Have you ever been standing on the shore and notice that, after a wave retreats from your feet, a bunch of small clams wiggle their way into the sand?
 
These clams, called coquina clams, have fascinated students and campers at the field station. They are very small, only about 10 to 25 cm, and can be purple, pink, orange, blue or gray. They are bivalve mollusks which means they have two hinged shells that cover their soft invertebrate body.
 
Coquina clams move up and down the shore by burying themselves in the sand after each wave moves them. This ability to burry themselves is thanks to their foot. This area where they reside is called the swash zone. They move so frequently so they can get the best feeding opportunities.
 
They are filter feeders that use two siphons which look like tubes to filter seawater. One extracts oxygen and collects algae, detritus and phytoplankton. The other gets rid of the waste that is in the water.

​Fish, crabs and shorebirds feed on coquina clams, and some people even make soup out of them.
 
Coquina clams are an indicator species because they are sensitive to environmental changes. They allow researchers to know whether or not the environment is healthy or not.
 
They can live up to two years in the wild, but without moving water for them to filter, they can only survive three days.
 
The next time you are at the beach, check around your feet to see if any coquina clams are making their way back into the sand when a wave passes!

Gretchen Knapp from the National Park Service stopped by the field station on Wednesday evening to speak to college students and CBFS staff about her job and the different jobs offered at the National Park Service.

Gretchen began by giving some background about herself. She was an instructor at CBFS for two years. This began her career with the park service where she has been for 25 years.

“That’s what gave me real life experience to do what I’m doing,” Gretchen said.

She started off as an interpreter by doing programs with the public and helping them engage with the environment around them. Now, she has moved up to be a supervisor. Not only has this position allowed her to use her background in marine biology, but she has also gained skills in many other areas including graphic design and website management.

“Park services is evolving as well to meet the needs of our visitors. We’re really trying to preserve cultural and natural history [and] the heritage of America for everybody,” Gretchen said.

During her presentation, she had everyone get into groups and assigned them a position with park services. Each group had to pick out a group of objects that represent the job from a table at the front of the room. Examples of jobs include law enforcement, maintenance, lifeguards  and administration.

Gretchen explained what responsibilities came with each job. She encouraged audience members to look into a job with park services and offered tips about resumes and the application process.

​“If you’re easily bored, this is the kind of career you might think about,” Knapp said. “There are a lot of other skills you can build once you get into the park services.” 

T​he Chincoteague Bay Field Station hosts grandparents and their grandchildren every summer in a partnership with Road Scholar through a program called “Share a Marine Science Adventure With Your Grandchild.”
 
It is a week-long, intergenerational program that allows families to spend time together while exploring the eastern shore environment. The activities include a wide variety such as a relaxing cookout on the beach to a swim through the salty marsh water and mud.
 
A participant from this week, Mary Beth, said her favorite part of the week so far was the marsh.
 
“The mud was so silly and so different from other intergen programs,” she said.
 
Mary Beth is from Seattle, where she is used to mountains and temperatures in the 60s, so coming to the Atlantic coast was a big change from what she is used to. Other intergenerational programs she has participated in have been in Yellowstone National Park and Chicago.
 
On Wednesday morning, the group headed out on the Mollusk, one of CBFS’s research vessels, to do tests and examine the water in Mosquito Creek. The group tested the water for salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, current direction and visibility.
 
To get a sample of water, they used a Van Dorn sampler to get water from depths of the surface, one, two and three meters.

​They then tested the water sample for its temperature and they used a refractometer to measure the salinity of water. 

​After testing the current and using a secchi disk to measure the visibility of the water, the group started preparing to trawl.

​The trawl was a success! The group caught many blue crabs, a couple of squids, lots of algae, and a couple of fish including a striped burrfish.

​Another participant, Hazel, said her favorite part of the week so far has been the boat trip. The best part of the boat trip for her was catching animals in the trawl net, and her favorite animal that was caught that day was the comb jelly.
 
Shayla, an educator at the field station, led the boat trip. Her favorite part of working with adult and family programs is the endless learning.

​“They love and love to actually learn. They sign up for it and it’s not forced,” she said.

​Our marine adventure day camp went crabbing on Monday morning at Chincoteague’s Veteran Memorial Park. The group waited to feel a tug on their lines before slowly reeling up crabs and catching them in a net. Many campers caught blue crabs, but one crab they caught was not like the rest. It was shaped different and had a lot of things attached to its carapace, or back.

​The crab was not a blue crab, but a common spider crab! Not to be confused with a Japanese spider crab, a common spider crab is only about one foot wide when its legs are stretched out. They often walk forward, but they can walk from side to side like other crabs do.

​Spider crabs are slow and have poor eyesight, so it has tasting and sensing organs on its legs to identify food or mud. Examples of what they eat include starfish and mussels. 

​Wondering what’s all over the carapace of this spider crab? They’re decorations! Spider crabs are considered “decorator crabs.” This means they will attach algae and debris to their carapaces with hook-like hairs. This is used for camouflage as defense against predators. The spider crab caught by our day camp has tunicates on it. It sure was an exciting find!

​University and research coordinator Sarah Bartle spoke to Chincoteague Bay Field Station staff, students currently taking college courses and professors teaching those courses on Tuesday evening about her research titled “Tracing Methods to Identify Recharge Sources and Quantify Discharge from a Submerged Spring.”
 
Sarah’s research began in 2011 at Shippensburg University, and it is still currently being conducted. To begin her presentation, she showed different examples of caves including carbonate, gypsum, quartz and marble, halite and wild caves.
 
She also explained how people’s fears of caves have changed over time. For example, people used to believe salamanders were actually baby dragons that lived in caves. Now, people are afraid of bats living in caves.
 
The significance of her research was that there is a lot of non-point source pollution in environments which means there is pollution that has no known source. Conduit streams which flow through caves have short residence times, or times that material is flowing through them, and they do not have enough time to get rid of the toxins that are flowing through. This also makes it difficult to know who is to blame for the toxins in the water.
 
For her research, Sarah mainly looked at Welsh Run where the stream seemed to trail off underground at one point and suddenly a spring appeared at another point. Sarah and her research group used dye dilution by time to determine the quantity of the sources of water that led to the spring.
 
“What goes down must come up again. So, if it goes underground, the water, the losing stream, it has to come back out at a spring and usually into a stream,” Sarah said.
 
The purpose of her research was to identify methods of locating connections between surface water and ground water and to find out if there are one or many sources that are contributing. She became interested in studying Welsh Run because there were cave fish, or surface fish, that were only there in the winter and not during the summer.
 
The group put Sulforhodamine B, or SRB, which is a non-toxic dye, into the stream that was detected on charcoal bags that were set up. This was used to determine if the stream flowed through the cave and out to the spring. The results were successful.
 
“That was a pretty good indicator that our hypothesis was correct that that little stream that was losing went to the cave and then to the spring,” Sarah said.
 
After, Sarah and her group did discharge measurement to figure out how much water was being lost in the stream swallet. The flow conditions played a large factor, and up to 50 percent of the water that was flowing through the cave was not from the stream swallet. The water could have been coming from a pond nearby.
 
The biological study found that the Welsh Run stream had a lot of algae, the pond had a lot of diatoms and the cave had both algae and diatoms. Because of this, her group continued on with the dye trace.
Sarah dumped the dye into the stream and an automatic water sampler was set up at the spring to take samples every 15 minutes. This found the quantity of water in the spring that came from the stream that flowed through the cave and out to the spring.
 
“[The study] showed a lot about how every site is site specific so it showed a lot about different methods you can use to trace water and determine sources based on quantity of water,” Sarah said.

Monday kicked off a busy week here at the field station. The first session of college courses began this week while school groups and Road Scholar continued their activities. Danville High School spent Monday afternoon checking the pH and salinity of the water. The group also learned how to trawl and tried their hand at trawling a couple of times.

On Tuesday morning, Covenant Christian High School students went to Wallops Island to learn about dunes. The students practiced making their own dunes out of only the materials provided to them. They also combed the beach to find shells.​

​The students went to the Maritime Forest on Wednesday morning to walk around and observe the different layers of the forest including the dirt and trees.

​Students from Owen J. Roberts High School spent Wednesday morning learning about invertebrates at Wallops Island. While there, they used sieves to filter through the sand in hopes of finding invertebrates. They also walked along the beach to find shells.

​Road Scholar participants kicked off Thursday morning with a kayaking trip through the Assateague Channel. During their morning paddle, they enjoyed the sights and saw wildlife including juvenile bald eagles and ponies.

On Thursday afternoon, students from Strayer Middle School went to Tom’s Cove to observe the environment. While they were there, they used sieves to discover what animals they could find.

​Also, they used what educators Hannah and Paige called a “Godzilla line” to scare animals into a net.

​To end the week, students from Freedom Middle School spent Friday morning in the marsh examining characteristics of the marsh environment. They embraced the setting by diving into the mud and getting a full body experience of the marsh.

​Students in the Biological Oceanography class with Dr. Robert Vaillancourt from Millersville University took abiotic readings of the ocean on Friday afternoon.

​There’s no better feeling than capturing that one precious moment in nature, when a bird takes flight, a bumble bee lands softly on a flower, or the setting sun reflecting perfectly on the surface of a mountain lake. Photographs are one of the best ways to relive your adventures and an excellent tool to teach others about the beautiful wildlife you’ve experienced. But when it comes to nature photography, capturing that perfect moment can be a challenge because there are so many moving parts, and wildlife can be especially unpredictable. We asked Chincoteague Bay Field Station’s expert nature photographer and Road Scholar instructor Jim Clark to provide us with a few simple tricks to elevate your photography and bring a piece of nature home with you: 

“Be a naturalist first, photographer second. I guarantee your images will be much more appreciated and welcomed by your audience,” explains Jim. “Oh yeah, you’ll have more fun, too!” The best way to photograph nature is to understand nature. Once you gain a deeper knowledge of your subjects, you’ll have an easier time capturing those defining moments about what makes nature so awesome. 

​You shouldn’t photograph nature just to get a pretty picture. Professional nature photographers enjoy being outside as much as they love capturing that perfect moment. For Jim, he loves how his students and Road Scholar participants have “just as much fun watching a great egret patiently wait for the right moment to strike the water to catch a fish as they did actually photographing it.” Nature photography should be about the experience and appreciating the beauty of the world, and then about you trying to photograph it. 

This one is a twofer. Knowing when to wait for just the right moment to capture can be hard, but it’s also very important. It involves plenty of patience and having a little know-how (see above tip) to anticipate how a moment might play out. Slow down, observe and wait to see if you can anticipate something incredible about to happen. Then be ready to chase the moment. 

Just as important as anticipating is knowing when to chase a moment. Once you see a moment beginning to unfold, get to work capturing the moment, like an osprey diving for a fish or two polar bears wrestling on the arctic tundra. Just remember: Jim says that knowing when to anticipate and when to chase aren’t mutually exclusive. Both depend upon each other to capture that perfect photograph. 

“As nature photographers, we strive to seek that elusive characteristic in our landscape photography: a sense of place,” says Jim. “After all, it is the ‘it’ factor in landscape photography to have our viewers feel as if they can actually sense being there.” That’s why truly immersing yourself into the landscape you are photographing is so important in becoming a skilled and confident nature photographer. Let all distractions fade away and try to pinpoint what makes this landscape so uniquely beautiful. Engage all your senses – savor the experience. The more connection you have with the location, the better your photography will stand out and the more your viewers will feel that magic, too.  

Though your first inclination might be to remain standing to photograph a small animal, a guaranteed technique to improve your wildlife photography is to change your perspective. Look at your subject from a different angle and get low for an up close and personal view of the animal.  “What makes a lower perspective appealing? The short answer: intimacy,” states Jim. “The viewer gets a sense of looking straight into the animal’s eyes and experiencing the world as the animal does.”

“Newly minted nature photographers tend to focus on what they see, not what they hear. They fail to take advantage of the moment they are photographing when they don’t use all of their senses.” Jim explains that there’s two reasons for listening when photographing nature. The first is to help identify the species you want to photograph. Sometimes the sounds an animal makes will reveal what it is going to do next. The second, and more important, is that nature’s symphony provides an extra level of nature appreciation. Enjoy the experience!

Once you’ve become skilled at the basics of photography, step outside your comfort zone and try something new. Try a new perspective or a different lens. Experiment photographing under different ambient lighting situations. Try a new Road Scholar photography program. “Make this the year you say to yourself, ‘Maybe it’s time…’ Then, fill in the rest of the sentence, and go for it,” Jim says. “Make this the year to increase your confidence, improve your skills, and raise your enjoyment in photographing nature.”

​A former North American Nature Photography Association President, Jim Clark is the nature photography instructor for the Chincoteague Bay Field Station, Wallops Island, Virginia. Jim leads anywhere between six to eight Road Scholar nature photography workshops at the station. Jim is also a columnist for Virginia Wildlife Magazine, former contributing editor for Outdoor Photographer magazine and author/photographer of six books. Visit Jim’s website at www.jimclarkphoto.com or like him on Facebook. For a full list of Jim’s Road Scholar programs, and more learning adventures, visit www.roadscholar.org.
 
Images © Jim Clark. All rights reserved.