Bomb Radiocarbon Dating of Hawksbill Sea Turtle Carapaces
By: Delaney Reynolds, SRC Intern After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawai’I, the United States declared martial law. In the decades that followed, the island of Kaho‘olawe, Hawai’I, an island considered sacred to Hawai’ian Natives, was used as a training ground and bombing range for the United States’ Army. Decades of bombing have not […]
The Future of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay: Artificial Reefs Pose as Successful Mechanism for Oyster Population Restoration
By: Sydney Steel, SRC Intern Nestled in the Mid-Atlantic, the Chesapeake Bay is renowned for being home to countless oysters, which contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem by providing food, protective reef habitat, and necessary water filtration. For centuries, Eastern Maryland’s economy has been dependent on harvesting seemingly-infinite numbers of bivalves, however oyster […]
Reading the Signs: Seabird sensitivity to environmental change and their potential as indicator species
By: Nicole Suren, SRC Intern As climate change has had increasingly noticeable effects on the earth, scientists have developed more accurate and innovative ways to determine what these effects mean for the natural world. One of these methods is to use indicator species, species that can be used as proxies to diagnose the health of […]
Ocean Plastics
By: Nick Martinez, SRC Intern The world’s oceans face a variety of challenges ranging from rising sea levels and sea surface temperatures, to overfishing and excessive amounts of anthropogenic debris being tossed into the oceans. Many studies have focused on the large scale effects of each of these dire issues, yet few have ventured into […]
Marine Protected Area (MPA) Effectiveness
By: Olivia Wigon, SRC Intern Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) encompass any and every type of area in the oceans, seas, lakes or estuaries. MPAs have some type of restriction on human behavior and activity in an area with the intention to conserve natural resources in that area. MPAs not only protect animals but the economy […]
Predicting Fisheries Collapse
By: Chris Schenker, SRC Intern Hundreds of millions of people around the world depend on wild harvests from the ocean as both a livelihood and source of protein (Srinivasan et al., 2010). Ensuring the long term sustainability of fisheries is therefore a matter of utmost importance for global resource security. However, according to a 2016 […]