A Very Good Sampling Day
Today we are sampling in the Mattaponi River, which joins with the Pamunkey River to form the York River, one of Chesapeake Bay's main tributaries. We arrived about 11:30 a.m. and took 10 samples at 2 sites: mixed vegetation and unvegetated beds. We will evaluate these samples in the benthic ecology lab for animal life.
The Mattaponi River is really beautiful and not very built up with homes. One of our sites was located near a very nice old home; the owners are quite interested in our work and talked to Dr. Schaffner at length about what we are investigating.
It was a really warm and sunny day, which made the work pretty nice. At low tide, the mud was fairly deep; we sank well past our knees a few times! We had a flat tire on the way home, but still got back to VIMS by 5 p.m. Overall, a very good sampling day.