The back-to-school autumn weather was perfect for a paddle on the marsh! After reflections on our work last year (see below), we wanted to broaden our experience and our ability to access the rest of the water for some additional data collection. Last year, we monitored salinity and we had alewife fry in different salinities to see if they were able to survive.
Since then, our town is requesting the Department of Marine Resources to re-stocking the marsh with alewives. We wanted to provide depth information to help officials evaluate a re-stocking effort and we wanted to pull the Marsh Monitor probe for recent salinity data.
Our paddle experience also had the goal of thinking about “indicators” of the health of our marsh and how we might approach using technology this year to enhance our studies of the marsh and why alewives are not returning.
Thanks to a generous grant from the Georges River Educational Foundation, we were able to work with Port Clyde Kayak and have a fun paddle throughout the marsh and collect some valuable data in the process.
Our “headline” take-aways were:
The marsh is very shallow throughout!! (Less than a meter)
Salinity is persistent…we measured 5-8 parts per thousand (ppt) throughout the marsh.
It is apparent that our freshwater marsh habitat is experiencing brackish conditions; not necessarily good news for alewife breeding habitat. Now we turn toward formalizing our findings to pass along to the Conservation Commission to inform and hopefully bolster a plan going forward.
Our reflections of last year…
“My highlight from last year’s science class for me was studying the alewives. I enjoyed going down to the marsh and being able to have some time to myself down there. I also liked that when we studied that, we were solving a real life problem “Why did the alewives leave?” and “How can we get them to come back?” I think it helps us how to solve real world problems and how we can help our environment.”
“I really enjoyed doing research on the marsh and alewives, like going to the marsh and taking samples and doing experiments with the alewives.”
“I liked going down to the marsh and studying alewives. It was great besides cutting my toe. I enjoyed it because it was outside and I like being outside where I can be more hands-on.”
“The highlight of our year last year in my opinion was learning about the alewives in our marsh. This is my highlight because I enjoy hands-on work and learning about the alewives allowed us to go down to the marsh and go on field trips outside, and we got to set up the tanks and many other things.”
“I like the outside activities because I focus easier with physical settings.”
“My highlight from 7th grade was the alewife project and measuring the salinity. It was fun putting out the salinity probe and finding out what the salinity was different days and even after king tides.”
“My most memorable moment in 7th grade was taking the ear bone out of the alewife.”