2022 Student Projects

2022 Interns

During the summer of 2022, three interns conducted research on striped bass.

Alanna Hughen and Hannah Birmingham taking videos of striped bass

Hanna Birmingham and Alanna Hughen

Falmouth High School, Falmouth, MA

Interns Hannah Birmingham and Alanna Hughen, rising Seniors at Falmouth High School, were supported by The Blue Economy Internship Program (BEIP) at the Marine Biological Laboratory. They spent July and August working on an ongoing project to study the migration patterns of striped bass. Many striped bass overwinter off the coast of North Carolina and move into fresh water rivers in spring and early summer to spawn after which they return to the ocean and migrate over 500 miles north. they migrate south again in the fall.  A population of striped bass spend the summer in Eel Pond, Woods Hole, MA.

Alanna and Hannah hypothesized that they could use aberration patterns in the stripes to identify individual fish (similar to identifying whales by tail fluke patterns) and determine whether fish that leave the pond in the fall return the following spring. They compared photographs taken in the fall 2021 when the fish were tagged with their own videos of the tagged fish that returned in 2022. The results supported their hypothesis that stripe aberration patterns allow definitive identification of individual fish and that they can be used to show that fish can return from year to year.

Mika Higgins cleaning a receiver that was retrieved from Eel Pond

Mikalya Higgins

Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School, Cambridge, MA

Intern Mikalya Higgins, a rising Junior at Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School, Cambridge, MA, was supported by the Edwin Barbey Charitable Trust grant to the Marine Biological Laboratory. She worked with Brian Prendergast, Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, to map the movement of striped bass in Eel Pond, Woods Hole, MA. Fourteen fish that were implanted with transmitters in fall 2021 returned the following summer. Six receivers were placed around the perimeter of the pond and the time differences between arrival of a signal at the various receivers from a given transmitter, was used to calculate fish position. Positions were monitored every 2-10 minutes over the course of the summer to look for patterns in their movement.

Mikayla also wrote a commentary with Steve Zottoli on the contradiction between the overfished status of striped bass and the apparent abundance of this fish during the summer of 2022 along the Elizabeth Islands.