Eastern Maine Skippers Program NH/VH

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Students from Vinalhaven and North Haven gathered on Hurricane in October 2013 for a two-day intensive trip as part of the Eastern Maine Skippers Program--a new curriculum thread in coastal Maine schools that is designed to make high school education more relevant for students participating in the lobster industry.  This program was focused on introducing students to different ways they can do science to improve their knowledge of lobsters at the larval, juvenile, and adult stages.

Our experiments included a transect and quadrat survey of juvenile lobsters in Hurricane's low intertidal, towing for larval lobsters and other planktonic organisms with plankton nets, deploying tethering platforms with juveniles on them to study lobster predation, and finally designing, implementing, and collecting underwater footage of modifications to three of Hurricane's demonstration traps to see if we could improve the traps ability to retain legal-sized lobsters. 

For this project, we collaborated with Noah Oppenheim, a graduate student who came to Hurricane earlier in 2013 to conduct research on juvenile lobster predation. This allowed students to learn about and replicate Noah's experiment, how scientists collect data, and how science and scientists fit into the grand scheme of managing the lobster fishery.

The skippers program (which also includes George Stevens Academy, Deer Isle Stonington High School, Harraguagus High School, and Mount Desert Island High School), is now in the process of designing and testing the viability of a trap fishery for winter flounder in Maine. You can read more about their project here.

Eastern Maine Skippers Program

Students from Vinalhaven and North Haven gathered on Hurricane in October 2013 for a two-day intensive trip as part of the Eastern Maine Skippers Program--a new curriculum thread in coastal Maine schools that is designed to make high school education more relevant for students participating in the lobster industry.  This program was focused on introducing students to different ways they can do science to improve their knowledge of lobsters at the larval, juvenile, and adult stages.

Our experiments included a transect and quadrat survey of juvenile lobsters in Hurricane's low intertidal, towing for larval lobsters and other planktonic organisms with plankton nets, deploying tethering platforms with juveniles on them to study lobster predation, and finally designing, implementing, and collecting underwater footage of modifications to three of Hurricane's demonstration traps to see if we could improve the traps ability to retain legal-sized lobsters. 

For this project, we collaborated with Noah Oppenheim, a graduate student who came to Hurricane earlier in 2013 to conduct research on juvenile lobster predation. This allowed students to learn about and replicate Noah's experiment, how scientists collect data, and how science and scientists fit into the grand scheme of managing the lobster fishery.

Bowdoin Geologic Studies

Students from Bowdoin College's Earth and Oceanographic Science Department came out to Hurricane Island to learn about the geologic history of Hurricane and to help us better understand Hurricane's granite, soil horizons, and groundwater. Led by Dr. Collin Roesler and Dr. Emily M. Peterman, students traveled around Hurricane looking at the different pocket beaches and how they formed and analyzed the ice pond and the quarry for dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, and pH. Students also took sounding information to create a bathymetry map of these surface water sources. We had a great time hosting them and learning about Hurricane's granite landscape in the process!

The Bowdoin Daily Sun wrote an article about this program that can be viewed here. 

Belfast Homeschoolers visit Hurricane

Eight middle-school aged homeschool students from the Belfast, Maine, spent four days on Hurricane learning about geology, birds, mammals, and the intertidal communities commonly found on our island. 

Islesboro Science Night

On Thursday, June 6, Hurricane Island Foundation staff visited Islesboro for Science Night, an annual school-wide celebration and presentation of long-term science projects that students participated in during the past year.  The event featured arena-style presentations by 7th and 8th grade students of prototype inventions they designed, poster presentations by 5th and 6th grades about experiments they had conducted, a poster series by 11th and 12th graders on the Energy for Me audit of Isleboro Central School, and finally, a public presentation from the 9th and 10th graders “2013 Study of Possible Contamination Sources of Islesboro’s Fresh Water”  to fellow students, visitors, and community members.

This presentation by the 9th and 10th graders was a synthesis of water quality data they collected during an April 22-26 field week, where students went out with their environmental science teacher, Heather Sinclair, our Science Educator, Alice Anderson, and Aaron Megquier, from the Isleboro Island’s Trust to collect water samples and analyze them for fecal coliforms, turbidity, and salinity. Students also spent time learning about some of the policy regulating septic systems and wells on the island. All of this informed their articulate presentation recommending that community members on Islesboro should be aware of the status of their septic systems and wells in order to prevent contamination to Islesboro’s sole-source aquifer.

The idea for this project on Islesboro evolved from a three-day trip that the students had on Hurricane Island last September. Students spent time learning about the water resources on Hurricane, including the sole-source aquifer, historic dug wells, and quarry. The course was framed around the question “how should Hurricane Island manage its water resources.”  Students were able to build on the skills they learned on Hurricane to design and implement their field week on Islesboro.

George Stevens Academy

Eight students and two faculty members from George Stevens Academy (Blue Hill, ME) came out to Hurricane Island May 28-31, 2013 to spend time learning about Hurricane’s intertidal zone.

Our voyage started in Rockland, where the whole group toured FMC Biopolymer, the largest carrageenan factory in the world.  At FMC, we had to wear hairnets, hard hats, earplugs, and gloves in order to see the whole process of extracting carrageenan from red seaweed.  Carrageenan is used as an emulsifying agent that makes food products more palatable and attractive.  It can be found in toothpaste, salad dressing, and chocolate milk.

After touring FMC, we took the ferry over to Hurricane, and enjoyed a late afternoon hike around the island, dinner, and had an evening meeting discussing the logistics for the next day. Low tide (-1.3) was at 9:01 the next morning, May 29, so we woke up and immediately went out into the field to familiarize everyone with commonly found invertebrates and seaweed in Hurricane’s rocky intertidal zone.

After a day in the field exploring and learning how to look for and identify all of the critters hiding under rocks and seaweed, we asked the students to design a research project that would focus on some of these animals and address a larger question of “how do we characterize Hurricane Island’s intertidal?” The questions that students generated were “how far do periwinkles and whelks travel in the intertidal when their food source is removed?” and “what is the abundance of green crabs on Hurricane Island?”

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Team Winkle at their study site

Based on these questions, students developed an appropriate experimental design, formulated individual hypotheses, and carried out their experiments over the new two low tide cycles.  For the first experiment, we broke up in to two teams (team whelk and team winkle) in order to investigate some of the differences in travel distance between dog whelks, which eat barnacles, and periwinkles, which eat seaweed.

Students identified their study sites, counted and marked their respective dog whelks and periwinkles, cleared the site, and then returned their study subjects. At the next low tide cycle, we all came back to the sites to recapture the marked marine snails and identify if they were in the cleared site or in a meter radius outside the site.

Students also designed field guide entries of their own to help future students on Hurricane identify some commonly found macroalgae (seaweeds): rockweed, knotted wrack, sea lettuce, and irish moss. 

North Haven ROV Building

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North Haven 9th and 10th graders spent a little over a week in March, 2013 building three “Sea Perch” remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) for future underwater exploration.  The ROV design process taught students how to solder components onto a printed circuit board for the control box, assemble a PVC frame, and mount thrusters or underwater propellers to help steer the unit.  Students also learned how to deal with the complications of working underwater—dealing with visibility issues, waterproofing, and factoring in the buoyancy of their robots.

North Haven Middle School

In September 2012, North Haven Community School middle schoolers stayed overnight for a learning expedition exploring Hurricane Island’s wild edibles using Euell Gibbons’ book A Wild Way to Eat, written for Outward Bound students in 1967. Students used a nature journal designed by our science educator, along with Gibbons’ detailed descriptions of the plants and animals that existed locally 45 years ago to track the changes that the intervening time has wrought. They collected and analyzed samples of plants, fungi, and sea creatures, and they helped to prepare a meal created with wild foods they collected! Each student also produced a field guide entry for their assigned edible plant.

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One student's field guide entry for Rosa Rugosa