Our field trip for Dan Ferandez’s weather and climate class visited the Baltimore harbor by means of the pungy schooner Lady Maryland. Instructors/crew from the Living Classrooms Foundation cast a (educationally-permitted) trawl net, with a little help from us participants.
Then, as the boat tracked to and fro in sight of Fort McHenry, we examined the fauna that we’d brought up in the net. Some fish (not Rockfish, despite my overeager and uninformed ID, but rather Yellow Perch [Perca flavescens] and Spot Croaker [Leiostomus xanthurus]) that favor the brackish water of the estuary, and a couple of comb jellies (not visible in the image, but in the adjacent bucket).
A wee Blue Crab (Callinectes sapidus), as well as a full-grown one that had joined the choir eternal. And, of course, plastic rubbish, which at least was serving as substrate for some sea anemones.
For me, one takeaway was a reminder from the educators that partially full bottles of drinking water in a landfill isolate that resource from the hydrologic cycle. If you see a bottle of water that’s otherwise going to be trashed (rather than recycled), the least you can do is empty the bottle so that the water can return to the sea.
Any trip to the Baltimore harbor has to include a shot of the Domino Sugar plant. We see some thin bands of cumulus clouds trying to get themselves better organized. Leta tagged along so that she could loom over the Baltimore city skyline.