Two recent marine science graduates and one environmental studies major gave oral presentations at Morgan State’s Patuxent Environmental & Aquatic Research Laboratory (PEARL) annual internship symposium on Aug. 2.
Shelby Dittman ’24, Brittney Douglas ’24 and Sara Dapp ’25 all had internship opportunities — an example of the Honors College Promise to St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) students through the Learning through Experiential and Applied Discovery (LEAD) Initiative — this summer at PEARL located on the shoreline of the Patuxent River in St. Leonard, Maryland.
Dittman, Douglas and Dapp spent 10 weeks researching their respective topics under the mentorship of PEARL faculty prior to presenting at the symposium.
PEARL research is designed to increase the understanding of coastal and environmental systems so that they can be properly managed and protected.
Under the mentorship of Ming Liu & Brittany Wolfe-Bryant, Dittman studied oysters at the aquaculture facility at PEARL, specifically focused on how oysters, susceptible to low salinity and disease, can be made more tolerant to low salinity levels in parts of the Chesapeake Bay and get less disease-prone for enhancing the oyster fishery in the Bay. For example, Dittman found in her research that growing oysters from egg-larvae-adults with added probiotics decreased oyster mortality and increased oyster size.
Elka Porter, associate professor of marine science at St. Mary’s College, said that what Dittman found in her research is of importance to oyster fisheries in the area. Porter said Dittman had a unique opportunity prior to her internship as she was recommended to work at PEARL’s hatchery during the spring semester. It was this opportunity that led to her internship.
Douglas and Dapp, under the mentorship of Tom Ihde, continued a decades-long blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) survey at PEARL to help determine the health of the blue crab fisheries in the Chesapeake Bay. This project began in 1968. The two researchers regularly went in the field via boat, to set traps in the Bay and collect blue crabs, on which they measured abundance, size, sex, as well as the fishing effort and environmental data. In addition to catching crabs, they processed and analyzed raw environmental data that accompanied the existing data from the project that had never been analyzed.
Porter explained that their projects “Analysis of Callinectes sapidus Catch and Environmental Data,” and “PEARL Blue Crab Survey: Analysis on Size and Environmental Factors “ respectively, helped provide an updated status on the Bay’s blue crab fisheries.
