Way Downstream

The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay asks you to take out the trash. From 9am to noon on Saturday, April 5, wade into streams, picking out debris and trash in the alliance’s annual Project Clean Stream. Over 122 clean-up sites in 12 counties have registered for this spring cleaning event. Last year, 2,500 volunteers fished more than 90,000 pounds of trash out of Maryland waterways to clean up our polluting act. Online registration is closed, but site managers encourage volunteers to phone in — 410-377-6270 — for locations and join the pick-up …

Sail into Ego Alley early. City Dock opens its waterway and Market Space docking ahead of schedule on April 4. The Susan Campbell Park and new finger piers will be ready as planned, mid-April, after City Dock parking lot, between Craig Street and Susan Campbell Park, is blacktopped April 9 and 10 …

Annapolis Towne Centre at Parole will pay $45,000 for ecological projects after two leading environmental groups complained of sediment pollution caused by construction. Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the South River Federation complained in federal court about violations of sediment and erosion rules. Without admitting guilt, Greenberg Gibbons Commercial offered to pay for preservation projects in nearby Church Creek, where runoff was alleged, and for an independent monitor of environmental compliance at the site. Additionally, South Riverkeeper, Drew Koslow is now included at weekly meetings between the developer and Anne Arundel County Department of Inspections and Permits …

In Maryland tidal waters, early bird commercial and recreational crabbers who jump in on the first days of crabbing season — which opened April 1 — will follow 2007 regulations. Significant changes, including more coordination with Virginia, are likely with new regulations, expected by month’s end, after the year’s crab surveys are complete. Find the full, changing story at http://www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries/ …

In Virginia, tests by a conservation group in the North Fork of the Shenandoah River turned up some disquieting results: human anti-depressant drugs, flame retardants, herbicides and insecticides. The group, Friends of the North Fork, found the chemicals last year and is reprising the tests this spring while experts try to determine the cause of fish kills, the Rocktown Weekly reports …

In California, green entrepreneurs have found a way to slow climate change and make a marketable product out of saved carbon. Santa Barbara-based Carbon Science developed a new, patent-pending technology to convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into calcium carbonate, used in the manufacturing of paper coatings, plastics, glass, ceramics, chalk, dental products, cosmetics, construction and architectural items and pollution filters. There’s more that’s green about this molecular process: It uses mineral waste products from coal mines. Find out more at www.carbonsciences.com …

At HolidayLEDs.com, 5,000 people have sent in more than 3,000 pounds of used holiday lights for recycling. It’s too late to earn a free LED strand; that bonus went to the first 100 recyclers. But it’s not too late to send in your tangled, burned out or out-of-date incandescent holiday strands. The lights recycling program remains open year-round at www.holidayleds.com …

photo by Rose Wills

Our Creature Feature comes from the Potomac River, where Ron Lewis must have thought he snagged a submarine when he hooked something massive indeed bottom-fishing Sunday before last. It was a blue cat, and not just any old catfish but the state record, more than four feet long and weighing an imposing 67.1 pounds.

Lewis, of Point of Rocks, Md., didn’t even have a net that could handle a fish with a three-foot girth, so he and his fishing buddy horsed in the behemoth by hand. The second headline here concerns the fate of the fish: Rather than getting eaten, it was kept alive and can be seen at Bass Pro Shop at Arundel Mills Mall in Hanover …