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CHESAPEAKE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY | SOLOMONS, MDAPRIL 2024ISSUE 92Lab Lines1IN THIS ISSUE: DIRECTOR’S VIEW 1 IN CASE YOU MISSED IT 23 RECENT PUBLICATIONS & AWARDS 4 IN THE NEWS 46 SAFETY CORNER 7Spring is a time for renewal and cleaning, and our facilities team has certainly been working very hard, making our buildings and surroundings look fantastic! It was perfect timing as we welcomed our new UMCES President, Dr. Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, to campus on April 5th. Thank you all for coming out to the Town Hall and meeting with him; there will be many more opportunities to meet him after he formally joins us on July 1st. Our CBL community engagement activities have brought many visitors to campus, from tours for students from other institutions to the successful run of our Spring 2024 Science for Community series. Thank you to Dave Secor, Genny Nesslage, Michael Gonsior, Andrew Heyes, and Chris Rowe for their presentations, to Tom Miller who ran the webinars each week, and to all of you who helped run the event. We plan to run this again for Fall 2024 on all Tuesdays in October, so please hold those dates, same time, and place! The open house will likely be held in early September, either the 7th or 14th, so watch this space for further details! I would like to thank Chris Turner for organizing the Christmas in April event on April 20th and to the sta, faculty (and families) who participated.As the Spring semester is winding down, I wish all our students the best in nishing o their class projects and exams. Our recent graduates will be receiving their MSc and PhDs on May 31st at the UMCES graduate commencement at IMET in Baltimore. We will soon be welcoming our summer 2024 cohort of REU students on May 19th, so please welcome them as you see them around campus.
In Case You Missed It 2"CBL's AAUW hosted a March Mammal Madness competition! Participants voted on the outcome when two (although not exclusively) mammals battled each other in bracket fashion similarly to March Madness for basketball. Kaitlynn Wade kept participants informed via AAUW's social media (@cbl_women_scientists) on Instagram and through email announcements. We had a great turnout with 18 participants and at the end, the Great White Shark was the last animal standing! Congratulations to Brian Marx (1st), Evan Kostelecky (2nd), and Nina Santos (3rd) for being our winners and thanks to all who participated. Stay tuned for more events with AAUW!"Lora Harris traveled to Guam with the SEAS Islands Alliance for the 15th annual Conference on Island Sustainability. Five students and four workforce fellows from Puerto Rico attended and presented their research on monitoring a bioluminescent lagoon in Puerto Rico. We interacted with our Guam colleagues and fellow SEAS Islands Alliance members. The conference was fantastic and we were able to facilitate excellent cultural exchange between our island hubs.
In Case You Missed ItLee Cooper will be a keynote speaker at George Washington University's Earth Day Symposium on Friday, April 26th, speaking on Ecological Implications of Climate Change and the Retreat of Sea Ice in the Arctic.The Kilbourne lab hosted Dr. Pam Groth and her student Jessica Oberlies, both from University of Mary Washington. They measured Sr/Ca ratios in a coral from Christmas Island to test if the species they have is recording seawater temperature in the skeletal Sr/Ca. The goal is to improve our record of past El-Niño climate events, which create cool and dry conditions at Christmas Island, to better predict if future El Niño events will change with background climate warming.“Thank you and congratulations to all of you who supported and participated in our 3rd annual Christmas in April project this year! This team really came together to help improve the safety of the home for a local family in our community. From porch and deck repair and strengthening, to stair building, electrical work and even door installation, the CBL CREW did a fantastic job with this project, KUDOS!!!!!” (Christopher Turner).On April 8th around 3:00 p.m., work and classes stopped so many of us could go outside to witness the solar eclipse. We donned our eclipse glasses or made viewers out of cereal boxes, colanders, etc. We also found that as it got darker, it got noticeably colder. A special thank you to Michael Gonsior for sharing his picture with us. 3Solar Eclipse - Photo by: Michael Gonsior
Recent Publications & Awards Michael Gonsior, Madeline Lahm, Leanne Powers, Feng Chen, S. Leigh McCallister, Dong Liang, Grace Guinan and Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin (2024). Optical properties and molecular dierences in dissolved organic matter at the Bermuda Atlantic and Hawai'i ALOHA time-series stations. Environmental Science: Advances. [2024-UMCES CBL-2024-026]Yufeng Jia, Changfei He, Madeline Lahm, Qi Chen, Leanne Powers, Michael Gonsior, Feng Chen (2024). A pilot study suggests the correspondence between SAR202 bacteria and dissolved organic matter in the late stage of a year-long microcosm incubation. Frontiers in Microbiology.Nianzhi Jiao, Tingwei Luo, Quanrui Chen, Zhao Zhao, Xilin Xiao, Jihua Liu, Zhimin Jian, Shucheng Xie, Helmuth Thomas, Gerhard J. Herndl, Ronald Benner, Micheal Gonsior, Feng Chen, Wei-Jun Cai, Carol Robinson (2024). The microbial carbon pump and climate change. nature reviews microbiology.Hatje V., J. Schijf, K.H. Johannesson, R. Andrade, M. Caetano, P. Brito, B.A. Haley, M. Lagarde, and C. Jeandel (2024). The global biogeochemical cycle of the rare earth elements. Global Biogeochemical Cycles4In e News Dolphins play crucial role in Chesapeake Bay ecosystems; Virginia Aquarium talks conservation (WTKR3) April 2"If you're seeing dolphins, then it really is a sign that the ecosystem is reasonably healthy," said Thomas Miller, a professor at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. "They won't be in areas that are degraded." The Chesapeake Biological Laboratory is a part of the University of Maryland Center For Environmental Science.Photo by: WTKRWhale Slow Zone extended in Ocean City till April 10 (Coast TV) April 3NOAA Fisheries announced an extension of a voluntary right whale Slow Zone Wednesday, April 3. On March 26, the Ocean City buoy operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science redetected the presence of right whales east of Ocean City. The slow zone will be in eect though April 10.
In e NewsClick HERE5On April 5th we welcomed our new UMCES President Dr. Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm to CBL. He gotto tour our campus, see our facilities, and hear about our research and community. We all got to enjoymeeting with him over lunch, learning a little about him, and hearing about his vision and plans for thefuture. He will ocially be joining UMCES on July 1, 2024 and there will be many more opportunitiesto speak with him.
In e News 6Stuck cargo ships are picking up some unwanted passengers (Baltimore Banner) April 25That briny brew of microbes, macroalgae and invertebrates — known to the maritime industry as biofouling — that grows along a ship’s waterline over time. The clock started ticking for ships stranded in the Port of Baltimore when the Dali crashed into the Key Bridge on March 26. Through his research for the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, [Mario] Tamburri knew biofouling would begin accumulating within days, even hours, on ships idling in warming water… “We can’t just worry about what’s coming in [to the Chesapeake Bay],” Tamburri said. “We have to think about what’s coming out, too.”Nick Silverson recently spent several weeks at NOAA's Pacic Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle working on identifying genomic markers in invertebrates from the Bering and Chukchi seas. His internship with Dr. Matt Galaska was written up on NOAA's Ocean Exploration webpage (https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/ocean-molecular-ecology/news-story/barcoding-benthic-macrofauna-bering-and-chukchi-sea).Nicholas Silverson (NOAA - PMEL 2/26/24)The Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal is seen behind a otation device on the NS Savannah on Tuesday,April 9, 2024. (Kylie Cooper/The Baltimore Banner)
7www.umces.edu/cbl | 410-326-4281P.O. Box 38 | 146 Williams Street | Solomons, MD 20688-0038Safety Corner: Oven Safety1. The rst thing you should do is to read the manual to know how to operate the oven. 2. Be aware of what you are doing and follow safety procedures. 3. Do not use an extension cord to connect an oven to a plug. 4. Never use laboratory ovens to prepare food for human consumption. 5. Do not use household ovens in the laboratory. While laboratory ovens have their heating elements separated from the interior of the oven, household ovens do not.6. Inspect oven prior to use. The oven should be clean and free of spills, residue and debris.7. Make sure the oven is working properly and the cord and plug are in good working condition. If there are any problems, do not use the oven and label it to warn others from using it. 8. Make sure the oven temperature is correct. Do not use a mercury thermometer to calibrate ovens. Breakage can cause an accidental spill and exposure to mercury.9. Use the right oven for the task. You need to consider the temperature range that is needed and what is the maximum safe working temperature for the material involved. 10. Be sure to check the materials before placing them into the oven. Do not put plastics, ammables or combustibles in regular laboratory ovens. These can melt or ignite, spreading re and/or fumes into the lab. 11. Do not use ovens to dry any chemical sample that might pose a toxic hazard unless special precautions have been taken to ensure continuous venting of the atmosphere inside the oven. Volatile substances can become airborne and expose personnel to harmful fumes. Any glassware should be rinsed with distilled water before going into oven to remove any chemical residue. 12. Make sure there is airow around the samples when packing them in the oven. Do not pack them tightly to get as many as possible in. 13. Wear the appropriate personal protective equipment. There is a potential burn hazard from the hot surfaces of the oven and the contents. If steam is released from the oven, be sure to step behind the oven door when opening.References:https://www.labmanager.com/product-focus/how-safe-is-your-lab-oven-2798https://www.labmanager.com/lab-health-and-safety/laboratory-oven-hazards-6724https://www.bu.edu/researchsupport/forms-policies/lab-equipment-dryerovenwasher-safety-guidelines/https://ehs.princeton.edu/node/376Prudent Practices in the Laboratory 2011. National Academies Press