SAV Teacher Workshop

Monday I came back to work, and instead of going to my office, I spent the day with the VA Sea Grant office at their SAV Teacher Workshop. Every year they have a species of concern workshop and this year's focus was SAV: Submerged Aquatic Vegetation - mainly dealing with eelgrass which is the most common species around here. We got a lecture from one of the big SAV profs at VIMS, then went over an activity using data on SAV and water quality, and then we went in the field. It was great! I brought my snorkel and got to snorkel around the grassbeds. We saw a skate, lots of blue crabs, and some fish. Also, lots of amphipods and isopods which are little bugs that live in the grass. Our job was to do a few simple sampling jobs - 1. Take a Virnstein sample (the clear plastic contraption in the picture) which takes a small sample of SAV at one of the sampling sites to take back to the lab. 2. Pull a dip net down our transect for animals. 3. Pull up a piece of grass to test for chlorophyll. 4. Take a benthic core to see the root system of the grasses.

After taking all of our samples, we brought them back to the lab and had to scrape the epiphytes (other things that grow on the blades of grass and block the sunlight) off the grass in order to run our samples. We put the grass through a machine that calculated the surface area of the blades, we ran chlorophyll samples, and we observed the live amphipods and isopods under a high-powered microscope in order to identify all of the different species. It was a great experience and my first time snorkeling at Goodwin Island!

Rotary Chesapeake Bay Conference

I spent last week with 23 high school students (and Hannah) from all over Virginia for the 18th Annual Chesapeake Bay Conference. The kids are supposed to have an interest in marine science and want to explore more of the topic, which this year it was a Chesapeake Bay theme instead of a particular species. Even though the kids at some points complained and drove Hannah and myself crazy, we did get to do some fun things.

Monday was the first day of camp, so we did intros and showed the kids how to canoe and seine. We had an intro lecture by Teta Kain, the Dragon Lady, who was going to take us down the Dragon Run, a waterway that flows into the Piankatank River and is one of the most pristine areas in the United States. They aren't sure why it's called the "Dragon" - but some of the myths are because of all the dragonflies, or because of the cypress knees might have looked like dragons sticking out of the water, or they might have called it that to scare the slaves so they wouldn't escape. Tuesday we canoed the Dragon and it was such a beautiful day! Even though the kids complained about the distance paddling, we saw some great stuff. Check out the pickerel weed - it was everywhere.

Wednesday was our day at VIMS - we went seining (and it was the most amazing seining EVER - caught a puffer, a lizardfish, a seahorse, and a giant crab which I'm holding in the picture), toured the SAV greenhouse, toured the oyster hatchery, saw the cownose rays, saw the cobia that were tagged and about to be released, and then worked with the fisheries grad students to id fish that we had caught over the past two days. I think the kids were pretty tired after all that, so we just chilled and went chicken necking on the pier while watching the sunset and then watched a movie.

Thursday we paddled to Rigby Island, in Mathews, VA. Found lots of interesting things on the island - terrapin shells, horseshoe crabs, even a stranded dolphin that had definitely been there a while. Friday we had a sunrise paddle which was amazing and totally worth getting up at 4:30am for. Finished up at camp with t-shirts and then we headed out of there. It was a long week, and I came home and lounged most of the weekend. :)

Visitors and Chef's Kitchen

I had some fun visitors to Williamsburg this week! My mom and Aunt Carol came up to VA for a few days. They got here on Wednesday afternoon, so I was able to sneak away from work a little early and meet them here at home to show them around the house and then we walked all around New Town. Wednesday night we went to A Chef's Kitchen here in Williamsburg where it's like you're at a cooking show, but you get to eat the whole meal too. It's delicious! And you get to take the recipes home with you too, so I'll have to try some of them out at some point. Here's what we had:

Sweet Potato Soup with Thai Basil and Coconut Cream

Mixed Baby Lettuces and Sweet Lemon Vinaigrette, Shaved Pecorino and Toasted Pistachios

A Chef's Kitchen Skillet-Baked Corn Bread

Sweet Pepper Crab Cakes with Mango Salad and Lime Cream

Jerked Kurabuta Pork Loin with Fried Plantains and Farmer's Market Vegetables

Cherry Snowball Puff with Chocolate Ganache Sauce

My favorite course was the crab cakes. And the mango salad was made in a very interesting way - they took 2 1/2" pieces of PVC pipe and filled it with the salad and then pushed it out of the pipe so it was a perfect circle on the plate. Here's the recipe for their famous cornbread if you want to try it out:

1 3/4 cups stone-ground yellow corn meal

1 tbsp salt

1 tsp salt

1 tsp aluminum free baking powder, like Rumford

1 tsp baking soda

1 egg

2 cups buttermilk

1 tbsp butter

Place a well seasoned 10-inch cast iron skillet in the oven. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Allow the pan to remain in the oven 5 minutes after the oven is pre-heated. Place the corn meal, sugar, salt, baking powder and baking soda in the mixing bowl and mix together. Add the egg and buttermilk and mix smooth. Add the butter to the skillet allowing it to melt and brown. Pour in the corn bread batter and bake for approximately 12 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. Turn the corn bread out onto a cutting board, presenting the corn bread bottom side up. Serve fresh and warm.

Enjoy!

Sand, Sand Everywhere

Last night was our Stories in the Sand Discovery Lab, and who knew there was so much to learn about sand? I definitely learned a lot. We had a speaker from the VA Sea Grant here at VIMS who has been collecting sand for the past 15 years and had it from all over the world. She has friends that collect it for her when they travel, and since she lived on the West Coast for a long time, she has cool sand from Hawaii and California that is so different from our sand. One of the coolest things that I learned was that biogenous sand (sand that is made up of skeletal fragments of marine plants and animals) will react with vinegar because of the calcium carbonate in the sand, but terrigenous sand (sand from rocks like we mostly have here) will not. It was a great demo for kids. Also, I had never seen this, but there is a Star Sand Beach in Okinawa, Japan and the sand actually looks like little stars (check it out on the left).


The kids were super excited about starting their own sand collection after seeing her presentation and collection. Another interesting site that she showed us was this Dutch artist that uses her sand collection to make art. The one on the right is sand from all over Florida. Her website has some really cool stuff on it including some art made with plastics. All in all, the sand lab was a success! Next will be the turtle lab in July!

Just what the doctor ordered

I just got back from a fun weekend in the Outer Banks to visit my friends Sarah and Ben in Corolla. They just moved there a couple of months ago and have the cutest place right across from the Outer Banks Wildlife Center where they work (check it out if you are in town b/c their educators are great - especially at the Sea Squirt Sing Along) and just 5 minutes from the beach. Friday I took off of work to drive down there. Ben was nice enough to let Sarah and I go to the beach and catch up and then cooked us a delicious meal that night of scallops. Then, we played some Yahtzee and went to the local hang out where there were a TON of fellow ECU pirates which was fun. Saturday, Sarah and Ben had to go to work so I spent my day on the beach and then reading in this amazing gazebo at the top of the dunes before you go down to the beach. It was the perfect spot. Sarah gave me a book to read while I was there and I'm still working on it but it's really good. I highly suggest it - it's called Sensuous Seas - Tales of a Marine Biologist by Eugene Kaplan. Then, we watched a movie and went kayaking at sunset in the sound. It was so nice. There was even a wedding going on at the same time so we had a little music while kayaking. Sarah and I joined in the dancing in the parking lot while loading the kayaks to the cha-cha slide song. :)

Sunday, I got to join Sarah and Ben at the Center for their Beach Exploration program and Sea Squirt Sing Along program. The participants had nothing but good things to say about Sarah and Ben's education skills when I was in the gift shop and trying to hear what they had to say! And I even got some ideas for our reserve too. It was just so nice to get a little taste of the beach before I get to go down to Hatteras for a whole week next month which I'm very much looking forward to - just 24 more days! Thanks Sarah and Ben!

Planet Green

Amber and I have a new addiction - Planet Green! It used to be Discovery Home Channel, and they've completely redone it to be Planet Green. It's the first all Green tv channel and they have a TON of cool shows. We've learned so much in just the week that it's been on tv. Some of my favorite shows are World's Greenest Homes (makes me want one); Alter Eco (see picture above) where they show you all about green building, organic food and wine, composting, everything green; and Living with Ed (Ed Begley Jr. who apparently is a CRAZY environmentalist and their adventures are quite hilarious). You should check it out. In Hampton Roads it's channel 102, but check your local listings or check out http://planetgreen.discovery.com/!

It's Over

We've officially finished moving into our new townhouse in New Town. The past couple weeks have been a blur of packing, moving, unpacking, with a ton of field trips mixed in there too. But last weekend we got everything moved over with a lot of help from some friends and family (THANKS GUYS!). The new place is awesome, except Amber and I still feel like we are on vacation and it's not really our house. I guess that feeling will go away over time. It's really nice to have a two-story place, and we even walked to the Green Leafe (local bar) for the first time on Saturday which was great. But I'm glad the moving is over. Trying to do that on top of all the field trips at the end of the year has been tough. It's hard to stay motivated to put stuff away after working all day. But we're nearing the end of the school year, just a few more trips and then it's officially summer time!

We also had some guests visit for the weekend! Andrea and Kristen, my ECU buddies, came to colonial Williamsburg for a girl's weekend. We had a great time catching up, doing some shopping, and going to see some movies since it was over 100 degrees here this weekend. We got to check out the farmer's market too on Saturday which was nice b/c I haven't had a chance to go all year so far. After the girls left, Amber and I got a ton of stuff hung up on the walls and the house is coming together. I'll post pictures later! Here's a pic from one of our shopping outings this weekend. :)