My husband and I couldn't afford a home in the DC suburbs. We moved to the Chesapeake Bay and never looked back.
However, even with two full-time incomes coming in from me and my husband, we couldn't find a house in the DC area within our budget of $430,000 that didn't need major repairs. One house we toured looked like the kitchen had been engulfed in flames and left untouched.
At this point, in the winter of 2013, we started considering moving outside the DC area.
I worried about moving away from my friends, losing access to all the conveniences, shops, and international cuisines, and moving to a place with likely less diversity.
However, my husband's friend suggested visiting Calvert County, located on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and after checking it out, we were instantly sold. What I was leaving behind didn't seem to matter as much after that.
We were charmed by the Chesapeake Beach, Maryland
My husband found the house we ended up buying and visited the area by himself before we took the rest of the family. One family visit is all we needed to decide this would be our new home.
The 4,000-square-foot house had plenty of space for our family to grow. I finally had a place to put my mother's piano, which I'd inherited, so our kids could take lessons on the one my siblings and I learned on.
The house came with a beautiful sun-filled kitchen, was one mile from the Chesapeake Bay in an area with a good school system, and, best of all, was within our budget. (The housing market here has since gone up, and prices are much higher.)
We found a community
Soon after selling our townhouse and buying the house in Chesapeake Beach, our new neighbors stopped by to welcome us and bring hot meals, candles, and kitchen towels.
This never happened anywhere we'd lived before. We were good friends with our neighbors in the DC suburbs, but our neighbors in Chesapeake Beach feel like family.
We shuttle each other's kids to and from practices, go on trips together, and I know I can count on them when I'm short on butter.
We're truly grateful to be part of this community, especially since we do not have family who lives close by.
I feel like I'm reliving the best part of my childhood
My favorite places are beaches. I grew up in Cape May, New Jersey, one of the country's oldest seaside towns, known for its local seafood, pork roll and egg sandwiches, and Jersey tomatoes.
So, anytime I'm at the beach, any beach, I return to the best parts of my childhood. Luckily, there's a tiny beach just a mile from our house.
In Chesapeake Beach, we paddleboard and collect fossilized shark teeth, which this area is known for. A local man is famous for discovering a Megalodon tooth when he was fishing at a nearby beach, which is estimated to be millions of years old.
For me, paddleboarding takes courage and balance, and it's taught me to be more patient with myself. My kids, though, have gotten pretty good on the water. I'm grateful that I get to raise them with a similar love of sand and sun.
I also discovered a new love of cracking crabs. Maryland is known for its seafood, especially blue crabs and oysters. On summer weekends, I spend time with friends dipping the Old Bay-seasoned crab meat in melted butter and apple cider vinegar. It's always an afternoon well spent.
We've now lived here as long as we lived in the DC suburbs, and while I occasionally miss some of the conveniences we used to enjoy, the trade-off has been worth it. We have no plans to move anytime soon.
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Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Yahoo
The shark in 'Jaws' is 20+ feet long. Are there sharks that big off Georgia's coast?
This year marks the 50th anniversary of "Jaws," a classic film that has caused a fascination and terror around sharks. While shark attacks are fairly rare, sharks are swimming along Georgia's coast. But are they anything like the "Jaws" monster? Here's what we know: In the original novel, the Jaws shark was 20 feet long. Around 1 hour and 23 minutes into the movie, a boat crew hunting for the shark spots it and Matt Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss) says, "That's a 20-footer." Quint (played by Robert Shaw) answers, " three tons of him." Fun fact: The movie shark was known as Bruce by the cast and crew. He was named after director Steven Spielberg's lawyer. New England Aquarium senior scientist Nick Whitney said "The largest white sharks that have been reliably measured are right around 20 feet, and any larger than this is likely impossible. We know this because scientists have been able to calculate the size of white sharks at different ages and show that their growth levels off when they hit around 40 years old. So you could roughly estimate a white shark's age based on it's length for its first few decades of life, but if you measured several white sharks between the ages of 40 and 70, their lengths would all be similar. They're just not going to reach 25 feet. Anything between 16 and 20 feet is a real monster." So the movie "Jaws" shark is impossible, but the novel "Jaws" shark is? Technically, yes, but it's worth mentioning that the National Smithsonian says most are smaller with average females being 15-16 feet and average males being 11-13 feet. Also, great whites only weigh a maximum of around two tons. NOAA says, when great whites are born, they are about four-feet long. The OCEARCH Shark Tracker has data on the whereabouts of more than 400 sharks. There have been four sharks identified and tagged off the Florida/Georgia coast since the New Year, including three great whites: Contender the male, adult, almost 14-foot great white was tagged on Jan. 17. He's recently been spending a lot of time way off the coast over the Blake Plateau (more than 80 miles offshore) but was recently pinged off the North Carolina coast. Danny the male, sub-adult, 9-foot, 462-pound great white was tagged on Jan. 17. He's been traveling up and down the east coast with his last swim near Georgia being in early March. He is currently off North Carolina's coast. Dold the male, sub-adult, 11-foot, 761-pound great white was tagged on Feb. 28, has since been circling the state of Florida, and is currently on the state's west coast. The largest kind of shark that's alive today is the whale shark, which averages 18 to 32 feet in length but can grow close to 62 feet, according to the Georgia Aquarium. But don't worry, its diet is zoo plankton. The largest shark to ever exist (but is luckily extinct) is the Megalodon, also known as the Giant Megatooth. It resembled great whites, but the Smithsonian says it was up to three times bigger averaging 44 to 56 feet for females and 34 to 47 feet for males. The largest were roughly 60 feet in length and possibly weighed up to 50 tons, the size and weight of a railroad car. Fun fact: Its scientific name "Carcharocles megalodon" translates to "Big toothed glorious shark." There are four "Jaws" movies including "Jaws 2," "Jaws 3-D," and "Jaws: The Revenge." However, while the first was a cultural phenomenon and considered one of the greatest movies of all time, the sequels Each sequel was given terrible scores by critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes with "Jaws: The Revenge" landing an astounding 2% from critics and 15% from audiences. Popular movie YouTuber Dan Murrell has argued that "Jaws 2" was the start of Hollywood's obsession with unnecessary (and sometimes horrible) sequels that can't hold a candle to the original. All four of the "Jaws" movies are available to stream for subscribers of Peacock. Also, if you want to buy the original, on-demand services like Amazon Prime and Fandango at Home are offering it for the discounted price of $8 and Apple TV is offering an even deeper discount at $5. Miguel Legoas is a Deep South Connect Team Reporter for Gannett/USA Today. Find him on Instagram @miguelegoas and email at mlegoas@ This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Jaws shark was 25 feet long. Are there real sharks that big in Georgia?
Forbes
11-06-2025
- Forbes
What Did Megalodon Really Eat? Probably Everything.
Lead study author Jeremy McCormack of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, holds up a fossilized ... More megalodon tooth. For decades, the giant prehistoric shark known ominously as 'The Meg" has been portrayed as a massive apex predator that hunted the only formidable opponent in the oceans at the time: whales. But new research suggests the reality was more nuanced — and a lot more interesting. In a study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, scientists used advanced geochemical techniques to analyze fossilized tooth enamel and found evidence that indicate this now-extinct behemoth likely had a more varied and opportunistic diet, feeding on whatever was available in its environment to satisfy its immense appetite The key to figuring out this mystery lay in the isotopes of zinc preserved in its teeth, which serve as chemical fingerprints of what an animal ate during its life. Researchers led by Dr. Jeremy McCormack at Goethe University in Germany analyzed 209 fossil teeth from 21 different species (both marine and terrestrial) dating back to the early Miocene period, roughly 20 to 16 million years ago. The fossils were collected from sites in what is now southern Germany, specifically a shallow seaway that once connected the ancient seas known as the Upper Marine Molasse. By focusing on a specific time and place, the team were able to compare Megalodon's diet with that of other sharks, dolphins and marine animals living at the same time. What makes this research stand out is its use of zinc isotope ratios (specifically δ⁶⁶Zn) as a tool for estimating an animal's trophic position, or its level in the food web. While nitrogen isotopes (δ¹⁵N) have traditionally been used to track trophic levels, they can degrade over time, especially in fossils millions of years old. Zinc isotopes, on the other hand, are much more stable and are now emerging as a reliable alternative. The higher an animal is in the food chain, the lower its δ⁶⁶Zn values tend to be, because heavier zinc isotopes are preferentially retained in tissues lower down the food chain, while top predators, which eat those animals, end up with lighter zinc signatures. In this study, Megalodon teeth consistently showed some of the lowest δ⁶⁶Zn values across the entire fossil dataset, placing them at the very top of the marine food web. The researchers also looked at the extinct Carcharodon hastalis, which is a possible ancestor of the modern great white shark, and found its δ⁶⁶Zn values were slightly higher. This suggests it fed at a slightly lower trophic level or had a different diet, supporting what many paleontologists have long suspected — that Megalodon was a top predator, likely preying on large marine mammals such as whales and dolphins. Finally, the scientists analyzed modern marine species, including sharks and dolphins, to create a baseline for comparison. They found that even today, top predators like killer whales have similarly low δ⁶⁶Zn values, further supporting the idea that zinc isotopes accurately reflect trophic level. McCormack works at the mass spectrometer, which is used to determine the zinc isotope ratio. This ... More ratio provides information about the diet of Otodus megalodon. Paleontologists have long suspected that Megalodon was a top predator based on its massive size, tooth morphology, and fossil evidence showing bite marks on whale bones. What this study does is go a step further by providing chemical evidence that directly links Megalodon to a high trophic level, rather than relying only on anatomical or circumstantial evidence. See, scientists face major challenges when trying to reconstruct what a creature like Megalodon actually ate. Sharks have skeletons made mostly of cartilage, which doesn't fossilize well, so researchers often rely on teeth. While bite marks on fossilized whale bones have been strong evidence of marine mammal being part of the Meg's meals, bites on other sharks leave less obvious traces, making dietary conclusions based only on physical bite evidence tricky and potentially misleading. This new chemical analysis helps fill in those gaps. By creating a kind of prehistoric food web, the researchers placed animals like sea bream (which eat mussels and crustaceans) at the bottom, followed by smaller sharks and extinct toothed whales the size of modern dolphins. Megalodon still sat near the top, as expected, but its zinc isotope levels weren't wildly different from those just below it in the chain, suggesting that those species may have ended up on the menu too. While the conclusion itself (big shark ate big animals) isn't groundbreaking on its own, the method is what's novel and important. This is the first time zinc isotopes have been used in this way for extinct marine predators, and the fact that the values line up with what we see in modern apex predators opens the door to re-examining other ancient species' diets and food web roles with greater precision. Still, it seems that ancient ecosystems are not so different from today's. Apex predators existed, food webs were complex, and adaptability was key to survival. Megalodon may have ruled the oceans, but not alone… and not without competition.
Business Insider
04-06-2025
- Business Insider
My husband and I couldn't afford a home in the DC suburbs. We moved to the Chesapeake Bay and never looked back.
My husband and I welcomed our second daughter in November 2012 and started house-hunting for a bigger space shortly after. Our townhouse in the DC suburbs was great for three, but would become cramped with our growing family. However, even with two full-time incomes coming in from me and my husband, we couldn't find a house in the DC area within our budget of $430,000 that didn't need major repairs. One house we toured looked like the kitchen had been engulfed in flames and left untouched. At this point, in the winter of 2013, we started considering moving outside the DC area. I worried about moving away from my friends, losing access to all the conveniences, shops, and international cuisines, and moving to a place with likely less diversity. However, my husband's friend suggested visiting Calvert County, located on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and after checking it out, we were instantly sold. What I was leaving behind didn't seem to matter as much after that. We were charmed by the Chesapeake Beach, Maryland My husband found the house we ended up buying and visited the area by himself before we took the rest of the family. One family visit is all we needed to decide this would be our new home. The 4,000-square-foot house had plenty of space for our family to grow. I finally had a place to put my mother's piano, which I'd inherited, so our kids could take lessons on the one my siblings and I learned on. The house came with a beautiful sun-filled kitchen, was one mile from the Chesapeake Bay in an area with a good school system, and, best of all, was within our budget. (The housing market here has since gone up, and prices are much higher.) We found a community Soon after selling our townhouse and buying the house in Chesapeake Beach, our new neighbors stopped by to welcome us and bring hot meals, candles, and kitchen towels. This never happened anywhere we'd lived before. We were good friends with our neighbors in the DC suburbs, but our neighbors in Chesapeake Beach feel like family. We shuttle each other's kids to and from practices, go on trips together, and I know I can count on them when I'm short on butter. We're truly grateful to be part of this community, especially since we do not have family who lives close by. I feel like I'm reliving the best part of my childhood My favorite places are beaches. I grew up in Cape May, New Jersey, one of the country's oldest seaside towns, known for its local seafood, pork roll and egg sandwiches, and Jersey tomatoes. So, anytime I'm at the beach, any beach, I return to the best parts of my childhood. Luckily, there's a tiny beach just a mile from our house. In Chesapeake Beach, we paddleboard and collect fossilized shark teeth, which this area is known for. A local man is famous for discovering a Megalodon tooth when he was fishing at a nearby beach, which is estimated to be millions of years old. For me, paddleboarding takes courage and balance, and it's taught me to be more patient with myself. My kids, though, have gotten pretty good on the water. I'm grateful that I get to raise them with a similar love of sand and sun. I also discovered a new love of cracking crabs. Maryland is known for its seafood, especially blue crabs and oysters. On summer weekends, I spend time with friends dipping the Old Bay-seasoned crab meat in melted butter and apple cider vinegar. It's always an afternoon well spent. We've now lived here as long as we lived in the DC suburbs, and while I occasionally miss some of the conveniences we used to enjoy, the trade-off has been worth it. We have no plans to move anytime soon.
