Welcome to Life in the Dead Zone! This blog is a collaborative effort by a number of scientists who are working on aquatic “Dead Zones”, specifically in the Chesapeake Bay.
A Dead Zone is a region of an aquatic ecosystem that has low dissolved oxygen, which leads to stress and death of many organisms that are not tolerant of low oxygen. However, many organisms are tolerant, at least to some degree and to some level of low oxygen, leading to “Life in the Dead Zone”!
Dead zones occur when organic matter sinks to the bottom of the water and it is decomposed (using up the oxygen) faster than oxygen is resupplied. This can happen in a variety of settings and can be exacerbated by many factors including weather patterns, warming, or increased nutrient inputs.
On these pages you will read reports from many scientists involved in different aspects of this research, from shipboard observations, laboratory experiments, and modeling. We hope you enjoy it.
abplankton
afishe21
bcrump
jellyfisher
planktoneer
Life in the Dead Zone 
My daughter, Jessica Snyder from East Carolina University, is helping you on this scientific adventure. She says she wishes she had more to do. Please feel free to fill her spare time with whatever you need to extend the knowledge of your research.
Thanks for reading our blog! Jessica is doing great and I think she is much busier today, simply because of how we structure the cruise operations. However, her task out her is to collect sea nettles and as of this writing we’ve only seen two, so if the nettles show up she will be plenty busy.
Am enjoying reading about the cruise…I seem to remember that Acartia was sensitive to the no O2 but we would often fine Oithona in no O2 areas.
Larry Harding is still keeping up his fly-overs (temp and chl) and just posted data map from yesterday (http://www.cbrsp.org/imagesmain.html) not sure whether you were following this…Anne