UMES Subunit Update

We have some updates for University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) Student Subunit. Foremost, we have new officers, beginning with me as president. Our election cycle syncs with the academic calendar year, so starts anew in August annually. Other officers are:

• Vice President: Ashley Silver, acsilver@umes.edu
• Secretary: Gillen Curren, gcurren@umes.edu
• Treasurer: Samantha Jalkowski, sjalkowski@umes.edu

Kayland Huckaby continues to help us as social media manager and historian, and can be contacted at: kfhuckaby@umes.edu. In addition to a Facebook page (American Fisheries Society UMES), we also have an Instagram page (@AFSATUMES).

We once again helped out with the UMES Extension’s 4-H STEM Festival. Held at the Engineering and Aviation Science Complex from 10 AM to 2 PM on Oct. 21, staff from NASA Wallops flight facility, several UMES organizations, and more were onsite providing K-12 students a firsthand look at many different careers. We also attended the UMES School of Agricultural and Natural Sciences First Look Fair on Sept. 21 where students check out experiential learning opportunities offered through  student clubs, study abroad, internships and student work.

Finally, several members attended the Parent Society meeting August 20-24, 2023 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

• Angel Reyes Delgado presented his study of diet variation and trophic impact of weakfish within multiple marine habitats of the Eastern U.S.
• Kayland Huckaby spoke about aquaponics—the practice of growing plants without soil using fish waste as a nutrient source. Her study sought to compare the quantity and quality of tilapia and butterhead lettuce grown in a coupled versus a decoupled aquaponics system.
• My presentation was titled, “Distribution, sources, and risk characterization of Total Petroleum Hydrocarbon in a tropical coastal waters and seafood” covering my study focused on using different indices to assess the sources and potential risk of n-alkanes in edible aquatic prawns.