Ecologists Walter Boynton and Michael Kemp receive the Odum Lifetime Achievement Award for estuarine science, top. The two have collaborated on improving Chesapeake Bay for years, Kemp, lower left, from Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge, and Boynton, lower right, from Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons.

Detectives of the Deep

Two Bay scientists shine
prize-winning light

For a quarter of a century, ecologists Walter Boynton and Michael Kemp have worked together to reveal the mysteries of the Chesapeake.

Where there was darkness, they’ve shown light.

“They’ve laid a foundation for a lot of Chesapeake Bay science,” says Christopher Conner, spokesman for the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “That basic understanding allows us to know the restoration programs we’re undertaking can be a success — provided we can do them on a big enough scale.”

Now, Boynton’s and Kemp’s work has won them the Oscar of coastal and estuarine science: The Odum Lifetime Achievement Award. The Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation bestows that award every two years.

Boynton and Kemp began their prize-winning collaboration as graduate students at the University of Florida, studying under Howard T. Odum — the namesake — and his scientist-brother Eugene, of the big prize. They’ve been lab partners at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science since 1972 — though they collaborate from across the Bay: Boynton works at Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons and Kemp at Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge. When one is stumped, the other seems to have the answer, according to Boynton.

“I’m glad we won this award together because it lets people understand the importance of teamwork,” says Boynton.

Kemp agrees: “Our ready-made Boynton-Kemp collaboration has been a foundation for a lot of the collaborations that have gone on for the last three decades in our institution, having different specialists working together on complex environmental problems.”

Boynton, the son of a commercial fisherman in Massachusetts, calls his biggest achievement looking at the Bay’s dead zones, areas of water without oxygen, and learning about their origins and effects on the ecosystem.

“That and the loss of sea grasses in coastal waters,” says Kemp. “That loss has consequences in loss of habitat for blue crabs and a variety of fish that have thrived historically in the Bay.”

When the scientist partners began looking at sea grasses, they had a mystery on their hands. “All we knew was that they were dying or already gone,” Kemp says. Out of many clues as to what might be the cause, they linked it to excess nutrient pollution: “The overfeeding of the Bay,” Kemp explains, “was turning the water to green and brown and blocking the light.”

The Boynton-Kemp collaboration that began while the two were graduate students — looking beyond surface problems to discover the big picture — has inspired scientists around the nation.

“We’ve provided an explanation for a widespread phenomenon, the loss of sea grasses and formation of dead zones all over world,” Kemp says. “Ours was some of earliest research in this field, and others have used the Bay example to apply to their situations.”

He’s particularly proud of the young talent he’s inspired. “Many of our graduate students,” Kemp says, “have gone on to do equally exciting things in their own areas and regions.”

That’s prize-worthy.

–Jessica Wunsch