When I tell my friends and family members I am studying marine science, I think they immediately picture me doing something grandiose like saving the orcas or cleaning all the plastic out of the ocean. I can always see this glazed look in their eyes set in when I clear my throat and inform them that, in fact, my current species of focus is a sort of minnow called the Mummichog.

“Mummi-what?” I can see them thinking.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. The question they most seem to regret though is asking what exactly it is I am studying about these minnows. As much as I’d just like to just say “how mummichogs having less access to the high marsh platform due to the impacts of anthropogenically-driven changes in low marsh geomorphology affects the diversity of biota they consume while utilizing the high marsh during spring tides”, that seems to go over people’s heads with room to spare.

So much to nobody’s preference, I seem to find myself instead launching into a 15-minute long tangent contextualizing eutrophication and the its effects on plant morphology, and how changes in plant morphology destabilize creek beds and low marsh degradation limits mummichog access, etcetera, etcetera. That’s when the glazed look just turns into full-on brain death and and my audience starts to feel the brunt of their regret.

“Why couldn’t she just have said dolphins” I see them thinking now.

It’s taken a few iterations of this story to realize that my friends and family don’t really want to know the nitty gritty details of what my research question is, they want to know why what I am doing is important. They want to know why, while great barrier reef is dying, I am interested in what insects minnows are eating. What they really want to know is that salt marshes are one of the most productive ecosystems on earth. That they are one of the most efficient terrestrial habitats at fixing the carbon we are pumping into our atmospheres. That they act as invaluable barriers between our coastal cities and sea level rise. Then, when I tell them that mummichogs, in essence, power the entire ecological system, it is easier to understand why it’s so vital to understand these tenacious little fish.

 

–Olivia Floyd (REU Summer Intern)

“Salt Marsh? That just sounds like mud, and holes and ditches with patches of grass growing on them.” Those were my thoughts when I first heard about the opportunity to work on a salt marsh at LTER, Marshview station.

I recently graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston with a bachelor’s degree in biology. I learned about this opportunity to work at LTER through Jarred Byrnes, Professor of biology/marine biology at UMass Boston, for whom I’ve worked for in one of his laboratories in the past.

The first week out in the marsh was a bit challenging, with everything from the loose clothes I had to wear to protect myself again mosquitoes, and deer fly whose bite can really hurt, and finally to jumping and falling into creeks, which were always a source of laughter for me and my team. Despite how challenging the first week was, I knew it was only matter of time before I got accustomed to being out in the marsh.

Now, into my last week as a lab tech, I’ve become very comfortable and confident into being in the marsh, and in the words of my team, aka “the crab crew,” I finally got my marsh feet. Daily, we do several things from collecting samples of grass such as the Spartina alternaflora and Spartina patens, to birds watching and recording their behaviors, and setting up transect and plots. I’ve enjoyed all of it, though maybe a bit less on those hot days!

Coming in as a lab/field tech, I expected to gain some experiences in the research field, but never as much as I’ve gained in the past two months alone. I’ve learned a whole lot about marine life from, green crabs, hermit crabs and horseshoe crabs, which really fascinate me for some reason that I haven’t figured out yet, to different species of birds who depends on the salt marsh for survival. From this unique experience I’ve gotten a sense of the work that goes into research, mainly the part which involves running the experiment. I’ve gained confidence in my ability to share ideas which can be very useful, and it also reminded me how much I enjoy being a problem solver. Among everything that is great about working at LTER, I really valued the relationships that I’ve build with all three of my teammates, which I had the pleasure working with. It’s always worth it to experience new things, the salt marsh will surely teach you that.

 

–Steevens Excellent (Field and Lab Technician, Byrnes Lab of UMass Boston)

If my future was presented to me 2 years ago, I would not believe it. Me, a Chicana born and raised in the city of Los Angeles, working in a salt marsh and collecting data for a whole summer!

I am a rising junior at Bryn Mawr College as a Biology and Mathematics double major. This past semester I applied and interviewed to be an undergraduate student who has the opportunity to do research with Professor Thomas Mozdzer. At first, I did not know what to expect–the first question I was asked was whether I felt comfortable jumping over ditches and walking through the forest. I was a bit confused; I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or if he was being serious. My first day on the field I quickly learned he was serious. That day we jumped over the various ditches in Sweeney creek as I tried to take in all the information about the marsh, the TIDE project, the species it holds, and the beautiful scenery. After a couple of weeks, this place still surprises me every day, whether it be by the scenery, the bugs, or new holes I fall into.

Working on the salt marsh is very exciting! I have been conducting flowering surveys, collecting samples of plants, flying the drone, and setting up my project which focuses on the rate of decomposition and how it differs when mesh size, creek, and time are taken into account.

The beginning of the summer took a lot of adjusting to, but I knew that over the course of the summer this place that is home to Spartina patens, Distichlis spicata, and many forms of Spartina alterniflora would soon feel like a home to me. I may not know my future, but I hope it involves beautiful places like the salt marsh, because ecological research is a big interest of mine. I have been able to learn so many skills from my PI and have had the opportunity to live with other graduate and undergraduate students who have shared their wisdom with me and have reassured me of my interest. Here’s to my first summer at the salt marsh!

–Jocelyn Bravo (Field Tech Intern, Bryn Mawr College)

Since being part of the TIDE project this summer, I have been helping to determine if there is top-down control of marsh invertebrates by mummichogs (small, minnow-like fish). What this means is that, if our hypothesis is true, mummichogs are the main factor controlling the population size of different species of marsh invertebrates. If it is false, there’s something else controlling how large these populations can get. While this question may seem fairly mundane, the data that we collect can be added to the repository of marsh knowledge that has been compiled since the beginning of the TIDE project in 2003. In turn, this data will help us protect local marshlands from a serious threat: climate change.

One of the things that has struck me most during my (burgeoning) career in marine biology is how often those of us in this field talk about climate change. Although I agree that climate change should be a frequent topic of discussion, I propose that we should change the way that we talk about climate change.

At the end of nearly every scientific paper I’ve read in recent years, there is a concluding paragraph which mentions climate change. The main idea may change slightly, based on the focus of the research, but the underlying message is always the same. Climate change is worsening and we must immediately halt carbon emissions if we want to keep global temperature increases within the 1.5° Celsius predicted by the most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Despite this, it can sometimes seem as if no change is being made.

It’s easy to place the blame on politicians, for example, or on petroleum corporations, though in reality, it is neither wholly the fault of lawmakers or entrepreneurs, but largely the unfortunate outcome of a society that has grown reliant on planes, trains, and automobiles. Many environmentally unhealthy practices have become ingrained habits, a part of our routine that’s difficult to give up. Take Amazon Prime, for example. Like many, I’m guilty of occasionally choosing their free one-day shipping even when I don’t really need my product that quickly.

While none of this means that we should stop campaigning for alternative sources of energy, or making choices that reduce our carbon footprint, now that we are at the tipping zone, we must make people our priority. We may no longer be able to save the world from climate change, but we can do our best to help those who will be hit the hardest.

Global climate change does not happen in a vacuum. Warmer temperatures lead to rising sea levels, unpredictable weather, increased flooding, and increased erosion. These facts are especially worrying for the 40% of the global population that live in coastal areas.

In Germany, many wetland areas are nearly gone. The Mississippi River delta loses a football-field sized chunk of sediment every 100 minutes. While efforts are underway to restore marshlands worldwide, it is a long, slow, expensive process. So why bother? Well, marshlands provide a number of services to humans, such as flood mitigation and water filtration. In addition, they can prevent erosion, as long as they are not so degraded that the marshland itself begins to erode. Marshes also serve as nursery habitats for many recreational and commercial fish species. Although sections of many marshes are protected from human activity, there are often areas set aside where people can engage in recreational activities such as boating or birding.

Flooding is also a pressing concern for citizens around the world, and the frequency of flooding has only increased. In 2016, 19 floods occurred in the U.S, the most on record. Just the other day, I met a man from Lafayette, LA. The flooding there in 2016 washed away his home, his horse and his dogs. In Newport, RI, efforts are underway to preserve historical structures in an 18th century neighborhood known as The Point, which lies directly on the water. The buildings there face an increased risk of flooding with each passing year.

The problems discussed here highlight the importance of projects such as TIDE. As we understand more and more about our marshes, especially the physical processes that take place there, we are better able to conserve these habitats, the flora and fauna that inhabit them, and the people that rely on them for protection. We will also be better able to devise strategies to assist those whose lives and livelihoods will surely be in jeopardy in the years to come.

 

-Katrina Fedors (Master’s Student, Three Seas Program, Northeastern University)

Salt marshes are weird. They’re not quite land, and they’re not quite sea. Most people wouldn’t recognize one if they saw it. But they might play a key role in the survival of cities like Boston. They act as a buffer zone between civilization and the open ocean.

I’ve lived my whole life in Massachusetts and hadn’t stepped foot into a saltmarsh until I was 20 years old; now I’m a second-year field tech for the Byrnes lab studying how salt marshes are changing over time. I consider myself very acquainted with the marsh, however cruel she might be sometimes, but I am in awe of the fact that time feels different in the marsh. When I return every morning, it seems the same. The grass is still growing, the creek is still running, the birds are still chirping, but most noticeably, the bugs are still biting. A seal skeleton I found fresh in 2018 is still perfectly aligned when I came back in 2019. Very constant. It’s as if the marsh simply doesn’t change.

Now think of returning to the marsh after a year away. The creeks are getting wider as they erode more marsh. The species of grass are changing, signifying a slightly lower elevation. Even all the first holes you fell into are now growing bigger, as if they’re chasing you. This, unfortunately, is called marsh degradation and it happens at a rate that can oftentimes be difficult to detect.

Salt marshes can feel like a bridge between worlds, maybe even like a world that plays by its own rules, and it needs our help. Only by observing this ecosystem for extended periods of time can we understand how we can reap all the benefits.

– Richard Wong (Field Technician, Byrnes Lab of UMass Boston)

Two years ago I held my breath as I sent an email to an address I didn’t know, but was listed as a contact for a project called TIDE. I closed my eyes, pressed “send,” and seconds later heard a ding–which turned out to be an automated message letting me know that the email address was no longer in use.

Several messages and a few meetings later, I found myself stumbling down a forest path and spit suddenly into what I would come to think of as one of my favorite places in the world. Spartina patens spread out before me and wind turbines in the distance, I, now dubbed a TIDE Project Intern, followed my mentors into the marsh to learn as much as I could during my twice-monthly field visits.

That summer took a lot, but it gave a lot, too. I remember showing up at Marshview afraid that I wouldn’t be good enough for the position, half-believing that I wasn’t fit to be a scientist. I beat myself up over the smallest mistakes and expected myself to be perfect at every turn. I set such high standards for myself that I managed to make it harder to take in all that was going on around me–creating the only real roadblock in my learning process.

I managed, however, to learn a whole lot despite accidentally holding myself back. When I looked back after what I thought would be the end of my time with TIDE, I remembered learning how to program finnickey automatic water samplers, running benthic algal samples using UV Spectrophotometry, and sampling for plant biomass during the Annual Harvest. These were processes that I couldn’t define when I began, let alone master–and, in the end, I felt confident that I could take these skills and apply them to wherever I went next.

It’s a good thing I didn’t go too far!

Now, two and a half field seasons later, the person I was when I began working with TIDE is almost easy to forget. I’ve been lucky enough to train a handful of other TIDE interns over the last summer and a half, and am constantly in awe of how they each adapt to their new, slightly more salty, environment. Already they filter with swift precision and jump into creeks as if they’ve been doing so for years, yet sometimes I see an inkling of my former self in them. I love teaching them and hope to help them understand, if not only the science itself, that they are beyond capable of being what we call a “scientist”–no matter what they (or society) may believe.

And I am grateful that my TIDE journey gets to continue.

– Katie Armstrong (Summer Research Assistant, Woods Hole Research Center)

 

Check out the most recent coverage the TIDE project has received!

Researchers start study of Great Marsh recovery

Plum Island study to examine salt marsh recovery from pollution

 

I am the type of person that attributes songs to the work that I do. And after my first day sampling for benthic algae last summer, I already had the chorus of the Beatles’ Twist and Shout running through my head.

That may seem an odd choice of song, but I assure you that there is no better musical masterpiece to describe the complete process of benthic algae sampling and running. In the field, with our four-centimeter diameter corers, we cut back the cordgrass Spartina patens in the high marsh to reveal the sediment beneath. The dense Spartina patens roots woven through the soil, however, force us to twist the corer to break up those roots, eventually releasing our sediment core sample. There we have the lyrics “Twist and shout,” shouting in joy (or frustration) optional.

The next week, I travel with my samples back to the lab at the Woods Hole Research Center, where I extract the cores in acetone before running them on a UV Spectrophotometer, to measure chlorophyll a absorbance at different wavelengths of UV light (which, in turn, tells us benthic algae abundance). With running the samples, though, comes a lot of tube shaking, after adding acetone and again before being spun down in the centrifuge to run on the Spectrophotometer. Hence, “Shake it up, baby, now.” Shake those samples!

If you couldn’t already tell, I’m quite passionate about benthic algae, the topic of my independent research. However, it took a little while for this interest to grow on me.

The first time I heard the words benthic and algae together was last summer, when it was proposed by the Lead Principal Investigator Linda Deegan that I be in charge of field sampling, organizing the past fifteen years of data, and eventually finding the story behind the microalgae response to nitrogen fertilization. I did my best to act knowledgeable about the topic, but in my two years of undergraduate study, I had only come across macroalgae, and never algae described as benthic. Cue the background research!

What we refer to as benthic algae is microalgae, such as cyanobacteria and diatoms, found in the first few centimeters of marsh sediment. Benthic algae is important for the uptake of nitrogen and carbon, and serves as a source of energy for grazers, among a myriad other things. This algae is also resilient to many environmental factors like extended darkness and hypoxic or anoxic environments, which means that it could play a role in salt marsh recovery from nitrogen loading; but should benthic algae be negatively affected by that nitrogen addition, there could be potential consequences for the salt marsh ecosystem.

Through research, I began to see benthic algae as a link between marsh invertebrate ecology, a topic I was familiar with and loved, and biogeochemistry, an area new to me when I began with TIDE. Armed with my corers in the field, a UV Spectrophotometer in the lab, and fifteen years of historic data in the office, I hope to unlock the full, fifteen-year story of how benthic microalgae responds to nutrient loading and marsh recovery this upcoming year.

– Kate Armstrong

Imagine for a moment that you are a crab larva. Floating in the middle of an urban estuary (say, the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands), you just hatched, and are one of millions of little baby crabs hoping to survive long enough to make it to adulthood. Then suddenly, inexplicably, you are sucked up into a strong current that you don’t understand. The sun disappears, and you are surrounded by thousands of your brothers and sisters, but also many other larvae that you don’t recognize. Time seems to stand still, and you do what you can to make the best of a bad situation. Then suddenly, the same current again pulls you, but now in the opposite direction, back the way you came. Hooray, you are free! But wait, this new water feels different; this is not at all what you remembered of your home. By this time, you are a little older, a little larger, and a little bit more aware of your surroundings. You recognize you must be in a different place entirely, but you again make the best of a bad situation, and settle along the marshy shores of your new locale (not knowing you just entered Boston Harbor). You grow into an adult, and you discover to your relief that your home is not so bad after all. Predators don’t recognize you as prey, and parasites don’t infect you. So you yourself then reproduce, your offspring survive in massive numbers, and your species excels in this new home; a truly crabby paradise.

Congratulations! You just experienced what it was like to be an invasive (i.e. non-native, non-indigenous, etc.) species transported from Europe to the Eastern United States by ballast water from a commercial vessel. In order to maintain buoyancy and pitch while at sea, ships take on various kinds of ballast including rocks and water. Rock ballast was more commonly used in early shipping in New England in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In fact, the first arrival of the European green crab Carcinus maenas to New England was through British and American merchants unloading rocks (which also contained crabs) at ports along the Gulf of Maine. A second wave of green crabs was introduced to the eastern seaboard more recently in the 1980s through water ballast (much like your own crab experience). Although seemingly beneficial for the crab, bioinvasions rapidly became a problem by the mid to late 1980s not only for native organisms, but also for people. In 1988, the zebra mussel was introduced accidentally to the Great Lakes in North America from Bulgaria in Europe. A fouling species of mussel that grows on practically any surface it touches, intake pipes from Lake Michigan to Chicago were clogged for weeks until utility companies were able to replace the critical infrastructure. The result: zebra mussels cost taxpayers millions to remediate the problem. Therefore, it is incredibly important to continue to understand global effects of bioinvasions on a variety of ecosystems including the Plum Island Estuary, and how to prevent their spread; no matter how much those crabs need a change of scenery!

– Michael Roy