It has always been things marine and estuarine that have brought me down to Virginia’s Old Dominion University (ODU), near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in Norfolk. It was the school’s oceanographic research, for instance, that revealed a major reason blue crab numbers fluctuate so capriciously: Their larvae, all hatched where the Chesapeake meets the Atlantic Ocean, depend on the vagaries of summer winds to blow them back up the estuary before they wash terminally to sea.