Way Downstream

Way Downstream

At BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport, the name’s not the only reappearance of a Maryland familiar. Newly installed in Terminal A Mezzanine Level is Maryland’s iconic blue crab. Southern Anne Arundel County artist Jackie Leatherbury Douglass created her 500-pound crab — soldered from 5,000 pieces of colored glass — for the airport. But airport growth and politics have made it oft absent. First installed in 1985, it was absent from 1996 to 2000. Now it’s back again …

In the Baltimore suburbs, a new poll shows Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley running exceptionally strong against Gov. Robert Ehrlich, which is part of the reason that a year from the election, Ehrlich trails O’Malley by 48 to 42 percent. The poll by Gonzales Research & Marketing Strategies also shows Ehrlich’s approval rating dropping beneath 50 percent for the first time. The governor is running better against Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan than against O’Malley, the Gonzales poll also shows …

In Virginia, it’s possible that ammonia nitrate, a product of manure in the poultry industry, is what wiped out thousands of fish in the South Fork of the Shenandoah River this summer, including 80 percent of the river’s prized smallmouth bass population. “Everything that the scientists have been observing indicates that there is one thing that caused a kill of this magnitude,” Irbie Nash, an engineer and Trout Unlimited member, told the Daily News-Record this week …

In Germany, the world’s tallest and smelliest flower — the Titan Arum, or Corpse flower — has bloomed, delighting visitors to the Stuttgart Botanical Garden. Follow the life of this 10-foot-tall stinker at www.wilhelma.de …

Our Creature Feature comes from the Galapagos Islands, where scorching lava is pouring out of the Sierra Negra volcano on Isabela Island, threatening the giant tortoises that have helped to make the Galapagos famous.

Unlike humans, these huge creatures are incapable of racing to safety. That’s why we’re heartened to hear that the red-hot lava is moving slowly down the mountain, bringing hope that it will cool by the time it reaches the coastline and the tortoises, who were exhibiting little concern about the eruption.