{"id":25806,"date":"2025-12-04T12:29:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T17:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/?post_type=story&p=25806"},"modified":"2025-12-08T10:17:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T15:17:09","slug":"from-crab-blood-to-carbon-hoarding","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2025\/12\/04\/from-crab-blood-to-carbon-hoarding\/","title":{"rendered":"From crab blood to carbon hoarding"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Caden Thomas \u201927 gets down in the mud for marine research<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Caden Thomas \u201927. Photo by Natalie Hoang \u201925, MBA \u201926 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For many Clark students, summer internships open doors to unexpected opportunities. For Caden Thomas \u201927, that door was an internship in the mudflats of Gloucester, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas, an environmental science and policy<\/a> major with a minor in geography<\/a> in the School of Climate, Environment, and Society, interned this past summer at the Gloucester-based Seaside Sustainability<\/a>, a small nonprofit focused on ocean conservation and community engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt seemed like a really cool opportunity, close to home, and different from what I usually study,\u201d says Thomas, who found the internship on Handshake. \u201cMost of my fieldwork has been in forests or on land, so I thought, why not try something new?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A marine biology class with Biology Professor Deborah Robertson<\/a> also inspired Thomas to pursue the internship. \u201cIt was a very detailed class, and it helped me understand some of the marine systems I ended up working on this summer,\u201d she says. \u201cThe whole biology major served as great prep.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Seaside Sustainability, Thomas joined a small team of interns conducting research for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Acrobiosystems, a biotech company exploring alternatives to the coagulant found in horseshoe crab blood, a vital component in biomedical testing. Thomas and fellow interns spent the summer tracking crab health and movement patterns during the breeding season, tagging crabs, and submitting data to federal researchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The team also measured mudflat acidification, testing the temperature and pH of coastal sediment to understand how these ecosystems, which double as major carbon sinks, respond to climate change. \u201cLower pH means more carbon dioxide is being absorbed,\u201d Thomas explains. \u201cWe wanted to see how that might affect the local marine life that depends on those habitats.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n