPL.

Kelly Kearney, University of Miami.A Modelfor Nutrient Pathways in the ChoptankRiver. Advisor: Bill Boicourt, HPL.

Elisabeth Kittredge, Mount Holyoke College.Biogeochemical Cycling in the SeagrassBed Thalassia testudinum in Florida Bayand Zostera marina in Chesapeake Bay.Advisor: Michael Kemp, HPL.

Lisa Malkiel, University of Maryland CollegePark.The Impact of Food Concentration,Organism Density, and Chemical Facilita-tive Cues on the Feeding Mode andGrowth of Macoma balthica. Advisor:Roberta Marinelli, CBL.

Keith McCullough, Savannah State University.The Effect of Bivalve Suspension Feeders(Mercenaria mercenaria) on ZooplanktonDynamics in Mesocosms with TidalResuspension and Realistic Water Col-umn Turbulence. Advisor: Elka Porter,CBL.

Polly Squires, Utah State University. HeatShock Expression in Zostera marina(Eelgrass) Placed in Different StressfulWater Temperatures. Advisor: IanDavison,ANSERC.

Sarah Stein, University of Vermont.TheDemise and Recovery of a SeagrassHabitat following a Barrier IslandOverwash. Advisor: Evamaria Koch,HPL.

Timothy Teffeau, Salisbury University.TheUse of Stable Isotopes to Determine theUptake of Cadmium from ThreeDifferent Uptake Pathways on theEstuarine Fish Fundulus heteroclitus.Advisor: Fritz Riedel,ANSERC.

Lee von Kraus,Vassar College. Relative Signi-ficance of Suspended Sediment and Predation in the Shaping of Acartia tonsaVertical Distribution/Migration Patterns.Advisor: Marie Bundy,ANSERC.

Marissa Yates, Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology. Characterizing SuspendedSediments in the Estuarine TurbidityMaximum Zone of the Chesapeake Bay.Advisor: Larry Sanford, HPL.

Alexander Zorach, Oberlin University.Ascendency as a Quantitative Measure ofComplexity. Advisor: Bob Ulanowicz,CBL.

Waterways, contact Kirsten Frese,UMCES, by e-mail, [email protected], or phone, 410.228.9250, x 614. Forinformation about the IAN network,visit the web at http://ian.umces.edu, orcontact Dr.William Dennison at [email protected] or 410.228.9250, x 608.

Documentary Wins Emmy

In June, the Capital Region of theNational Academy of Television Arts andSciences awarded an Emmy for bestlong-form documentary to The PfiesteriaFiles, a one-hour Maryland Sea Grantdocumentary directed by Michael W.Fincham. Co-produced with MarylandPublic Television, the documentaryexamines the “Pfiesteria hysteria” thatgripped much of the mid-Atlantic in1997 during the September fish kill sea-son. When the toxic microbe Pfiesteriawas blamed for sick fish and sick peoplealong three Maryland rivers, it kicked offpolitical controversies, media wars amongnewspaper and television reporters, andan expensive science race to identifytoxic blooms in the Chesapeake.

The Academy is a nonprofit profes-sional organization serving the Maryland,Virginia and Washington D.C. televisioncommunity. The Emmy Award is theindustry’s benchmark for the recognitionof television excellence.

The documentary also received firstplace in its category from the OutdoorWriters Association of America.Theaward was presented in Charleston,WestVirginia, also in June.

Newsletter Focuses onResearch and the Bay

A new publica-tion, Healthy Ches-apeake Waterways,brings togetherinformation aboutwatershed popula-tion, land use, andhow research andscientific monitor-

ing are being applied to further ourunderstanding of Bay processes that canbe employed for resource management.

The handsome, four-color, bimonthlynewsletter is produced by the Integrationand Application Network (IAN), aninitiative of faculty members at the Uni-versity of Maryland Center for Environ-mental Science. IAN got underway in1999 with the goal of synthesizing scien-tific knowledge across disciplines so thatit could be used for addressing issues thatare critical for management of theChesapeake Bay and its watershed.

The intent of IAN is to link academ-ics, resource managers and environmen-talists together in order to inspire, man-age, and produce timely syntheses andassessments on key environmental andnatural resources issues.

In addition to its newsletter, IAN willundertake projects that include providingweb access to GIS data, producing a soft-ware program for creating visual conceptdiagrams, issuing a report card on theecosystem health of the Chesapeake anddeveloping an eChesapeake web portal.

For a free copy of Healthy Chesapeake

SUMMER 2002 • 15

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Solomons Biathalon

Tenth Annual Solomons Island Biathalon,UMCES Chesapeake Biological Labora-tory, September 28, Solomons, Maryland.The Biathalon is an event for competitiveracers, recreational athletes, families, andthose who love the outdoors. Proceedsfrom the Biathlon provide scholarshipfunds for graduate students who work onChesapeake Bay-related environmentalproblems. Participants bike from the Labat Solomons to Calvert Cliffs State Park(6.7 mi.), walk or run through forests andalongside marshes to the Chesapeake Bayand back (~4 mi.), and bike back toSolomons (6.7 mi.). For more informa-tion, call 410.326.7214.

Estuarine ConferenceAtlantic Estuarine Research Society Fall2002 Meeting, October 10-12, St. Mary’sCity, Maryland. A half day-workshop

focusing on submerged aquatic vegetation(SAV) restoration will precede eveningregistration check-in on the 10th. It islimited to 10 participants — those inter-ested should check the AERS web site,www.vims.edu/AERS. The conferencewill include a welcome social, scientificpapers and posters, and a banquet cruiseon the St. Mary’s River on the final day ofthe meeting. Registration is $70 for mem-bers and $50 for students. For more infor-mation, visit the web site or contact Dr.Bob Paul at [email protected].

Environmental JournalismTwelfth Annual Conference of theSociety of Environmental Journalists,October 9-13, Baltimore, Maryland.Among the topics for discussion will beChesapeake Bay restoration and research,Maryland’s smart growth efforts and envi-ronmental justice and health. For confer-ence details, visit the web at www.sej.org/confer/index1.htm.

Shellfish ConferenceSixth International Confer-ence on Shellfish Restora-tion (ICSR ‘02), November20-24, Charleston, SouthCarolina.As part of a

global commitment toreviving degraded ecosystems,

the conference will provide an opportuni-ty for local, state and federal governmentofficials, resource managers, users and resi-dents to discuss approaches to restoringcoastal shellfish ecosystems through reme-diation and pollution abatement, habitatrestoration and stock enhancement.

The conference will feature invitedkeynote presenters, panel sessions andcontributed posters along with casestudies of successful projects with oppor-tunities for roundtable discussions.

For more more information, visit theweb at www.scseagrant.org/icsr.htm orcontact Elaine Knight at 843.727.6406or [email protected].

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