07/31/2026
Come along with Blue S. for a day of CBASS in Quahog Bay!
But first, let’s talk about what CBASS is and why we do it
On our ride to the first site, the CBASS net made a comfortable bed for Mary to lie in. We started our day bright and early at 6:45!
Choose your fighter: Red Bull of Coffee. Either way, caffeine is an essential part of early morning field work!
Once we arrived at our first site, Katie and Cora began setting our net. Though we visit the same spots every week, the wind and current makes the process a bit different every time!
After the net was properly set, it was time to haul it in! Sometimes seaweed weights down the net making this a hard job, but today wasn’t too bad!
Once the net was pulled onto the beach, we went through its contents, identifying and measuring the lengths of every fish we found
At our first site we caught mostly Atlantic Herring, like the one shown here. Other common species we catch include Atlantic silverside, alewife, and mummichogs, but herring are my favorite because of how sparkly their scales are!
Once we finished at our first site, we pulled the net back in and headed to the next location
We then repeated this process at the 5 other sites, finishing around 11. By then, the rising sun started to warm things up and we were happy to be headed back to enter the data!
Thank you for joining us for a day of CBASS!
This photo story was done as part of our SciComm programming with GMRI
