Hey Everybody! My name is Drew and I am an Aquaculture intern at CEI this summer. I’m from Maryland and just graduated from high school in DC; I will be attending Bowdoin College in Maine this fall where I hope to study Biology and English. In the past I have volunteered/interned at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum and National Zoo. My specific interest is in Invertebrates, so it’s a change of pace for me to be working with fish! At the museum I worked primarily with deep water invertebrates that were pulled from Lophelia reefs in the Gulf of Mexico collected before and after the oil spill in 2010, all in hopeful preparation for some comparative analyses, and I worked at the Zoo in the Invertebrate exhibit maintaining some of their tanks. In my spare time I like to work on my marine aquarium, whitewater kayak on the Potomac, read, and explore the Appalachian mountains.

If you are not already aware, the aquaculture team (Marie, Tyler, and I) with the help of a lot of other awesome CEI people transferred our cobia to the offshore cage. For the past week or so we have been making daily dives on the cage to feed the cobia and check the overall integrity of our new shark-proof netting. We have also started some water quality testing to monitor the effect of our aquaculture cage on water quality – there is some concern that the waste produced by so many fish in such a small area might start effecting water quality and overall health of the surround ecosystem. Other than that I do maintenance jobs around the labs, like making a solar distiller to dry out sand cores as well as producing some sea salt for the kitchen.

Thanks for reading, I am having a blast down here and I am certain the Island School kids will too!