To understand how our climate is changing today and what could happen in the future, we need to understand how the Earth’s climate has changed in the past. However, on a global scale, we have not been studying the Earth’s climate for very long.

Sorry to disappoint comic book fans, but don’t expect to see any crabs with super powers swimming around the Chesapeake Bay — despite the Washington Post's prediction not long ago that "it is the dawn of the super crab."

The White House’s press release about President Obama’s recent announcement regarding new investments aimed at enhancing safety and security in the changing Arctic notes that “Climate change is reshaping the Arctic in profound ways. The global Arctic has warmed approximately twice as fast as the rest of the world, resulting in significant impacts on land and sea.”

The start of the 2015/2016 school year has brought six new students to the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.

Caroline Coulter, of Little Rock, AR, came to Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in August 2012 with a B.Sc. degree from UNC Chapel Hill, where she majored in chemistry. Caroline was awarded a 2-year CBL Graduate Education Committee Fellowship and entered the Marine Estuarine Environmental Sciences (MEES) program with a specialization in Environmental Chemistry.

Despite the end of commercial whaling, many whale populations have been slow to increase in number, and one of the reasons for this is continued human-induced mortality. Human impacts including collisions with vessels, entanglement in fishing gear and exposure to underwater noise are major sources of disturbance, injury and mortality to large whales.

CBL Research Assistant Professor Dr. Helen Bailey and her student Aimee Hoover are working with The Leatherback Trust on a project that investigates the migration of young leatherback sea turtles between when they leave their nesting beach as hatchlings and the time they reach maturity. This period is known as “the lost years” because even today, not much is known about where turtles travel during this time.

UMCES' Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL) alumnus Adam Peer and CBL Director Dr. Tom Miller were recipients of the Best Paper of the Year 2014 awarded by the American Fisheries Society for its journal North American Journal of Fisheries Management.

To study restored streams in Anne Arundel County, Filoso went driving by day and sometimes by night, in summer and in winter. Every two weeks, in daylight, she collected water samples from the streams for chemical analyses.

CBL Professor Dr. David Secor is tracking the migration patterns of the Chesapeake’s most popular fish to catch and eat: the striped bass.