Virginia Sea Grant’s 2012 Graduate Research Fellows presented at the 2014 Virginia Sea Grant Project Participants’ Symposium. Unlike other talks they give about their research, we challenged them to tailor their talk for a general audience.
Annie Murphy, VIMS
Annie Murphy, a Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) graduate student, studies nutrients in clam aquaculture. In her talk, she discusses how the seaweed that grows on clam beds takes in some of the access nitrogen in the water column.
Ryan Schloesser, VIMS
Ryan Schloesser, a VIMS graduate student, studies how to measure health in young fish so fisheries managers could better predict survival numbers needed to set fishing limits. In his talk, he discusses the three different methods he tested for estimating health in summer flounder and Atlantic croaker.
Billur Celebi, ODU
Billur Celebi, an Old Dominion University graduate student, researches how climate change will affect eelgrass, a type of seagrass that is important habitat for many species in Chesapeake Bay. In her talk, she discusses her findings in how increased temperature and CO2 will affect grass survival.
Mark Stratton, VIMS
Mark Stratton, a VIMS graduate student, researches the ecology of the nearshore fish communities of the U.S. East Coast by studying the abundance, distribution, and diets of fishes found in several trawl surveys. His presentation suggests that management boundaries don’t always align with the ecological boundaries of fish.
