Talk at HelmSoc

Last week, I attended and spoke at the 715th (!) meeting of the Helminthological Society of Washington, a DC-area parasitology group with over one hundred years of history. While the whole meeting was fascinating, the highlight was a delightful keynote address by Dr. William Campbell, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in the discovery of a powerful antiparasitic drug. Among other scientific accomplishments, Dr. Campbell recounted the time he gave Irish whiskey to pigs while researching trichinosis.

Fieldwork on the Patuxent River

We finished setting traps for the Chesapeake Bay Parasite Project today, along the Patuxent River near Broome's Island. Parasite prevalence is usually pretty high here. We pulled a trap that had been soaking since last fall, and found it covered with invasive sea squirts (Molgula manhattensis). We had some fun cleaning it off.

Talk at Tidewater AFS Meeting

The American Fisheries Society Tidewater  Chapter annual meeting just wrapped up at SERC. I gave a talk on parasites and got to hear about all sorts of interesting fisheries research (tagging telemetry is so cool). Below is a photo of the beautiful Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which hosted the meeting banquet on Friday.

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Visit to the National Fish Collection

As part of the the American Fisheries Society Tidewater regional meeting (hosted by SERC), I got to see the National Fish Collection at the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center. So many fishes in jars, some of which were collected by Teddy Roosevelt and David Starr Jordan. There was also a large coelocanth. It was splendid.

Fieldwork on the Rhode River

We set 24 mud crab traps in SERC's backyard on Wednesday for the Chesapeake Bay Parasite Project. We'll pick out all the colonizing crabs in June and again in August, with the help of an army of volunteer citizen scientists.