Marine Biology

I was fortunate to land a dream job one summer while attending college, research assistant at the University of Delaware Marine Biology Station in Lewes, Delaware. When I reported to work I learned I was one three assistants selected from eight hundred applicants. I was planning to major in marine biology so the job was an opportunity to gain real-world experience in the field.

The research station was a collection of small buildings, the only structures on an island separated from the mainland by a fifty-yard wide inlet. We traveled to and from the island in small outboard-powered utility boats. The inlet was alternately calm and running swiftly, depending upon the tide, as it rose and fell in the upstream marshland. I quickly honed my boating skills just by crossing between the parking lot and the research station.

I assisted several biologists who were working on their doctoral theses or had already earned their degree. I did a variety of jobs; all were interesting, some were downright exciting.

The station was home to two research trawlers. Twice a month we would collect samples in the Delaware Bay by dragging the trawl net along the bottom for a distance of one-mile. Everything in our path was collected by the huge net and then deposited on the deck. Sometimes it came up nearly empty, at other times it contained tons of marine life. My job was to handle the net and sort through the hundreds of animals collected, tossing some into coolers for later study and the remainder back over the side.

We each brought personal coolers onboard to keep some of the catch for ourselves. I brought home fish that could seldom be caught on a hook. After one cruise I returned with two flounder, each nearly three feet in length. They were so thick that I had to fillet the fillets. I gave one to an elderly neighbor who used to boast to me about his fishing skills. His jaw dropped in disbelief as I handed him the fish. When he asked how I caught it I answered, “on a worm, just lucky I guess.”

On one trip our net snagged something so heavy that it stopped us dead in the water. We backed up until we were directly over the obstruction then, with our stern pulled deep into the water from the weight, continued to winch the net and the unknown object to the surface. It was a huge iron anchor of the type carried by sailing ships in the eighteenth century. A check of our charts showed no wrecks indicated at our location. It was possible that we had discovered an unknown ship that sank centuries before. We cut the anchor free and recorded our coordinates, planning to return in the future to explore further.

One of my regular duties was to collect data on the population of weakfish, or sea trout, in the bay. I brought fifty average-sized specimens caugth on the trawler back to the lab. There I recorded the weight, length, age and stomach content of each fish. The age was determined by removing the inner-ear bone, or otolith, from the skull. Otoliths have growth rings, like a tree. By counting the rings the age of the fish could be calculated precisely. Stomach contents were examined and separated by type; shrimp, bait fish, etc. The amount of each food source was measured by dropping it into a graduated cylinder and recording how much water it displaced. The resulting data tables and graphs provided an indication of the health and annual growth rate of the weakfish population.

The most fascinating project I worked on that summer involved brain surgery on sharks. I administered anesthesia as researchers opened the skull of the shark and severed the nerve connecting the fish's lateral line to the brain. The lateral line runs the entire length of the body on both sides of all fish and is used to sense the source of vibrations in the water. After surgery I walked the sharks in a pool to keep water flowing over their gill racks until they regained consciousness. These were not dangerous sharks. They were a species called dogfish, or squalus acanthias, reaching a length of about two feet and unable to puncture skin with their bite. The purpose of the research was to study the ability of sharks to locate their prey with their lateral lines both intact and severed.

There was a very real danger of shark attacks at the research station. Large sharks often congregated in the inlet between the island and the mainland each day. They came to feed on hundreds of pounds of clam scraps released from the Doxsee seafood processing plant just upstream. The plant accumulated the scraps in large holding tanks during the canning operation then flushed them into the inlet waters on the outgoing tide. Often, when crossing the inlet to return to the parking lot, sharks of six feet and longer would pass by the boat, sometimes grazing the hull. I always felt fear when I saw the dorsal fin break the surface or the large grey body gliding just under the surface.

That was the best job I ever had. I looked forward to completing my undergraduate studies and perhaps returning one day to the station to specialize in one of the marine sciences. My plans were confounded by my difficulty in mastering chemistry. Eventually I turned from marine biology and majored instead in journalism and television production. Perhaps that was for the best. I suffered from sea sickness whenever we set out in swells greater than two feet. That could be a real handicap for a scientist who goes down to the sea in ships to make his living.