Mid-Atlantic Region
DE | MD | NC | NJ | VA
Delaware Sea Grant
Fisheries/Blue Crab: Researchers Working to Predict the Supply of
Blue Crabs
• The population of young, juvenile crabs in any given year
is a key determinant of the size of the harvestable, adult population.
• Delaware Sea Grant researchers have worked with physical
oceanographers to develop a mathematical model that can predict
general trends in the size of the juvenile blue crab population
over time.
• The study could have implications for the crab fishery and
the restaurant industry.
Maryland Sea Grant
Water Quality: Study—Water Quality Important to Boaters on Chesapeake
Bay
• Boaters see the importance of water quality in the Chesapeake
Bay and are willing to pay an estimated $7.3 million a year for
water quality improvements, a new study finds.
• The study, published in Marine Resource Economics, is believed
to be the first of its kind nationwide to estimate the importance
of water quality to boaters.
• “Boaters, across the board, no matter what their concerns
were about water quality, wanted to see improvements in water quality,”
says Doug Lipton, coordinator of the Maryland Sea Grant Extension
Program at the University of Maryland, who conducted the research.
North Carolina Sea Grant
Water Quality: Sea Grant Researchers Monitor Hewletts Creek Spill
• A Hewletts Creek Pump Station leak last summer caused as much as three million gallons of raw sewage to flow into the creek.
• Results showed that the water column concentration of bacteria declined rapidly after the spill, but that sediment concentrations remained high.
• The study will help water quality managers assess how long potentially dangerous conditions can persist after a spill.
• "This also reinforces the seriousness of sewage spills, as the fecal pathogen contaminants persist longer than we thought earlier, making them dangers for weeks and not days," according to researcher Larry Cahoon.
New Jersey Sea Grant
Invasive Species: Sea Grant Offers Adaptive Management Approaches
for Phragmites
• New Jersey Sea Grant has helped redirect the management
of Phragmites australis from wholesale eradication, to an adaptive
management approach based on integrating new emerging, redeeming
values of the species on a landscape scale.
Virginia Sea Grant
Fisheries/Tuna: Virginia Initiates Aggressive New Electronic Tagging
Program for Juvenile Atlantic Bluefin Tuna
• Because the migratory patterns of juvenile bluefins must
be understood in order to develop a more biologically realistic
conservation program for bluefin tuna Atlantic-wide, Virginia Sea
Grant and partners have initiated a tagging program for juvenile
fish.
• The data returned from these archival tags will be an important
first step in understanding the behavior, distribution and migration
paths of juvenile bluefin tuna.
• So far, 46 tags have already been deployed on juveniles
off the coast of Virginia. Scientific colleagues in the Bay
of Biscay are undertaking the same tagging of juvenile bluefin
on the other side of the Atlantic.
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