News and Events
Cambridge
October 7, 2009
After three nights of camping in western Maryland and Shenandoah National Park, Chesapeake Semester students were happy to freshen up with an over night on campus before heading south to Cambridge, MD where they were able to visit J.M. Clayton Seafood Company for a look into the largest crab picking house in Maryland one of the last companies of its kind. Students finished up the morning with a tour of University of Maryland's Horn Point oyster and fish hatcheries.
Click to enlarge photos by Mike Hardesty '05.
Bill Brooks, great grandson to the founder J.M Clayton, began the tour by introducing the centerpiece of the whole operation, the Maryland blue crab.
Fresh Sooks brought by waterman directly to the J.M. Clayton's dock.
Large steam operation to prepare the crabs for picking.
Crab pickers at work. Due to the seasonality and difficulty of the work, J.M. Clayton Seafood has had to rely heavily on guest workers from Mexico for picking.
Crab pickers quickly weigh in their crab meat and collect more cans. Crab pickers are paid by the pound produced per day.
At Horn Point Laboratories (HPL), students met with Rebecca Fox, a graduate student at Maryland, for a tour of the facilities. Here students observe a manufactured oyster reef.
Dr. John Seidel gets a little closer to observe the diverse fauna of the oyster reef.
Large tanks are used to allow the billions of oysters larvae produced at HPL to settle on to old oyster shell. This year HPL produced 600 million spat on shell which are then distributed all over the state of Maryland to restore the dangerously depleted oyster stock throughout the Bay.
Fox fields a question from Laura Lazenby '11 about the HPL's clown fish project.
Students observe Maryland's state reptile the diamond back terrapin, which is still recovering from over harvesting in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A bite to eat at the Cambridge Yacht Club.