NEWS Food Festivities
page 3 RESEARCH
Studies of Florida’s Stone Crab
BY AIDEN PRIMEAUX @acprimeaux
MADISON SCOTT / The Reveille
Chef Tila hosts the LSU dining Jambalaya cook-off on Friday, Sept. 24, 2021 outside the student union. BY MADDIE SCOTT @madscottyy American celebrity chef Jet Tila hosted the country’s largest college street food festival next to the LSU Student Union on Friday. Food trucks, activities and music lined the street adjacent to the Union and peaked the interest of hundreds of hungry students. After living during a pandemic for over a year, students said they missed the lively experience of large, outdoor events on campus. Graphic design freshman Landin Smith loved the atmosphere of the festival, thrilled about being at an in-person event after feeling like he missed his senior year of high school. “I feel like I just went from eleventh grade into college, and it wasn’t fun, so it feels good to
be around all of these people— all different personalities,” Smith said. “It’s great.” His friend, elementary education freshman Ameyah Johnson, agreed. Johnson said she wishes LSU would have an event like the food festival every week. She heard about the event from a flier in the bathroom and decided to bring all of her friends. With fall finally arriving, Smith and his friends were excited about the suddenly cool weather. The sunlight and a gentle breeze filled the area, proving to be perfect addition to a plate of Louisiana’s classic dish: jambalaya. One of the festival’s main features was the vast amount of jambalaya options. From vegan to seafood, there was an option for everyone. The long lines of students at every booth seemed to
prove that. Art junior Zed Lobos was excited to give an on-the-spot critique of the alligator jambalaya, one of the crowd’s favorite jambalayas of the festival. “It’s got a great texture,” Lobos remarked. “The gator is not too tough. A lot of issues with gator jambalaya is that the gator tends to be too tough. Seasoned right. Gator’s good.” Agriculture education senior Savannah Kennedy, couldn’t agree with Lobos’ assessment more. She tasted all six of the jambalayas, and her favorite was the alligator. When asked what the highlight of the event was for her, Kennedy said she loved meeting Tila. “I didn’t know he was here until I walked by and was like, ‘that’s him,’ so I got to meet him and that was pretty cool,” Ken-
nedy said. Toward the end of the event, Chef Tila hosted the jambalaya competition, where three judges decided which chef had the best jambalaya. “First comes the dining, now comes the deciding,” announced Tila as a row of LSU Dining chefs anxiously waited to hear if their dish was the winner. The winning jambalaya was a vegan chicken and sausage dish, cooked by Johnson’s. After Tila announced the winner, Chef Taylor’s line for jambalaya tripled as students waited to taste the winning dish for themselves. Tila concluded the cook-off with one iconic, LSU pride-filled line: “Last but not least, Geaux Tigers!”
The National Science Foundation awarded a grant to two LSU professors and one professor from Florida Southern College to research the effects of climate change on the Florida stone crab. Assistant professor Dan Holstein and associate professor Zuo “George” Xue of the College of Coast and Environment, along with assistant professor Philip Gravinese of the Department of Biological Sciences at FSC, received $922,033 from the NSF to study one of the country’s most unique and popular crustaceans. The Florida stone crab is widely known for its delicious claws, which are extracted by workers before returning the crab to the water. Stone crab claws are one of the most expensive seafood items and the industry supports over 800 workers. The stone crab fishery has had a 30% reduction in catch in the past two decades. “It’s hard to know if that’s because of climate change, or natural fluctuations in the population, or increased effort to catch these crabs and that’s finally starting to affect their abundance,” Holstein said. “We don’t have an understanding of just how sustainable the fishery is.”
see CRAB, page 4
RESEARCH
Marine robotic diving vehicles for Deepwater Horizon BY AIDEN PRIMEAUX @acprimeaux
A year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that polluted over a quarter of Louisiana’s coastline and caused devastation for thousands of already-endangered wildlife, an LSU mathematics professor and his students mapped out the remaining crude oil concentration in Grand Isle.
Mathematics professor Michael Malisoff has been working on the intersection of applied dynamics and engineering for years, but the oil spill provided a unique opportunity to apply this research to an environmental issue. Over three weeks, a team of professors and students from several universities used marine robotic vehicles to produce crude oil concentration maps and collect sediment and water
COURTESY OF COLLEGE OF SCIENCE MAGAZINE
samples that LSU professor Edward Overton analyzed for contaminants. “The motivation for the research is to try to avoid situations where humans are put into hazardous situations,” Malisoff said. “Although there is a human in the loop, the intervention is minimized in order to ensure safety while trying to ascertain the effects of pollution.” The first stage of the project involved over a year of modeling the complex physical scenarios the marine robots would encounter in the field. The second was the actual programming of the robots, which was completed in a few months. Professor Fumin Zhang of Georgia Tech and Malisoff are frequent collaborators, and they received a patent in 2020 for their work on a pointer acceleration system model involving computer mice. They had been working together for years prior but the Deepwater Horizon spill presented a chance to both test
COURTESY OF MICHAEL MALISOFF
their theories and help the environment. “We were doing something useful to help in the aftermath of the oil spill,” Zhang said. “We were part of the solution.” The team used five marine robotic vehicles, some of which were built by Zhang and his students. Environmental science professor Edward Overton and his lab analyzed the samples from
the field work. Overton has worked for decades with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as an environmental chemist through oil spills such as the Amoco Cadiz and Exxon Valdez wrecks. They analyzed sediment samples in a gas chromatography– mass spectrometry machine, which generates a graph of the
see MARINE, page 4