CHESAPEAKE
QUARTERLY
Terrapins
The Fall & Rise
MARYLAND SEA GRANT COLLEGE • VOLUME 7, NUMBER 4
contents
2 Return of the Native
A natural history of two local species
6 Terrapins on the Patuxent
Twenty years of research
8 Success on Poplar Island
Terrapins thrive on manmade refuge
10 The Men Who Would Be Kings
And the turtle they bet on
14 Naturalist on the Bay
A winter’s tale
16 Research Vessel Commissioned
New ship for Bay scientists
Cover photo: The diamondback terrapin is
known as the mascot of the University of
Maryland College Park and the official state
reptile. This particular diamondback is known
as Patsy, and she was rescued by Marguerite
Whilden of the Terrapin Institute and
Research Consortium. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN
CONSOLI. Opposite page: Naturalist Willem
Roosenburg has been catching and often
recatching terrapins in creeks off the Patuxent
River for 22 years. He is holding a female
terrapin that he’s caught before as part of a
long-term study documenting some of the
threats to her survival.
CHESAPEAKE
QUARTERLY
Chesapeake Quarterly explores scientific, environ-
mental, and cultural issues relevant to the Chesapeake
Bay and its watershed.
This magazine is produced and funded by the
Maryland Sea Grant College Program, which receives
support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration and the state of Maryland. Editors,
Jack Greer and Michael W. Fincham; Managing
Editor and Art Director, Sandy Rodgers; Contribu-
ting Editor, Erica Goldman; Science Writer, Jessica
Smits. Send items for the magazine to:
Maryland Sea Grant College
4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 300
University System of Maryland
College Park, Maryland 20740
301.405.7500, fax 301.314.5780
e-mail: mdsg@mdsg.umd.edu
www.mdsg.umd.edu
We gratefully acknowledge support for Chesapeake
Quarterly from the Chesapeake Bay Trust for 2008.
December 2008
A Natural History of Two
M aybe you can go home again,
at least if it’s summer and
home is Southern Maryland.
It’s early June and Willem Roosenburg is
heading out towards the river he grew up
on. He’s steering a small skiff along
Washington Creek, a short, muddy-look-
ing branch of the Patuxent River.The
49-year-old biologist is back from his
teaching job at Ohio University and he’s
doing what he did first as a kid, then as a
graduate student: he’s looking for turtles.
It’s the first day of his summer turtle-
catching season, and under his wide-
brimmed hat, Roosenburg sports a round
face, a goatee, and the smile of a big kid
let out of school.As he glides the skiff up
to a fyke net, one of several he set out
two days ago, he immediately starts an
introductory lecture to a boatload of four
assistants. Out on the river, he’s still play-
ing the teacher.Two of his assistants are
undergrad students from the University
of Maryland where a diamondback terra-
pin named Testudo is the school mascot.
They’ve heard the lecture before and
begin hauling the net aboard.
His other assistants are hearing his talk
for the first time.They’re field biologists
just arrived from faraway Myanmar, sent
here for training by the International
Turtle Alliance and the Wildlife
Conservation Society, organizations
alarmed by the possible extinction of tur-
tles in Asia. Back in Myanmar, naturalists
are organizing conservation and restora-
tion programs focused on the Burmese
roofed turtle.This is the biologists’ second
day in Southern Maryland and their first
experience with emptying fyke nets.
The fyke net, a long, baglike cylinder,
lies submerged in shallow water with
several hoops breaking the surface like
the humps of a small whale tethered to
the shore. In the belly of this whale
Roosenburg expects to find a number of
diamondback terrapins, the species he’s
been monitoring along this river for
more than 20 years now, a species that’s
been crawling around rivers like this for
longer than humans have been walking
on two legs.Turtles shared the earth with
dinosaurs and somehow survived the
mass extinction that wiped them out.
Sometimes the race is to the slow.
“Let’s show you how to get these tur-
tles out of the net,” Roosenburg tells his
Myanmarese assistants.As the net comes
out of the water, several diamondbacks
are clawing their way along the sides,
their heads sticking through the net and
swiveling on narrow necks like periscopes
scanning for enemy ships. Most of them
lose their grip and tumble backwards.
“You first go to the back of the net,”
Roosenburg says,“and you need two
people.” His helpers, Khin Myo Myo and
Kyaw Moe, grab the back end and begin
shaking out the net.A small pumpkinseed
sunfish and several perch are soon flop-
ping along the bottom of the boat.And
crawling among them are seven terrapins.
Roosenburg picks up one of the
larger terrapins, a female with a bright
yellow bottom and a distinctive diamond
pattern on the back of its shell, and holds
it out.“Somebody want to hold her?” he
asks.“She’s a female.You can actually feel
the eggs inside it, little hard round things
that dimple.” Myo Myo takes the turtle
and hesitantly inserts her fingers under
the shell.“I think she’s probably 30 years
old.And she’s marked,” he says pointing
to notches along the rim of her shell.
RETURN OF THE
He put those notches there him-
self when he first caught this same
turtle years ago, and those notches
tagged her with a numerical ID that
will stay with her the rest of her life.
“This one’s ID is 1R2R4R11R9L,”
he says, reading first the right side of
her shell, then the left.
On this bright June morning,
Roosenburg and his crew pick 24
terrapins out of five fyke nets along
two muddy creeks and 18 of them
are clearly marked recaptures.They
also find a number of blue crabs and
fish, including a hogchoker, which
unleashes a lecture on the nomencla-
ture of local species.The crew gets
lessons on bagging terrapins and
numbering the bags according to
location. Field notes on time and date
and site of each capture go into a yel-
low notebook.
This mark-and-recapture study is
one of the reasons biologists come
this far to work with Roosenburg.
For more than two decades, he’s
been catching and notching turtles
along these creeks. He’s doing nat-
ural history, a traditional form of
science that features time-consum-
ing field work, close observation,
and obsessive record keeping, all
aimed at a fulsome description of
organisms and their survival over
time in their natural habitat.
In his records are some
worrisome signs.
Roosenburg has not
been catching as many
turtles as he did just 10
years ago. Is Maryland’s
diamondback terrapin, like the
Local Species
Michael W. Fincham
NATIVE
Burmese roofed turtle, rapidly becoming
an endangered species while hardly any-
one’s watching?
Long-term records that track popula-
tion trends are rare now in estuarine biol-
ogy.They’re rare because they’re rarely
funded. For his turtle work on the
Patuxent, Roosenburg has been funded
well for only seven of 22 summers. His
research has been largely self supported.
Are natural historians like Roosenburg
also becoming an endangered species?
Natural history may be dying out, much
like some of the animals it once described
in such loving detail.That, at least, is the
argument put forward by a number of sci-
entists and philosophers of science who
would revive the discipline.They point to
the encroaching popularity of newer
fields, such as cellular biology, molecular
biology, systems ecology, and mathematical
ecology. Scientists in those fields are seen
as rising stars working in cutting-edge
research, a perception that leads to gener-
ous funding for newer fields and skimpy
support for “old-fashioned” fields like nat-
ural history. Universities, of course, have a
natural tendency to follow the money,
hiring scientists in hot fields in hopes of
bringing in larger grants that will help
pay the bills. It’s one of their survival
strategies.
The results of this trend were spelled
out in pessimistic detail several years ago
in “The Impending Extinction of Natural
History,” an essay published in The
Chronicle of Higher Education.As universi-
ties fill up with specialists in the new
fields, those specialists are not likely to
hire junior faculty in older fields like nat-
ural history.A cascade of decline can fol-
low, similar to declines seen when wildlife
populations are driven out of their breed-
ing grounds.“The natural historian has
been pushed to the margins of academe.”
wrote the co-authors of the essay, David
Wilcove, a conservation biologist, and
Thomas Eisner, a pioneer in the field of
chemical ecology.“The de-institutional-
ization of natural history,” they write,
“looms as one of the biggest scientific
mistakes of our time.”
Natural history today is only seen as
useful if the animal it studies is useful.The
blue crab supports an important commer-
cial harvest in Chesapeake Bay, and so
does the striped bass, and once upon a
time, so did the native oyster — all species
that have been and still are well studied.
But what’s the economic payoff from nat-
ural history on species like the diamond-
back terrapin? When Christopher
Norment, an expert on the Harris spar-
row, applied for a job at a small university,
he got the tough question about natural
history:“What good is your research?”
Another rap against natural history is
that it seems to offer no “theoretical fix,”
according to Mark Sagoff, a philosopher
and critic of theoretical ecology. Science
that promises to deliver (eventually) a the-
ory about how a whole ecosystem works
is more likely to get funded. System-wide
theories seem more “useful” for managing
complex ecosystems than detailed
descriptions of an individual animal —
unless that animal is a force in how the
system functions or malfunctions.“What
we really have to do,” says Sagoff,“is find
out how terrapins are an umbrella species
or a keystone species or a nail-in-the-cof-
fin species. Or any metaphor you like.”
Then terrapins might be worth saving —
along with the natural historians who
study them.
Such seems to be the naturalist’s
dilemma in the contemporary science
climate: How do you run a long-term,
largely unfunded study of a low-profit,
low-theory animal? And what good, after
all, is your research?
Roosenburg is lecturing again, and this
time everybody is listening. He and his
assistants and five bags of turtles are
crammed in a small field lab, getting ready
for their first data-recording session of the
season.Their makeshift lab is a small dark
room in a red brick outbuilding that
might have been a horse stable once upon
a time.
The lab sits on a large farm estate that
holds a number of barns as well as two
small cabins where the student assistants
bunk and a creekside house where
Roosenburg and his family spend their
summers.The whole setup comes with a
low rent to Roosenburg and his crew,
thanks to the good will of a long-time
landowner who likes the idea of a local
scientist doing long-range natural history
on a native species.
That’s part of the secret behind
Roosenburg’s success in running a long-
term study of a low-profit animal: he uses
low-cost lab space and low-cost help like
biologists from Myanmar and undergrad
students from Ohio University and the
University of Maryland.
His students are eager, but untrained.
Hence all the lectures.“You’re looking at
a turtle that is probably twice as old as
you guys are,” Roosenburg tells his assis-
tants, holding up a large female that was at
least 15 to 20 years old when he first
caught her in 1988. For this turtle and for
every other one that comes out of his
4 • Chesapeake Quarterly
Diamondback Terrapin
Malaclemys terrapin
The diamondback terrapin is the only
North American turtle that lives exclu-
sively in the brackish waters of estuaries,
bays, and salt marshes.The carapace of
each animal has markings as unique as a
zebra’s stripes or a human’s fingerprints
and the pattern on its shell gives the dia-
mondback its name.
The subspecies found in Chesapeake
Bay, the Northern diamondback terrapin,
grows larger than any other diamondback.
Males can reach six inches, while the gen-
erally larger females may grow up to nine
inches.Terrapins primarily eat mollusks
such as snails, clams, and mussels, their
strong, sharp beaks allowing them to
break their prey’s hard shell.
Though terrapins can live longer than
forty years, very few of the eggs laid actu-
ally survive the first year. Predators such
as foxes, raccoons, and skunks prey on
eggs and juveniles. As diamondbacks
mature, threats largely shift from natural
predators to human-induced challenges,
such as fishing pressure and damage from
boat propellers.
Jo
hn
C
on
so
li
nets, he wants a dozen data points
recorded, including time and place of cap-
ture, carapace length, width, height, mass,
sex, and age. If it’s a first-time turtle, he
will give it an ID, notching its shell with a
drill and file. If it’s a recapture, he wants
the ID recorded along with any changes
in size and condition. Everything goes
into the computer, into the database.
As Roosenburg holds her, the turtle
keeps twisting in his hands, oblivious to
his lecture on field data, her claws pad-
dling the air as she tries to crawl back to
her home river. She’s clearly a survivor,
with the scars to show for it.“This is from
spending a lot of time in pound nets,” he
says pointing to scrape marks along her
legs. That goes into the computer also.
One fact comes out of the computer
immediately: this 40-something female
has shown up in Roosenburg’s nets 14
times in 20 years. Recapture rates like this
are good news for the naturalist because
every time this turtle reappears in his nets,
she adds a new data point, making his
demographic records even more robust.
To date he has more than 30,000 captures
of more than 10,000 terrapins.
Other facts come out: this lady terra-
pin seems to have lived her entire life
within three miles of here. Four decades
ago her mother dug a small hole, probably
in sandy soil along a local creek, perhaps
urinating to soften the ground.There she
laid her eggs, a baker’s dozen in most
cases. Life in a turtle nest is either quiet or
catastrophic — with catastrophes coming
in the form of foxes or raccoons, both
adept at sniffing out turtle urine and dig-
ging through the sand to feast on turtle
eggs.The hatchling that grew into this
hefty female first came crawling out of a
lucky nest as a tiny turtle, pea green and
perfectly formed — but still easy prey.
Like most females, she outgrew every
male in the river, but did not reach sexual
maturity until age eight or later.Thanks
to her size she survived foxes and rac-
coons; thanks to luck, she survived water-
men’s nets and motorboats, two of the
leading killers for large terrapins.
Every November or December, she
hibernated, swimming to the bottom of a
small, deep creek and digging herself into
the mud for a long winter’s sleep.
Scientists call this brumation rather than
hibernation, but by any term it’s a neat
trick for an air breather who normally
likes to sun herself on rocks and tidal flats.
Once past puberty she began mating
with male terrapins, and several times a
year she dug her own nest and laid her
own clutch of a dozen or more eggs.
Each year, however, she found fewer nest-
ing beaches as new homes replaced old
farms and new owners put in more riprap
and bulkheads and docks along their
waterfronts. How many offspring from
this 40-year-old are likely to survive?
According to Roosenburg’s numbers, per-
haps one in a hundred.
Pausing in his lecture, the naturalist
looks the terrapin dead in the eye and
smiles. It’s not clear whether the biologist
is catching the turtle or she’s catching
him.“Hey babe, how you doin’?” he asks,
one survivor to another.“Welcome back.”
Like his lady terrapin,Willem Roosen-
burg grew up on this same river.The
biologist is the son of a biologist who also
worked the Patuxent. Bill Roosenburg
was a field worker at a small field station
that the Chesapeake Biological Labora-
tory established at Hallowing Point. On a
nearby bluff above a farm, Bill
Roosenburg built a home with a view of
the river where young Willem spent
much of his free time. He hung around
with biologists and grad students at the
station, hitchhiked rides on the research
boats, and learned to pull sampling nets.
Like the sons of local watermen, he also
learned to fish and boat and trotline for
blue crabs. Rowing on the river one day,
he spied small, dark bobbleheads popping
up, then disappearing. Shipping his oars,
he leaned over and suddenly saw turtles
gliding under and around his boat, turtles
by the dozens. He was floating through a
herd of hundreds.An accidental vision
that proved prophetic.
After high school he left to become a
biologist, starting the long, slow swim
towards a Ph.D.When he was finally a
doctoral candidate at the University of
Pennsylvania, he went looking for a dis-
sertation topic and a site for his field
research. He thought again about the
Patuxent. His father was there and now
he was struggling with health problems.
And all those turtles were there.
He began with a proper Ph.D. ques-
tion: did ground temperature in the nest
determine the sex of the hatchlings that
emerged? It was an odd phenomenon,
one found in other turtle species, but not
documented in terrapins. In most animals,
of course, sex is determined when an egg
is fertilized, not when it sits buried in a
nest much later. It was a question he
would study in the field and later in the
lab, working with biologist Al Place at the
Center for Marine Biotechnology of the
University of Maryland Biotechnology
Institute in Baltimore.
During his first summer in the field,
he worked completely alone, setting out
fyke nets, catching and marking terrapins,
tracking down nest sites, and checking the
sex of little pea-green hatchlings as they
came crawling out. It was a ragtag opera-
tion, but it was a start.When he came
back for a second season, he was surprised
by how many recaptures he was finding in
his nets.That revelation opened the door
to other research options, demographic
studies exploring how local history and
ecology create variations in life history
traits. By the end of his third summer he
was hooked. He realized he could do this
the rest of his life.
After graduate school his life fell into a
familiar rhythm. Fall, winter, and spring,
he hibernated at Ohio University digging
out his own niche in an academic habitat.
He taught classes in ecology and evolu-
tion, supervised graduate students, and
Volume 7, Number 4 • 5
Shipping his oars, he leaned
over and suddenly saw turtles
gliding under and around his
boat, turtles by the dozens.
He was floating through a
herd of hundreds.
published well. Every summer, he packed
up the family for the annual migration
back to his home river.At the beginning
of every summer the same question from
the kids: why do we have to spend every
summer in Maryland?
“To be quite frank with you, I love doing
field work,” Roosenburg admits. He’s
working his way through his sandwich at
a picnic table next to his summer house.
Lunchtime at his turtle camp is a do-it-
yourself affair where he stocks the
kitchen with bread and cold cuts and
everyone makes his own. For the crew it’s
break time between finishing the lab
work and hauling the turtles back out to
the river where they’ll be released to go
look for their own lunch.
Field work like this has its joys — and
its sorrows, the kind of emotional com-
plexities rarely found in lab-based experi-
ments or computer-based ecosystem
modeling. For many in the natural his-
tory tradition, the joys can be seen in
their writings, whether it’s Thoreau pok-
ing around Walden Pond, Darwin picking
up plants in Patagonia, or Aldo Leopold
tending his Sand County farm in
Wisconsin.The same joys can be heard in
Roosenburg’s lunchtime talk about track-
ing terrapins along the Patuxent.“I love
being outside,” he says.“That’s the most
important reason why I am a biologist.”
But the sorrows are there also. Field work
in the 21st century has a flip side: a
working naturalist often comes face to
face with the decline of the animals he’s
studying.
The best summers for Roosenburg —
as a scientist and a Southern Marylander
— were the seasons he spent working
together with local watermen, catching
fish in bank traps under his own com-
mercial license and catching turtles for his
research project. Bank traps are tall box-
like cages that watermen use for catching
gizzard shad, catfish, yellow perch, and
peeler crabs.These large wire cages sit
out from a river bank, sticking up out of
the water at the end of a long stretch of
net that runs directly out from the shore.
When fish and crabs and muskrats and
turtles are cruising the shallows, they
encounter the net and try to swim
around it.Their detour lands them smack
in the bank trap.
For a turtle, a bank trap is usually not
the worst fate.A proper trap stands tall
enough that its top sticks up out of the
water, even at mean high tide, and air-
breathing animals like turtles can rise up,
stick their periscope-like heads above the
water, and breathe. If the trap is not tall
enough, however, or if the waters rise too
high on a wind-driven tide, or if water-
men don’t check the trap regularly —
then turtles and muskrats and others can
easily die.Working with a local water-
man, Roosenburg would pick live turtles
out of the traps, haul them off to his field
lab to record data, then return them lov-
ingly to the water.
For the terrapin biologist, the bank
traps were a bonanza.The income from
his commercial catch bought fuel for the
boat and paid room and board for his
field assistants, and the turtle catches
added data to his growing demographic
study of the species. On good days he was
taking more than 100 turtles out of 35
bank traps. On his best day he hauled
home 196 turtles, nearly all of them large
females.Turtle bags completely filled the
back of his pickup truck, and two teams
of assistants had to spend eight hours
recording, measuring, and marking before
heading back out in boats in the middle
of a northeaster to get the turtles back in
their home waters. Hard work every day,
but for a Southern Maryland boy, it was
the best of two worlds: he could be a
waterman and a scientist at the same time.
One of those worlds came to an end
with the great bank trap war of St. Mary’s
County. It was a war between watermen
6 • Chesapeake Quarterly
Volume 7, Number 4 • 7
and landowners.As waterfront farms
along the Patuxent gave way to new
homes with large, well-mowed riverfront
lawns, many of the arrivistes from the
cities and suburbs began complaining.
These odd-looking bank traps with their
stakes and nets were spoiling the view
from the lawn.While some watermen
were willing to move their traps away —
some were not, citing fishing rights that
date back hundreds of years. It was the
kind of culture clash, full of ironies, that
has become familiar in the tidewater
regions of Maryland.
Caught in the cultural crossfire were
the scientist and the terrapin.As the bat-
tle heated up, moving from local disputes
towards legislative action, Roosenburg
lobbied to keep the bank trap tradition
alive, partly out of friendship with water-
men, partly out of self-interest in his large
turtle hauls, partly out of fears for what
would follow. He even ran a large study
of bank traps for the Maryland Depart-
ment of Natural Resources (DNR) that
identified ways to make them even more
turtle safe.
When watermen lost the bank trap
battle, Roosenburg’s worst fears soon
came true.After the legislature banned
bank traps in St. Mary’s County in 2001,
watermen turned to fyke nets as they
warned they would, and turtles began
dying in larger numbers as the scientist
warned. Fyke nets don’t stick up above
the water unless a float is inserted to cre-
ate space for air breathers. Roosenburg
would keep floats in his nets, watermen
would not.
The scientist lost his large turtle hauls
as well as some long-standing friendships
with watermen.When DNR officials
caught watermen illegally keeping blue
crabs caught in their fyke nets, the agency
also closed down their commercial fyke
nets.That left the biologist as the only
legal fyke netter, a fact that enraged some
local watermen who immediately blamed
Roosenburg, sometimes confronting him
on his collecting trips.“They swear that I
was the one that turned them in,” he
says.“Somebody else called them in and I
took all the heat for it.”
The summer of 2001 was the low
point.The crisis dissolved his friendships,
a loss he regrets.“I’m from Maryland, I
admired the waterman’s way of life,” he
says.“That was friendship that I cher-
ished.” Bank traps were gone, watermen
were angry, an oil spill was killing turtles,
populations were dropping, his father was
dying.“That all happened in one bang,”
he says.“Those were the dark days of my
life.”
Maybe you can go home again, but you
can’t step twice in the same river. On
Roosenburg’s river, farms were giving
way to new houses, nest sites were disap-
pearing, winter oystering was hitting new
lows, and more watermen were turning
to turtle catching. By 2001 terrapins were
also facing dark days.
Roosenburg, however, was already
quietly at work in another kind of war, a
gathering campaign to save the estuary’s
oldest inhabitant. One of his projects
highlighted the huge threat from
recreational crab potting, an old-time
tidewater tradition. It documented turtle
deaths by drowning in all those crab pots
hanging off all those community and pri-
vate docks.According to Roosenburg,
these accidental kills probably wiped out
turtle populations decades ago in many
rivers.Another project designed and
tested bycatch reduction devices, now
required by law, that can keep turtles out
of these lethal pots.Yet other projects
explored ways to make bank traps safer
and tested fences for keeping predators
off nest sites.
Findings like these came out of natu-
ral history work that went beyond classic
observational surveys to include field
experiments, hypothesis testing, and
Terrapins on the Patuxent
Kyaw Moe, a field biologist from Myanmar, learns how to handle a fyke net.
He’s pulling diamondback terrapins out of a creek off the Patuxent River that’s
now lined with large homes and new lawns where terrapins used to nest. He’s
here for training with Willem Roosenburg (center), a biologist who’s been run-
ning a long-term research project on his hometown river. Helping with his
mark-and-recapture study are Margaret Lilly and Tom Parker, students from the
University of Maryland where the terrapin reigns as the school mascot. Each
diamondback is notched with a long-lasting ID, then weighed and measured,
sexed and aged — and finally released back into the river. Over 22 years
Roosenburg has more than 30,000 captures of more than 10,000 terrapins.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL W. FINCHAM.
mathematical modeling of populations.
This kind of natural history work could
clearly have payoffs for conservation —
at least if its findings are applied.
One of his key findings was applied
when Maryland terrapins suddenly faced
a new threat.The trouble began not in
the Chesapeake but in China, a country
that began importing more turtles in the
1990s for consumers who had long val-
ued turtles for their meat and their
alleged powers for fighting cancer,
enhancing virility, and extending
longevity. The fast-growing China trade
began decimating turtle populations in
Myanmar, Vietnam, Borneo, Java, and
Sumatra. Conservationists called it the
“Asian turtle crisis,” and began warning
that an American turtle crisis could be
next.
In Maryland local groups began lob-
bying the legislature to close down the
commercial fishery for diamondback ter-
rapins.They pointed to incomplete har-
vest records that showed a fishery that
was still small — but ready to explode.
For 2002 DNR estimated a harvest of
only 151 terrapins. Four years later, how-
ever, with only 14 watermen working the
fishery, the harvest jumped to 11,010 ter-
rapin taken.The China trade could now
quickly draw dozens or hundreds of
watermen into the terrapin fishery and
set off a turtle fishing boom that could
prove disastrous.
The new lobbying campaign lasted
several years with Roosenburg playing an
advisory role — low-key, but persistent.
As a member of the Chesapeake Terrapin
Alliance, he was one of several scientists
arguing that terrapins — because they are
late-maturing, low fecundity animals —
are easy to overfish.“He was quietly
advising us that this was not a species that
needs a fishery in the face of a declining
8 • Chesapeake Quarterly
Poplar Island nearly vanished from sight before the Army Corps of Engi-
neers began building dikes for storing dredge material dug out of the ship-
ping channels of Chesapeake Bay. Now the man-made island with its new
wetland cells is becoming home to thousands of terrapins who are finding
safe nests for their offspring.To keep track of births on the site, field tech-
nician Ryan Trimbath (below) and another assistant patrol the island during
nesting season.When they find a nest, they dig it up, count the eggs, then
cover them again, and flag the site. Fifty days later they ring the nest with
aluminum flashing, creating a little terrapin corral to keep hatchlings from
wandering away.When the hatchlings finally crawl out,Trimbath captures
them for weighing, measuring, and tagging.The survival rate for these nests
is running in the 70 to 80 percent range — happy news for biologist
Willem Roosenburg (right) who releases hatchlings back into the wetlands.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL W. FINCHAM.
Poplar Island Success
Volume 7, Number 4 • 9
spawning habitat,” says Harley Speir, a
fishery manager for DNR, the agency
caught in the middle between conserva-
tionists, watermen, and legislators. In
2006, the campaign won a partial ban
based on turtle size — and the harvest
actually jumped.The next legislature
enacted a complete ban on the commer-
cial harvest of the diamondback terrapin.
A new governor, Martin O’Malley,
quickly signed it into law.
Some of the clinching evidence came
from Roosenburg’s work. Called to testify
before legislators the biologist spelled out
a take-home message from the only long-
term study of terrapins in the Bay. In the
last 10 years, terrapin populations had
already declined 75 percent in his home
river, said Roosenburg, with hardly any
commercial harvest in the region.A
boom in the harvest could quickly drive
the species down for decades.
Local research carries weight because
it is local, suggests Speir.“It was signifi-
cant,” he says of Roosenburg’s research.
“It was the only real data we had for this
area.”
Willem Roosenburg kneels down next to
a canal-like creek and pulls three little
green hatchlings out of a bag. He sets
them gently on a small, stony beach bor-
dered by thick, high-standing marsh
grasses.The hatchlings stand motionless
for a good 30 seconds, then one clambers
over a stone, slips into the water and
begins waving its legs like it wants to
swim.The other two look around, then
clump off towards the marsh grass.
The biologist snatches them up and
plunks them back at water’s edge where
they glance around again, then finally
take the first plunge.“Okay guys, have
fun,” says Roosenburg.“See you in a few
years.”
It’s his last field day for the summer,
and he’s spending it on the eastern side of
the Bay on Poplar Island, the site of his
second field research study. Once stretch-
ing over 1,000 acres, Poplar Island broke
apart with time and erosion and land
subsidence, dwindling to three smaller
islands totaling less then 10 acres. Since
1998, the Army Corps of Engineers has
been diking and filling to construct a
large artificial island and dumping ground
for all the dredge material that is dug out
of the shipping channels of Chesapeake
Bay every year. One key question for the
Corps: can this new/old island also
become a habitat for birds and, perhaps,
for terrapins? That’s why Roosenburg is
here.
To keep track of terrapin births on
the site, the biologist has two assistants
work the island every day. Ryan Trimbath
and Tony Frisbee, both blond and slightly
sunburned, patrol the island’s new wet-
lands, looking for nests, capturing and
tagging and releasing hatchlings. Every-
thing — the number and location of
nests and hatchlings — goes into note-
books and then into the computer.
Answers are already coming out of
the database they’ve built, answers that
bode well for Roosenburg’s hopes for a
terrapin restoration. Back in the Patuxent,
he was finding survival rates running
about one hatchling per hundred. Here
on Poplar, he’s getting survival rates of 70
to 80 percent. No commercial harvesting
for the China trade, no foxes and rac-
coons, no riprap and bulkheads blocking
off the beach, no crab pots and bank traps
and fyke nets to drown in.The only
predators so far seem to be birds. If these
survival rates keep up, the Corps could
rename the place Turtle Island.
After his dark years on the Patuxent,
the Poplar Island experience has been
hope-inducing for Roosenburg.When
the Corps first approached him about
monitoring terrapins on a manmade
island of 1342 acres, he had his reserva-
tions.“Now that I’ve looked and seen
those wetland cells,” he says,“you’d be
pretty hard pressed to tell the difference
between them and other wetlands here
on the Eastern Shore.” Poplar will double
in size over the next decade, and restored
islands like this could indeed swell
Baywide terrapin populations.
What does Poplar Island mean for the
mainland? The experience here stands as
a rough “proof of concept” for some key
steps that could be tried elsewhere.The
Some Natural History Classics
“It is a commonplace of all religious thought,
even the most primitive, that the man seeking
visions and insight must go apart from his fel-
lows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he
is of the proper sort, he will return with a mes-
sage.” So wrote Loren Eiseley, the scientist who
made himself a great American writer. For
several centuries natural history writers of the
proper sort have ventured into America’s
natural world and returned with messages that
helped shape the country’s science and
literature as well as its conservation and envi-
ronmental movements.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden. By the writer
who made himself a natural historian.
George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature. An
early effort at ecological thinking that helped
launch the modern conservation movement.
John Wesley Powell and Wallace Stegner
(editor), The Arid Lands. A report on the land
beyond the hundredth meridian by the geol-
ogist who made several famous explorations
of the Colorado River.
John Steinbeck (with Ed Ricketts), The Log from
the Sea of Cortez.The tale of a trip to collect
flora and fauna of the intertidal zone of the
Baja, by a famous novelist and his best friend,
the marine biologist who became the central
character in several novels.
Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac. Its chapter
on “The Land Ethic” profoundly influenced
the literature of environmental ethics.
Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey. Natural
history that takes the long view, and does
so lyrically.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.The book that
helped outlaw DDT and inspired the modern
American environmental movement.
John and Mildred Teal, The Life and Death of a
Salt Marsh.The ecology of the salt marshes
that edge the East Coast from Newfoundland
to Florida.
William Warner, Beautiful Swimmers. A natural
history of blue crabs and the watermen who
chase them.
Christopher Norment, Return to Warden’s Grove.
A new classic by a scientist who traveled to
the Northwest Territories to study the Harris
sparrow and learn about himself.
More on the Terrapin
Chesapeake Terrapin Alliance,
www.cterrapin.org
Diamondback Terrapin Working Group,
www.dtwg.org
Terrapin Institute and Research Consortium,
www.terrapininstitute.org
ban on commercial harvesting will help,
says Roosenburg, but more is needed.
Watermen could check their bank traps
and pound nets and fyke nets regularly
(as many already do), recreational crab-
bers could fit their pots with bycatch
reduction devices (as they are now legally
required to do), landowners could begin
replacing riprap and bulkheads with “liv-
ing shorelines” that are graded and vege-
tated (as some are doing already).These
may look like baby steps, but they are a
start.
They could slowly bring more terra-
pins back to the mainland rivers where
they were always part of the life and spirit
and sense of place in tidewater
Chesapeake, a world where a boy in a
boat could look down and see hundreds
of terrapins passing by.
Reaching into a long, tan bag,
Roosenburg grabs another handful of lit-
tle hatchlings and holds them up for pic-
ture-taking.This morning’s launch is
being staged for two writers, two pho-
tographers, and a videographer.The new
harvest ban seems to have stimulated
more press interest, both in the diamond-
back terrapin and in the biologist who’s
built a career trying to save them.
Roosenburg has only 15 hatchlings to
release this morning, but it goes slowly
with frequent retakes and multiple cam-
era angles. Each baby terrapin gets a well-
photographed bon voyage.“When we have
150 of these to release,” the biologist
chuckles,“there’s a lot less ceremony.”
Finally he pulls the last terrapin from
the bag, the last release for Roosenburg’s
summer before he migrates back to acad-
eme.Atop a small grey stone, the lone
diamondback stands its ground, tiny and
charismatic and eerily confident, the
newest apparition of the oldest animal life
in the estuary.
“He doesn’t want to go,” says
Roosenburg.“He likes it here too
much.”
— email the author, fincham@mdsg.umd.edu
10 • Chesapeake Quarterly
The Men Who Would
How Grand Plans for the Lowly Terrapin . . .
T he man who first made a lot of
money off terrapins in
Maryland arrived in Crisfield
in 1887. Albert T. LaVallette Jr.
moved to town with his new wife
and began buying terrapins from
local watermen and selling them to
high-end restaurants in cities like
Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New
York. He set off the first great boom in
terrapin fishing in the Chesapeake Bay,
emerging as the “Terrapin King” of Crisfield
and turning Crisfield into the terrapin capital of the east coast.
The man who made terrapins even more famous in the state grew up in Crisfield
during that boom. Harry Clifton “Curley” Byrd, the son of an oysterman, was born in
1889 and left town in 1905, riding a steamboat across the Bay to enroll at College Park as
a cadet at the tiny Maryland Agricultural College. He became a star athlete there, then the
football coach, then the president of the University of Maryland. In the process he helped
transform the College Park school into one of the largest and fastest growing universities
in the country.
The king and the coach probably never met, but the two men had much in common.
Both were ambitious, with big plans, flamboyant personalities, and colorful private lives.
And both altered the fame and fate of diamondback terrapins in Maryland.
ALBERT LAVALLETTE JR. was probably born ambitious. His grandfather was a
well-known admiral and his father a successful businessman, according to the family
history unearthed by Eugene L. Meyer for Chesapeake Bay Magazine. Grandfather Elie
LaVallette VI had commanded the U.S.S. Constitution, the warship famous in history as
“Old Ironsides,” and was eminent enough to have two naval destroyers and a town in
New Jersey named after him. LaVallette’s father,Albert Sr., worked in land development
and was shrewd enough to talk some Philadelphia investors into forming the Manokin
River Oyster Company near Crisfield.
LaVallette Jr. came to Crisfield with a clever plan.The town was already wildly busy
with booming oyster businesses and a traditional blue crab fishery, so LaVallette focused
his money-making schemes on the diamondback terrapin, an unexploited species that was
prolific in the abundant shallows and marshlands of the lower Eastern Shore. Long seen as
poor people’s food, turtle meat had been eaten by early colonists, by soldiers in the
Revolutionary army, by slaves on tidewater plantations — but seldom by the well-off in
the high-end restaurants of the Northeast.
In an early example of niche marketing, LaVallette traveled to cities like Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and New York and sold the best-known restaurant in each city on a secret
Michael W. Fincham
Talent, ambition, and terrapins brought fortune and fame to two residents of Crisfield, Albert
LaVallette Jr. and “Curley” Byrd (above, from left). PHOTOS: LAVALLETTE, COURTESY OF ELSIE BLUHM; BYRD,
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS.
recipe for terrapin soup that he had picked up in the
Caribbean.According to Glenn Lawson’s account in The
Last Waterman, each sales pitch included an entertaining
performance with LaVallette as chef whipping up his
secret soup with considerable flair in the restaurant’s
kitchen. Under his original deal, one restaurant in each
city would have exclusive license to use his recipe, but it
would have to charge a high price for the dish.And he, of
course, would be the only supplier.As these elite restau-
rants advertised their exclusive LaVallette’s Diamondback
Terrapin, they created a strong brand that LaVallette later
capitalized on.When it came time to renew the contracts,
he expanded the market, making his now well-known
recipe available to other restaurants in each town. He
also raised his prices. Back in Crisfield, the terrapin
fishing boom was on.
WHILE CRISFIELD WAS BECOMING —
however briefly — the terrapin capital of the
country, young Curley Byrd was making money for
college by dip netting for crabs, according to a local
historian, and could often be seen running barefoot
on the tidal flats, training for the track team.After
graduating from the local high school, he arrived in
College Park with plans.At the Maryland Agricultural
College he listed his goal — perhaps in jest — as
“becoming a star athlete,” and he achieved the feat in
three sports. In football he was quarterback and cap-
tain, in baseball he was the top pitcher, in track he set
long-standing sprint records. Byrd was also popular with
his classmates, who thought him clever and — with his
curly black hair — handsome. Under his photo in the
1908 yearbook, a phrase warned:“The devil hath power to
assume a pleasing shape.”
After graduating in three years, he left College Park to
play yet more football as a ringer at several other colleges
and more baseball as a minor league pitcher for a farm
team of the Chicago White Sox. By 1912 he was back in
College Park as football coach, and under his leadership
the Maryland Agricultural College defeated Johns Hopkins
University that year for the first time in the school’s his-
tory, a feat that established his popularity with a new gen-
eration of students and administrators.
By 1920 the coach had added two jobs — athletic
Volume 7, Number 4 • 11
Be Kings
Went Somewhat Awry
Terrapins were so popular
at the beginning of the 20th
century that they were featured
on this menu card for a 1902
banquet. The Hotel Rennert
(below), located at the corners
of Liberty and Saratoga streets
in Baltimore, had a restaurant
favored by local businessmen
and politicians and journalists
like H.L. Mencken. Known for
fine Southern food and sea-
food, especially terrapin soup,
the hotel kept hundreds of live
terrapins penned in the base-
ment. The Rennert shunned
Carolina terrapins and served
only Chesapeakes, which may
have come from Albert
LaVallette Jr. No record
survives of the exclusive soup
recipe that came with the terra-
pins, but the one listed below
contains the basic ingredients
included in more recent recipes.
Classic Terrapin or
Mock Terrapin Soup
1 quart chicken or veal stock
2 cups terrapin meat, chopped
(substitute lean beef or
dark chicken meat)
1 cup cream
2 hard-boiled egg yolks
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon paprika
Dash of mace
1/2 cup sherry
By
go
ne
B
al
tim
or
e:
A
H
ist
or
ica
l P
or
tra
it
by
Ja
cq
ue
s
Ke
lly
By
go
ne
B
al
tim
or
e:
A
H
ist
or
ica
l P
or
tra
it
by
Ja
cq
ue
s
Ke
lly
C
ou
rt
es
y
of
t
he
M
ar
yl
an
d
H
ist
or
ic
al
S
oc
ie
ty
director and special assistant to the presi-
dent — and he spent a lot of his time in
Annapolis successfully lobbying the state
legislature to make his old aggie college
the home campus for a new University of
Maryland. Like Albert LaVallette selling his
terrapin soup, Byrd was able to sell the
idea of a new university, largely through
his immense personal flair.“What he was
great at was his personality,’’ says George
Callcott, the historian who recounts the
Byrd era in his two histories of the
University of Maryland.“He made every-
body love him,” Callcott says.“He bent
everybody to his will.”
Curley Byrd now had big plans for his
university and big problems to overcome.
The university was new, it was small, and it
did not yet have the loyalty and financial
support of tens of thousands of alumni.To
most Marylanders, the new state university
was still the little aggie school that ranked
well below long-established schools like
the Naval Academy,Washington College,
St. John’s College, Georgetown, and the
more recent, but well-funded Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore.“There has indeed
been a tradition for the socially proper
people in Maryland and especially in
Baltimore to go to Johns Hopkins or
Princeton or the University of Virginia,”
explains Callcott.“And this was always
derogatorily called the aggie college.”
One of Byrd’s strategies for building a
new university was building winning
teams, especially in football, the college
sport that seized the public mind during
the Jazz Age.The popularity of his teams
helped him in his job as chief lobbyist
before a legislature that had no alumni
from the new university and few from the
old aggie college.“Byrd believed very sin-
cerely, and maybe he was right, that the
way for a university to become a great
university was for it to become known, for
it to become loved by the people,”
explains Callcott.“And the best way for it
to become known and to be loved by the
people was to have winning teams.”
Another way to become loved was to
change the name of his winning teams. By
1923 coach Byrd, the son of Crisfield, was
calling his team the Terrapins. Most of the
newspapers followed Byrd’s lead and grad-
ually dropped old names like the Aggies,
or the Farmers, or The Old Liners. It
probably helped that Byrd — among his
many jobs — was also a sportswriter with
the Washington Evening Star.And sports
stories, then as now, put the university
before the public more than any other
form of journalism.
As branding, the new name was as
brilliant as one of LaVallette’s best tricks.
The terrapin name jettisoned the old
down-scale label as an ag and engineering
school and rebranded the new university
by linking it with a charismatic animal
familiar to anybody who lived near or vis-
ited the many rivers and beaches of the
Chesapeake Bay.Terrapins were known
and loved, often as pets for children who
grew up to be fans. Maybe the scrappy
teams called Terrapins and the university
they represented could also be loved.
Students, at least, clearly loved the ter-
rapin connection. Eight years after Byrd
renamed his teams the Terrapins, the stu-
dent newspaper prodded the University
into canonizing the terrapin as the school’s
official mascot.The Class of 1933 raised
money for a large, 300-pound bronze
statue and named it “Testudo.”The live
model for the statue came from Crisfield,
of course, and the bronze Testudo stood
for years in front of Ritchie Coliseum
where it was the target of kidnappings by
raiding bands from Hopkins, Loyola,
Georgetown, and the University of
Virginia.
12 • Chesapeake Quarterly
Curley Byrd, the coach, began calling his football team the Terrapins back in
1923. When the class of 1933 created Testudo, a 300-lb bronze statue (shown at left
at its unveiling), the terrapin became the school’s official mascot. The living terrapin
that was the model for the statue crawls on the ground. She’s probably headed back
to Crisfield where she and the coach both came from. Byrd soon became president of
the university and later hired football coach Jim Tatum (below) who brought home a
national championship in 1953.Over more than 80 years, the terrapin (opposite
page) has worn a few hats and odd clothes and smoked some pipes as the enduring
mascot for a rising university. PHOTOS:THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE PAGE, 1934-1978, UNIVER-
SITY OF MARYLAND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; 1994 AND 2003, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
T HE TERRAPIN FISHING BOOM
that Albert LaVallette had unleashed
around Crisfield made him briefly rich
and socially prominent. He built a new
home for his wife and two children, a
large bungalow on the fringes of town out
on Hammock Point. Behind the house
were the pens where he stored all the ter-
rapins he bought from local watermen,
feeding the animals scraps of crab waste
collected from local crab houses.
The boom soon went bust, a classic
case of fishing a resource with little or no
knowledge of the basic biology of the tar-
get species.Terrapins, it turned out, are
easy to overfish.The largest and most prof-
itable terrapins are the females who lay
only a dozen eggs at a time and don’t start
doing that until they are eight years old.
When watermen quickly fished out most
of the females, they drove down popula-
tion levels in Maryland for decades. In
1891, the new boom had watermen har-
vesting more than 35,000 terrapins for sale
to high-end restaurants.Ten years later,
they were harvesting fewer than 70.
By then terrapin soup was still the rage
and overfishing episodes were common in
many states along the east coast, perhaps
sparked by LaVallette’s early success in
marketing his recipe. Declines in supply, of
course, kept the price high for what was
becoming a rare delicacy, and the high
price kept driving fishing pressure and
lowering the supply even more.What
finally broke the cycle, according to scien-
tists, was Prohibition. It outlawed the
sherry that went into diamondback soup.
As the harvest declined, LaVallette’s
economic fortunes began to sink.
Competitors cut into his market, and
some began importing terrapins from
the Carolinas and passing them off as
“Chesapeakes” (much as crabs are
shipped in today for use in “Maryland-
style” crabcakes).
His personal life took an even more
dramatic turn when he began an affair
with his children’s governess, Mary Bussey.
It cost him his family and his house and
his life in Crisfield.According to Meyer’s
account in Chesapeake Bay Magazine,
LaVallette moved to Hampton,Virginia
where he lived for decades on a houseboat
with his new love.The local paper called
him a “picturesque character” and a vivid
story teller, once famous for breeding ter-
rapins. He died a pauper in 1937 and was
buried in the Hampton National Military
Cemetery.
Terrapin populations in Maryland and
many other states took decades to recover
from the fishing frenzy LaVallette had
helped unleash.Attempts to breed them in
captivity were tried in several states,
including North Carolina where scientists
at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries Lab in
Beaufort were describing the reproductive
biology and growth rates that made terra-
pins so easy to overfish.After the commer-
cial demand for terrapins dropped away,
the lab released tens of thousands of
hatchlings into the marshes and sounds of
Atlantic and Gulf Coast states. More than
500 were released into Maryland waters.
CURLEY BRYD’S professional life
also took a dramatic turn when the
coach of the Maryland Terrapins was
appointed president of the University of
Maryland in 1935. It was, for the times, a
bold decision to pick a football coach
with no advanced degrees, a recent
divorce, and a reputation for dating attrac-
tive women, but Byrd was able to turn
both the Depression era and the Post
World War II era into boom times for his
school. He managed to raise huge
amounts of money in these tough times,
mostly through his personal charisma and
his canny deal-making both in Annapolis
and in Washington DC.
His best-laid plans for the Maryland
Terrapins eventually backfired.To bring his
university back into the public eye after
World War II, Byrd began hiring coaches
who would take his team to the top of the
college football world.The best of them,
Jim Tatum, took the team to a series of
big-time bowl games and won a national
championship in 1953 for Curley Byrd’s
Maryland Terrapins.The result, however,
was a reputation, some say undeserved,
that Maryland — at the time the third
largest state university in the country —
was more a football school than a highly
ranked academic institution.When Byrd
resigned to run for governor in 1954, his
opponents brought the football-school
charge into the partisan political debate, a
tactic that played a big role in Byrd’s great-
est defeat.
Byrd later lost races for the Senate and
the House of Representatives, but his life
as a public official continued. In 1958, he
was appointed chairman of the Maryland
Tidewater Fisheries Commission, the state
agency charged with managing all of
Maryland’s fisheries. It was an appropriate
crown for the son of an oysterman.After
he died in 1970, his body was buried in a
churchyard back in Crisfield.
The real terrapins of Maryland, the
diamondbacks that swam the state’s shal-
low waters and plodded through its wet-
lands and woods, may have been the
unexpected beneficiaries of Byrd’s sports
teams.As Maryland became more urban-
ized and suburbanized, fewer Marylanders
actually saw many real terrapins. But
nearly everyone knew they were there.
Their high profile helped terrapins sur-
vive when a new overfishing boom threat-
ened. In the 1990s, China began import-
ing turtles from across the globe, setting off
heavy fishing that decimated turtle popu-
lations in a number of Asian countries and
drove many species close to extinction.
Volume 7, Number 4 • 13
1934-35
1940-41
1953
1964
2003
1978
1994
When the China trade reached into the
Chesapeake Bay, the commercial harvest in
Maryland began climbing dramatically: in
just four years the estimated harvest
jumped from 151 to 11,010 terrapins
taken in 2006.
Conservationists had been warning
that a new boom was ready to explode.
Maryland watermen, another endangered
species, were already struggling through
declines in their commercial harvests of
blue crabs and oysters.With rising prices
from the growing China trade, watermen
could start flooding into the terrapin fish-
ery again, setting off a harvest frenzy that
could rouse LaVallette’s ghost from his
grave.
In 2001, when conservation groups
were banding together to campaign for a
fishing ban, they found that the terrapin
had a lot of fans in Maryland, thanks in
part to Curley Byrd’s university. By a fluke
of timing, the University of Maryland in
2003 began republicizing its historic mas-
cot, the diamondback terrapin, by launch-
ing a new, well-funded “Fear the Turtle”
marketing campaign, complete with T-
shirts and posters and television spots.
Through the wizardry of digital
graphics, the campaign could move
beyond cartoon terrapins to create dra-
matic, yet realistic versions of a handsome,
charismatic, full-colored terrapin that
could walk, talk, lift its head — and roar.
The campaign boosted fundraising and
student recruitment, and it probably
helped the conservation campaign as well.
According to one biologist, it showed
millions of Marylanders what real
terrapins look like.
The conservation campaign took sev-
eral years of lobbying and a lot of planning
by environmentalists, scientists and activists
— but it finally won. Last year the legisla-
ture enacted a complete ban on the com-
mercial harvesting of terrapins and a new
governor signed it into law.
For terrapins, some well-laid plans
finally worked out. Now the ghost of
Albert LaVallette was back in his grave.
And somewhere Curley Byrd was
smiling.
14 • Chesapeake Quarterly
I t looks like our last, best chance for
the year. Motoring out of Cambridge
marina, we can see some skim ice
floating below the docks, but all the signs
say this is a good day for diving and film-
ing and photographing the bottom of
Chesapeake Bay.
We had the right weather: windless,
clear and cloudless.We had the right sea-
son: two days before Christmas, two days
into winter when cold waters can run
clear, with no warm-weather plankton
blooms to block out sunlight.
And we had the right cameraman:
Nick Caloyianis, a Marylander who has
done deep-water filming all over the
world. Lean and lightly bearded,
Caloyianis and his partner Clarita Berger
came well-equipped for a day of shallow-
water diving in the Choptank.They’ve
loaded the cockpit of a wide-beamed
workboat with crates and piles of scuba
gear and camera gear and underwater
lights.
As we cruise the middle of the
Choptank River, the sun — still low in
the east — begins bouncing light up off
the river. Behind us, it slowly lights up
the brick and frame houses that stand like
sentinels along the shore and lends a soft
glow to all the white sailboats and cabin
cruisers that now crowd the waterfront.
Would there be light below the water?
That’s the gift we’re looking for. But the
river gives no clue.We are cutting across a
flat, flashing mirror.
As a filmmaker, I first hired Nick
more than 20 years ago to dive down and
film the Bay’s dwindling seagrass beds for
a documentary called Chesapeake:The
Twilight Estuary. Since then Nick has
filmed all around the world, from the
waters off Galapagos and the Greek
Islands to the Red Sea, the North
Atlantic, the Arctic, the Caribbean, and
the far western Pacific. In recent years,
however, he has refocused his energy on
his home waters and refocused his career
on a new role: he’s trying to turn himself
into an unusual kind of naturalist, an
underwater naturalist.
According to the classic definition of
the species, a naturalist uses direct obser-
vation to study plants and animals in their
environment, in most cases bringing back
data in the form of field notes and sam-
ples for lab analysis. It’s a definition that
fits scientists who focus more on field
work than laboratory experiments,
molecular biology, or theoretical model-
ing.And it’s a definition that fits certain
nonscientists, including writers like the
famous Henry David Thoreau and the
less famous Gilbert Klingel. Back in 1951,
Klingel wrote The Bay, one of the first
popular books on the Chesapeake.
Klingel, it turns out, is an inspiration
Caloyianis likes to cite, not just for his
book, but for his early interest in directly
observing the underwater life of the estu-
ary. He spent time on the bottom in old-
style diving suits with metal helmets and
in a diving bell he invented himself. He
brought back some of the first photo-
graphs of the underwater Chesapeake.
The naturalist label, by these defini-
tions, may also fit a photographer like
Caloyianis. For a number of years he’s
been trekking out with all his scuba and
camera gear to film and photograph the
key species in the Chesapeake, both the
famous and the little known: not just blue
crabs and oysters and striped bass, but red
sponges and toadfish and killifish, all
shown in the underwater world where
they live, a world the rest of us — includ-
Naturalist at Bay
A Winter’s Tale
Michael W. Fincham
Volume 7, Number 4 • 15
ing most scientists — never see. His new
goal is a book he’s titled Life Beneath the
Chesapeake. He sees it as “a big picture
look” at the underwater estuary: full of
color photos that would give — species
by species — a view of the whole system.
He’s after “the quintessential elements that
made the Chesapeake what it is.”
If Caloyianis can pull it off, his picture
book could make the perfect gift for
some future Christmas — but that’s a big
if. He’s got better gear than Klingel ever
had, but he’s got a bigger problem to
solve.The key to great photography is
light, and light is hard to come by in the
Chesapeake, much harder than it was
when Klingel made dives in the mid-
1950s or when Caloyianis himself first
began diving and photographing in the
mid-1970s.As a beginning photographer
who couldn’t land many assignments, he
worked for two years as a commercial
oyster diver.“I didn’t make that much
money,” he said,“but I saw a whole lot.
And every chance at good visibility I took
my camera in the water.” Down along the
bottom of this same Choptank River he
made pictures showing 20 to 25 feet of
visibility.“Look how clear the water was,”
Caloyianis said.“We haven’t seen that in a
quarter of a century.”
Today he’s back on the Choptank to
film the bottom for another documentary,
and he’d be happy with just four to six
feet of visibility. Even that kind of clarity
is rare, he warns, on the order of one day
in ten. Some days he can’t see his hand in
front of his face. On those days he packs
up his gear and goes home.
Caloyianis, however, has learned a lot
of tricks over the years.The key trick is
persistence, to keep hauling his hopes and
his gear down to the Bay despite being
skunked.Another trick is to always bring
lights.The best tricks are to pick his spots
— two favorites are Eastern Bay and
Mobjack Bay — and pick his days. He
checks the marine weather reports, espe-
cially the wind reports, and pulls up the
latest satellite imagery that can show an
educated eye a lot about current turbidity
patterns. He also calls John Volatile, an ex-
waterman who keeps a constant weather
eye on the Bay. Lately Caloyianis has got-
ten his batting average up to six days out
of ten.
We’re still hoping for a 10-foot day
when Ben Parks, our captain, drops anchor
out in the middle of the Choptank, just
east of the Route 50 bridge. Parks is a
long-time waterman with local knowledge
and a GPS. Both tell him we’re floating
directly above Bolingbroke Reef where
seed oysters were planted three years ago.
Back in the cockpit, Don Meritt, a scien-
tist from a hatchery at the UMCES Horn
Point Laboratory, swings a set of long-han-
dled tongs over the side and starts working
the bottom.When he pulls up a load of
big oysters, we know we’re on target.The
oysters are clumped together and clotted
with mussels, another good sign. Oysters
and mussels are strong filter feeders and
restoring them to the bottom could help
clear the Bay’s murky waters.
While Caloyianis swings his oxygen
tanks across his back, Clarita Berger leans
overboard and tries her spit test. Her small
glob of spit slides quickly past the boat.A
strong tide is running — not a good sign.
Continued on p. 16
Always bring lights — that’s one lesson Nick Caloyianis learned from decades of filming and photographing underwater life in the Chesapeake Bay.
His photographs document the loss of natural light in the estuary. In 2008 (above left) he worked with multiple lights as he tried to film oyster
restoration on Dominion Reef in the mainstem Bay. Back in 1979 (above right), he had plenty of light to photograph his partner, Clarita Berger, as
she took pictures of the grassbeds of the Choptank River. PHOTOS: MICHAEL EVERSMIER, AQUA VENTURES, INC. (LEFT) AND NICK CALOYIANIS (RIGHT).
Both divers gear up, buckle on their
weight belts and slide overboard.
Captain Parks hands a heavy under-
water camera down to Nick, and the
two divers sink out of sight, swim-
ming hard against the current.
When they find the reef, it’s
mostly by feel. Down along the bot-
tom, the divers are not getting a 10-
foot day or a 4-foot day or a 2-foot
day. Visibility is down to inches and
the two divers have to hang onto
each other to keep in sight and hang
onto rocks to keep from being swept
off the oyster bed. Caloyianis surfaces
with several minutes of footage, but
it’s too murky to be useable, and he
doesn’t ask for his still camera.
Healthy oysters are down there but
not enough of them to clear the
water. Despite all the planning, he’s
been skunked again. Days like this
keep pushing his book into a distant
future. It’s time for the born-anew
nat