Skimmer Says.... Tea Time!

Grab a cup of tea and join us as we discuss the collaborative Tea Time project with Kyle Derby from the Chesapeake Bay Maryland National Estuarine Research Reserve! 

To contact the education team about an education program or volunteer event, email us at dnerrprograms@delaware.gov. 

You can follow us on Facebook at @DNERR or Instagram at @delawarenerr.

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Welcome to Skimmer Says, an estuarine podcast hosted by the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve. I'm your host, Laurel Sullivan. And today I'm joined by two of my wonderful colleagues on the couch. Doctor Mollie Yacano, would you like to reintroduce yourself? Hi, everyone. My name is Mollie Yacano, and I'm the Research Coordinator here at the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve. And we also have Kyle Derby Kyle. Hi everybody. I'm Kyle Derby, I'm the Research Coordinator for the Chesapeake Bay Maryland NERR. Thanks for joining us today. I know that that's a short, not so short drive. That's fine. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the Maryland reserve? Sure. So the Maryland National Estuarine Research Reserve, there are two Chesapeake Bay NERRs, one in Maryland and one in Virginia. The Maryland near was the first NERR designated in 1985. So 40 years this year. We have three components. The Delaware NERR has two. Yes. So we have three components. One is down in Somerset County, the oldest component in Monie Bay which is a brackish wetland system, kind of like the Saint Jones. And then we have two other components. One is jug Bay on the Patuxent River in Maryland, which is a tidal freshwater riverine wetland, which is a very rare environment, kind of like the Blackbird. And then our third component is, Otter Point Creek, which is up in Abingdon near Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, which is a tidal freshwater embayment, system. So we actually have two tidal freshwater components and one tidal brackish component. What does the word embayment mean? It's basically like a small bay off the main part of the bay. So that's cool. Bay within the bay. That's kind of cool. So Mollie has been here before, but you're new, so we always start our podcast out with a game time. So today Sadie came up with a this or that. Are you ready? I'm going to give you two things that I want you to tell me which one you'd prefer. Okay. Coffee or tea? Coffee. Coffee for sure. That's really awkward because I haven't actually told anybody. But we're here to talk about tea today. Okay. If you had to drink tea. Because I'm done talking about coffee. Black tea or green tea? Black tea. Black tea. Is it because it's the closest to coffee? Absolutely it is. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Tea again. Hot or iced? It depends on the time of year for me. You know, like I want iced tea all summer long, but hot tea really gets me through the afternoon in the winter. Iced unsweet. You're skipping ahead because my next question was sweet or unsweet. Unsweet all the time. Unsweet. That's a crime. But okay. Unsweet is crazy. It's not. It should be sweet tea only. Maybe a splash of unsweet if it's too sweet. Yeah, I think that I would prefer cold sweet tea, but I agree. Like, if it's cold in the afternoons of the winter, I want to have a nice, sweet, hot tea. And it's okay. Some people can give you the tannins. That's what I'm here for. Some people can have incorrect opinions. It's okay. We still love you, Kyle. Yeah. So a little bit about what we're here to talk about today. You two are working with a few of our other colleagues on a tea time decomposition project, am I correct? That is correct. Would you guys like to tell us a little bit about that project, what you're looking at and how you came up with it? Sure. So. Oh, I it seems forever ago, back in 2019, I had just started as the research coordinator. I'm in my seventh year now with the Maryland NERR, and one of the things that I was thinking about doing was increasing the collaboration between the Maryland NERR, the Delaware NERR, and the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia NERR, because all three of our sites are multiple component reserves with a lot of similar sites. We have similar weather, we have similar plants, we have similar tidal ranges, similar a lot of stuff. So I thought it would be an excellent idea for us to leverage, all of our resources together, you know, go further together. So I had some calls with the folks at both of the reserves, including the former research coordinator here, Doctor Kari St. Laurent. And one of the ideas that we came up with was looking at things in addition to what all the NERRS do. And I'm sure you guys have talked about the NERR system near 30 reserves across the country, and we all monitor the same types of things in the same types of ways. So what is something else that we could look at that would utilize that existing data that we're already collecting? And one of the things that we talked about was below ground decomposition and belowground decomposition is important in wetlands for lots of reasons. But essentially, you know, wetlands are wet and they grow a lot of plants, and that plant material stacks up over time, and it takes forever to decay because it's wet. Which is one of the ways that wetlands build carbon, which is why you always hear your wetlands are carbon sinks. But one of the ways to get rid of carbon is through decomposition. So how do you measure that? And measuring belowground decomposition is a bear because it varies all over the place. It depends on all sorts of variables. So the more standardized you can do that methodology the better. And a method was developed in Europe quite a while ago now where you actually bury tea bags in the marsh because tea is essentially plant material. I mean, you're steeping leaves in water. That's what tea is. And since Lipton wants a reproducible product for every teabag that they make, it's the same amount of tea. It's the same type of tea in every single bag. So these researchers in Europe, the website is teatime for4science with not four spelled out the number 4 had deployed tea bags in all sorts of environments and measured essentially the weight when they went in and the weight when they came out. And that difference through lots of complex math and calculations, you know, equations with lots of letters in it gives you the rate of decomposition and the three reserves. We discussed it and we decided that we would pitch this to the entire system at the NERRS annual meeting. And we had, I want to say, 26 reserves sign on, which was all of them at that time, except for 1 or 2. That and the ones that didn't want to, but literally didn't have the staffing at that time to do it. And we put in for a NERRS science collaborative grant to fund that project. The project wasn't funded. So we said, well, forget that, we’ll do it anyway. So I had to convince my procurement folks to purchase the tea, because since the study was done in Europe, all the calculations were done with European Union standardized tea. So American like, you could go to Costco and buy the big box of green tea and do this. You could totally do that. But for the, you know, the science to science, it would need to be the same type. So that was a fun couple of weeks, buying all of that. So, but yeah. And then, we sent an email out to everybody to see who wanted to sign on for this, like back of the napkin effort that we were trying to scrape together. And we ended up having 20 total reserves participate in the project. And that was and then Covid happened. So it was a very interesting 2020, 2021, 2022, figuring this project out, getting it all set up. But we are working on it, right? Actively working on it. We have the paper coming to put getting put together as we speak, literally as we speak. So when you're saying burying tea bags on the marsh, are they just I take out this Lipton thing tea bag and I put it in the how does it happen? What does the magic look like? It's very close to that. Let me paint you a picture. So it is very close to just burying teabags in the marsh. But because we're weighing the amount of tea in a tea bag, you need to have a pretty good scale to really get that, you know, level of detail. So we would take the tea bags out, weigh them, label them, and then put them into a window screen packet that we made in order to protect them, because, I mean, they're designed to just sit in some hot water for you know, however long you like to keep your tea in hot water, not stay out in the marsh for 90 days. So you don’t want roots to grow through them, or an animal to rip into them. So we would make these, fiberglass, fiberglass window screen packets for them and basically weigh everything and keep track of everything. So it was a lot of keeping everything lined up. Organization set us free with this project. And there was no willy nilly when you're sending it to 20 different reserves. Kari and I did the first year in her in her driveway because it was Covid and nobody knew what was going. I was very early on, during all of that. So we were, like, weighing and sealing and doing all of that, like in her driveway while her daughter drew chalk behind us, like, the pictures are pretty funny. I don't know if any of us will make it into the manuscript or not. The second year we did a lot of that leg work here, and then I would ship the tea out to all the reserves, so I would go and essentially ruin a Fedex worker's morning with my 30 boxes that needed to go everywhere from Puerto Rico to Washington state, with a receipt as long as this couch. Yeah. So, but yeah, that was that was how it worked. And you, we weighed everything and then reserves there after the deployments, they went in for about 90 days, recording this right after Memorial Day. So this is about when we would deploy the bags and we would pull them out in late August, early September, which is about 90 days later. And then, dry them and weigh them again, and then cut the bags open and weigh the tea inside the bags and then plug it into the math, which is not a picture I think anybody wants to hear us paint. That's fair. Okay, so what have you been finding? Does it look the same in all 20 other reserves? Not at all. Not at all. There was a lot of variability, within the different regions. So we grouped all the reserves into their different physio geographic regions. So like the Maryland Reserve, the Virginia Reserve and the Delaware Reserve are all grouped together. But the New England reserves are grouped differently. The Hawaii reserve, it's its own thing. And the West Coast Reserves are grouped into their different regions. And none of the regions were that different, which was very surprising. But there were some interesting relationships that may not have been that surprising. So the warmer the region was, the higher the decomposition rate, which would make sense because, you know, if you think about food, food goes bad when it's hot, right? And food stays okay when it's cold. What breaks that food down. And it's disgusting. It's microbes. And that's what's eating these teas. So that makes sense. But then the other interesting trend that we saw was the saltier the water was, the lower the decomposition rate, which is another not necessarily surprising result, but we didn't see any other real trends. We also looked at the vegetation cover, where those teabags were deployed within the marsh so the lower sites that were flooded more versus the drier sites that weren't flooded more. Those rates were the same statistically. And that variation wasn't significant, which we were actually really surprised to see. I don't think we expected that at all. But then also to see that aside from Hawaii, all of the rates were similar. We did also see some localized, I guess, interesting bits in the tea. So for instance, at the Texas Reserve, they had experienced an extreme weather event. Not a hurricane, but like extreme rain flooding event. And there was some evidence of that, be it in looking at their year one versus year two data. And so that was also although not something we saw across the reserve system. There was like these stories that we could pick out of those individual reserves. Once we dug into those data. It's pretty cool. It rains so much that it actually decreased the salinity enough to have an impact of the decomposition rates, which we only saw because we did it two years in a row. If we had only seen it, if we'd only deployed for one year, we would have just. Yeah, okay. Replication matters. That's right. So you use two different types of tea, correct? Yes. You use the roibos and the green tea. Yes. Is there a reason why and is there a differences between those two teas and their decomposition. Yes. You want to take this one. Sure. There are differences between the two. So one of them, the green tea, decays quickly. So you have this quick decay rate and then the roibos decay is much slower, so it's more recalcitrant carbon, it's harder to break down. And so when you put those two together, you get the, you get the short term, like the decay, the short term decay rate. And then also this long term decay rate. And you're able to put that into the equation to get the overall decay over time. Cool. Interesting. So is this something that could be done? I know you guys are some of the smartest people that I know. Is this something that could be done by everyday people at home? Definitely, definitely. The original developers of the method, the tea time for science folks have education components on their website. You can actually do this work, plug your work into their online calculator and submit your data to them to their project. Which is super cool. Like that community and citizen science really can involve you and you don't need to do it in the marsh. You can do it in your yard, right? If you were so, if you were so inclined, and you don't even need to use tea bags. There are other ways to do this. Yeah. Like what? One of the more, fun ways to do this? Well, as of now. And we'll get to the fun way. And some of my previous work, when I worked in other places, we measured this. We actually made essentially made tea kits out of our own carbon. But then another thing we did was bury strips of canvas in the marsh at different depths, and then after, you know, a week, we take them out, dry them off, and then see how much force it took to rip them. But another very accessible way is you go to the store and you just buy cotton, bleach, white underwear and bury it in the soil a couple of inches down and then see how long it takes for those underwear to break down. The healthier your soil is, the more microbial activity is going to be going on, the more little, you know, bacteria are doing the bacteria thing. So if it only takes like a week in the summer for your underwear to go away, that's good for your soil health. It means that it's active. Is that how long it should take because depending it depending on how things are going, if it's wet and hot, probably. But if you bury that underwear in April and then you come back in August and it's just like dirty, then that probably means your soil is pretty sterile. And there isn't a lot of stuff going on. Yeah. So one of our common themes throughout this podcast is we're reminding folks not to litter. So bury your underwear in your own yard. Definitely not in our marsh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't come down here and and make sure you remember where you bury. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely need to mark your plots. That was one of the things that. Could you imagine wanting to run this study with, like, the family or your kid, and then you sold your house and then somebody bought your house, and then they're just like, you're going to plant a garden here. And now there's all these like, oh, there's this in the yard. Yeah. Very weird. Well if they're planting their garden there and the underwear still in the yard. Maybe they should choose a different spot for the garden. Yeah, yeah. All right. So is there anything else that you want folks to know about this project? What's next? So right now we're trying to get our publication out. Because as I said, we kind of did it on our own time with our own, like, limited budget. It's taking a little bit longer than I think any of us would have wanted to get the paper pushed out. But, you know, it's going to happen this year. It's going to happen. And when we originally started this, the hope was to, continue doing this a few years down the line with, like, a larger project. We wanted to figure out what are the rates at these sites, and we have that now, but then why? Why are the rates what they are? We have those initial smaller, not small, but those initial background trends. But there is still enough variability within the data that there is site specific reasons for why the rates are what they are. And that's going to require a much larger effort looking at what's in the what's in the water, in the marsh, what's in the water, in the waterways adjacent to the marsh. Right. Yeah. Do those plants communities, if we dig down to a little bit deeper of a level, can we find something that might predict what the decomposition rates might be? Say things get warmer and saltier in our coastal systems. All right, so my last question for you all. What is your favorite part of the project? I think my favorite part of the project. So I came in there, not on the second half of things. So it gave me the opportunity to learn about not only our system, but also how collaboration works across the National Estuarine Research Reserve System. So I thought that was really important to me becoming a part of the system. I hate to agree completely, but I do think that, you know, as boring said the same thing, but it was it was when I started this project, I was where Mollie was when she became involved with it, maybe a little bit further along, but it was my first chance to really try and lead something with the system and to get the buy in at the meeting before, we didn't get the funding. Basically seeing that entire roomful of my peers nod and excited agreement that, yeah, like, yeah, this is a good idea. Yeah. Like, we should do this. And to have, you know, that working relationship with my peers that really like, stoked the warm and fuzzies inside. And I think that there's something really special about the reserve system is that you have these folks from across the country that are interested in the same thing that you're in, and they want to figure out the same things that you're figuring out. So I think that that is something that's really special about where it is that we work 100%. So. All right. Well, thank you all for joining us today. And thank you, Kyle, for coming all the way over from Maryland. Of course, sitting on the couch with us, of course. And until next time. Bye.