Young Artists on Display at Rock City Cafe Express their Scientific Observations through Creativity Amidst a Changing Environment

Young Artists on Display at Rocky City Cafe Express their Scientific Observations through Creativity Amidst a Changing Environment

Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership Partners with Center for Maine Contemporary Art and Rock City Cafe

Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership recently ran an Art and Marine Science program for high school students on Hurricane Island. This summer program is designed for students who are passionate about ocean ecosystems and interested in gaining skills and practice in scientific communication through the use of visual art. Throughout the week, student participants dove into marine ecosystems and honed their observational skills to create beautiful, communicative, and impactful artwork. They explored the invertebrates inhabiting the seaweed covered intertidal zone on Hurricane Island, the planktonic communities of the Gulf of Maine, and took a deep dive into the recreational and commercial uses of marine resources, including lobstering and the growing aquaculture industry. In collaboration with Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) and Rock City Cafe this year, the students artwork is displayed for public viewing in Rock City Cafe in Rockland. 

Each year, students in the Hurricane Island Art and Marine Science program create multiple individual art pieces including scientific illustrations, cyanotype prints, scallop structures, and many others. The students also work collaboratively to create one large piece of art to portray a certain ocean issue or topic. The art focuses on the growing aquaculture industry in Maine (specifically scallop aquaculture, one of the focuses of Hurricane Island’s research) and how it relates and interacts with vital fisheries, highlighting the potential for industry diversification to support more resilient coastal communities.

Center for Maine Contemporary Art is dedicated to advancing contemporary art in Maine through direct engagement with artists and the public, creating exceptional exhibitions and education programs that communicate the transformative power of the art of our time. CMCA’s Education department partners with Rock City Cafe to exhibit works that support the next generation of contemporaries.

Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership Boasts A Summer of Aquaculture and Science Learning

Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership Boasts A Summer of Aquaculture and Science Learning

Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership maintains an experimental aquaculture lease site in Penobscot Bay to focus work on aquaculture research and education for all ages. The work accomplished in using this lease provides those involved with unique opportunities to engage in aquaculture research projects, explore aquaculture professionally, and establish themselves as a part of the valuable waterfront communities of Maine. Hurricane Island’s experimental research lease is on a 3.2-acre aquaculture farm on the south waters of the Island and is conducting research on the emerging industry of farmed sea scallops.

This summer was filled with aquaculture on Hurricane Island. The organization hosted three total aquaculture workshops open and accessible to the public, with an additional workshop to come in fall, inviting individuals to experience aquaculture firsthand and visit the farm site off of Hurricane Island themselves. These free one-day workshops allowed participants to dive into aquaculture growing methods, spat collection for sea scallops, and more. Attendees came from a wide range of backgrounds–from professional oyster farmers to professors to individuals who had no previous knowledge of aquaculture or marine biology. These workshops exist to increase accessibility to and knowledge of the field of aquaculture and scientific research, furthering Hurricane Island’s mission.

Noah Schiller working with spat bags

For ten weeks over the summer, Hurricane Island was additionally particularly delighted to host two AquEOUS Fellows, Savara Shrivastava from the College of William and Mary, and Noah Schiller from Pitzer College, in collaboration with the Aquaculture Research Institute at the University of Maine. The AquEOUS Fellowship is an immersive program for undergraduate students interested in gaining hands-on experience in aquaculture. It focuses on building skills required for successful careers in aquaculture, fisheries, natural resource management, and marine extension work. 

During their Fellowship on Hurricane Island, Noah and Savara helped with aquaculture farm labor on the site, engaged visitors and students in aquaculture-related research programming, and assisted local researchers with long-term ecological monitoring data collection and analysis. At the culmination of the program, Noah and Savara had the opportunity to work with Hurricane Island research staff to design their own research project, collect and analyze data, and transform these visuals into final presentations at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center AquEOUS Symposium on August 7th. 

Savara Shrivastava with lantern nets

The Hurricane Island Fellows’ presentations showcased the interdisciplinary nature of Hurricane Island’s approach to aquaculture. While Savara tested the efficacy of a novel biodegradable gear cover technology, developed by Ocean Farm Supply, designed specifically to reduce biofouling on aquaculture gear, Noah focused on refining methods of integrating scallop aquaculture practices into Hurricane Island educational programming—one of the focuses of the organization. Both Fellows went above and beyond with their projects; Noah created an interactive map, accessible via a QR code on his presentation, displaying coordinates where Hurricane Island educational programs have collected juvenile scallop larvae since 2013. These larvae, explained on Noah’s poster, are then counted, measured, sorted, and incorporated into our experimental aquaculture farm. Savara programmed statistical tests comparing biofouling communities on two different aquaculture sites: Hurricane Island’s experimental aquaculture site and a standard lease, Pen Bay Farmed Scallops, in Stonington, ME. 

In addition to working with adults and college aged students, Hurricane Island emphasizes aquaculture-based education opportunities for high school aged students and younger. One opportunity for younger students this summer was a high school program focused on aquaculture and fisheries that allowed students to obtain a level two youth micro-credential in aquaculture from the University of Maine upon completion. The weeklong program focused on education surrounding water quality, biology, animal husbandry, aquaculture systems, and economically important fishers in the Gulf of Maine.

While many students partake individually in Hurricane Island’s programming, the organization also partners with middle schools, high schools, and colleges directly. This year, Hurricane Island is thrilled to have obtained funding to host high school students from the Mid Coast School of Technology. This workforce development effort will focus on aquaculture systems as part of a marine technology class, allowing students to experience a sense of place in Penobscot Bay, become familiar with aquaculture lease operations, establish themselves as science and technology leaders, and jump start their lessons in the class for the remainder of the school year. 

A New Leader with New Ways of Thinking About Leadership

Will Galloway Joins Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership as Education Director, Leads North Haven & Vinalhaven Teacher Professional Development Program Funded by Maine Dept of Education

East Boothbay, Maine - On an uncharacteristically beautiful mid-April Monday, applause erupted from a conference room inside the Graham Shimmield Residence Hall at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Inside, 13 educators from Vinalhaven and North Haven had just come to the conclusion of Phase I of a three-day Climate Education Professional Development Grant funded by the Maine Department of Education and delivered by Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership.

“This has been really helpful to work with Hurricane. There’s been time to connect with fellow educators and time for things that don’t really happen in our day to day - especially in a small school where you have so many different roles to take on.” said Amanda Labelle, North Haven Community School’s Arts & Enrichment Coordinator. 

Temptations of April break aside, the educators came together from their respective islands to collaborate on integrating hands-on, climate-focused, project-based learning into their classrooms. This opportunity not only strengthened the professional skills of island teachers, it allowed them to coalesce and build relationships to one another internally across departments as well as across islands. 

Bryan Feezor, Assistant Principal at the Vinalhaven School shared “There’s not a lot of people who face similar realities and know what it’s like to go from a 6 year old to High School to Middle School in just a morning.”

The program is called Teaching Resilience: Professional Development for Climate Curricula, and brings in a diverse range of teaching talents including science, statistics, the arts, and included humanities teachers such as North Haven Community School’s Fred Emerick - “We’ve got a project idea that’s in place and ready to begin and I have a model for continuing that beyond this project and a network who I knew but didn't have a relationship with before.”

Newly at the helm of the Education Team for Hurricane Island is Will Galloway - With over 30 years of experience as an educator, mediator, consultant, and most recently as the Head of School for Watershed in Camden, Maine. Galloway’s talent is bringing people together, and that talent has already been put to great use, and will continue as Hurricane Island anticipates the busiest year of programs yet. Whether it is bringing together families, schools, nonprofits, for-profits, students or community organizations, Will hopes to create opportunities for convergence. 

Will has a knack for understanding the nuances of leadership as well, “Leadership is the capacity to demonstrate fluid expertise. Which means knowing when to lead and knowing when to join. It’s not one or the other but knowing how to be a part of, and support a group and also knowing when a group looks to you for direction.” and as Hurricane Island continues to evolve and think about how to make change in the world, leadership matters, “It’s not a leadership that imposes but a leadership of supporting.” shared Galloway 

He has a track record of success in implementing community-wide sustainability initiatives in midcoast Maine and that track record stretches back to his time in the Peace Corps in Thailand. These successes only come from a sense of coming together in consensus and harmony  

“I see Hurricane Island as a really good opportunity to build on the convergence that happens on the island, both with the staff and the students. My hope is to see the sense of community we create here be fully realized when participants return home. I want to use this experience to help plant the seed of what is possible when engaging with one another and their environment”.

Galloway plans to bring a more explicit awareness to the community-building, leadership development aspect of Hurricane Island - something that many feel is necessary against the current backdrop of American and world politics. Concepts like social emotional learning and resiliency draw on moral growth, sense of self, and relationships, and these ideas are increasingly being quantified and prioritized in formal and experiential education alike.

“Through our work at Hurricane Island, our participants gain confidence and grow more vulnerable, they have the courage to engage with one another on a deeper level, and leave seeing one another differently.”

This approach to consider the relationships between individuals and groups, different perspectives, and how to support one another is key to reaching the consensus necessary to approach the politicized large-scale issues posed by climate change in coastal communities like Vinalhaven and North Haven. 

In Phase I of this program teachers workshopped with leaders in place-based education and found guidance around curricular design in climate specific content areas, with the ultimate goal of designing a learning project to be implemented in the remainder of the school year. These projects were timely, responsive and relevant to the major changes happening in Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine at large

With an eye towards the fisheries, Vinalhaven science teacher Ruth Brooker, is looking at the lobster industry. In Vinalhaven, lobstering is an extremely visible and important part of the local economy and lobster boats dominate the harbor. “We’re focusing on lobster and sea temperature data” shared Brooker. A Georgia transplant in her first year at Vinalhaven School, she is becoming fully immersed in the ecology around her - just a week earlier she had students participating in marine field research with Hurricane Island, part of a NOAA-funded collaborative study on Maine scallops which includes Colby, Bates and Maine Center for Coastal Studies.

Break out sessions led by the Hurricane Island staff included year-round Hurricane Island Educator Claire Gabel, who is returning from the 2023 season. She took teachers on an ecology walk and with prompts of ‘what do you notice, what makes you wonder, and what does this remind you of?’; and Assistant Education Director Kyle Amergian led a foray into the intertidal zone and introduced the five E’s of teaching - Engage, Explain, Explore, Elaborate, and Evaluate.

North Haven Community School Project Coordinator Maddie Hallowell is also considering environmental impacts on her island - with a background in environmental monitoring and her experience with surveyors and drone use. Her idea is to collect “ consistent and regular measurements on coastal erosion around North Haven with students” with a component of outreach to seasonal and year round residents. “I have access to students of all ages, and I think students are interested in this especially after the storms this winter.” said Hallowell. 

It is important to consider the necessity for scientific literacy as well. Teacher presentations transitioned into goals and desired outcomes, this was evident as a Vinalhaven math teacher David McKechnie offered the collaborative services of his statistics class; “Many projects are going to be using data and my goal is to help the various projects in both islands use their numbers in the most efficient, careful, realistic and scientific ways possible. My superpower is my students … No exaggerations or assumptions allowed!”

Thinking about the projects goes hand in hand with considering the results; for Ruth Brooker on Vinalhaven “One of my successes would be students that are able to communicate understand past historical trends in temperatures in the Gulf of Maine and lobster populations and identifying a correlation for future comparison - we could start a community conversation about trends and have interviews with what folks see now”. 

Likewise for Maddie Hallowell and her coastal erosion project, “My success would be creating a data collection protocol sheet and making nice graphic pieces that community members could see, creating consistent data and perhaps a suggestion sheet for landowners on how to mitigate erosion. This could include planting native plants, landscape changes, or even things not to do.”.

The teachers will be supported by Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership, which has year round professional researchers and educators with time set aside for this collaboration. Local community organizations will play a role as well, partnerships have been identified with Vinalhaven Land Trust, North Haven Conservation Partners, The Climate Working Group and the Town of North Haven.

These projects are now entering Phase II, wherein the research projects will be organized and carried out and in Phase III these teachers will come together again on Hurricane Island in late summer to share their experiences implementing their community-based projects.

Assistant Education Director Kyle Amergian was ready to lean in with everything that Hurricane Island has to offer, “We’re excited for the next step in all of this and hope that you’ll utilize me. I’m ready to come help and put these plans into action.”. This offer of support includes access to Hurricane Island’s scientific and educational resources, which includes a fleet of vessels with scientific gear to deploy and take oceanographic measurements and samples. It also includes staff such as Amergian, who is the Assistant Director of the organization’s Education Department, as well as the Hurricane Island’s Science & Research team, led by Dr. Anya Hopple. 

Sitting just a few miles away from both Vinalhaven and North Haven, the staff and educators of Hurricane Island are equally familiar with the opportunities and challenges presented by the island landscape and local ecology. Hurricane Island’s Research and Education staff are no strangers to the classrooms and coastlines of either island and as such they are an ideal connector for this professional development opportunity. 

North Haven science teacher Sam Taggart summed up the overarching theme of the effort, “You’re trying to get people to think about and care about what is going on around them”. This motivation combined with a long overdue sense of creating inter-island relationships could be felt even by the end of the 3 days at Bigelow. Amanda Labelle, Arts & Enrichment Coordinator for North Haven shared that “finding our throughlines in these trainings will help us in the future because we will have established a process of collaborative practices with our disciplines and be able to feel like that’s something we can continue to do. We can use this as an opportunity to generate that continued collaboration in this hands-on interdisciplinary approach.”.
For more information about the Maine Department of Education Climate Education Professional Development Grants contact Teddy Lyman, Climate Education Specialist at the Maine DOE Office of Innovation at theodore.lyman@maine.gov

Microcredentials on Hurricane Island

Microcredentials on Hurricane:

Training for Maine’s Marine Economy Future

Chloe Finger is a bonafide marine engineer. Borrowing from her growing up on the schooner J&E Riggin and her expertise from working last year on Hurricane Island’s Facilities team, this week she completed an oyster grader on island to efficiently sort the oysters that we grow on the Hurricane Island aquaculture farm. She’ll begin using this tool with Micah Conkling, her fellow Aquaculture Farm Assistant this season who brought oyster-farming and aquaculture-development research experience to the farm, but only after he finishes removing the encrusting organisms that foul the nets that we use to grow our scallops.

While Chloe and Micah’s tasks this season varied weekly—from boat handling to animal husbandry to SCUBA diving on our farm’s moorings—their duties for the season overlapped with the hands-on aquaculture curricula that we designed with the Hurricane Island Education team for this year’s two cohorts of high-school aquaculture workshop participants. In all, the skill-building Micah, Chloe, and our aquaculture students experienced is part of innovative occupational-development programming in vocational education: namely, that of “microcredentials.”

Microcredentials are certifications of proficiency awarded once a learner of any kind completes a training that an established institution recognizes as sufficiently rigorous. In our case, Hurricane Island has been building a curricular pathway with UMaine’s Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research (CCAR) and Aquaculture Research Institute (ARI) and other partners to teach the basics of saltwater aquaculture such that Chloe, Micah, or our high-school students may receive official, résumé-ready certifications of their skills without needing to enroll in a traditional school. As a college student completes credit hours in a classroom to show they know their stuff, so can a student learning maritime skills outside the classroom, as long as an education authority approves their learning path.

While they also award official certifications, microcredentialing programs are often much shorter than conventional college courses (weeks instead of months) because they are aimed at making skill-certification more broadly attainable. Says CCAR’s Melissa Malmsteadt, “microcredentials are kind of brilliant—you can get a baseline level of interest in a topic to see if it interests you without needing to commit to a four-year college.” Microcredentials differ for youth and adult learners, and microcredential development accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic as educators foresaw future impediments for traditional learning systems. However, professionalization programs for marine aquaculture are especially new because ocean-farming industries are still maturing in Maine and nation-wide (shout-out to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s 2020 strategy report on aquaculture workforce development in the state).

Thus are Hurricane Island’s adult and high-school aquaculture microcredentials still pilot programs while Chloe and Micah provide feedback on their skill-development, and as we field-test lesson plans to guide youth students through at least the first of three levels of ocean-farming proficiency. This season, however, we are proud that our youth participants completed Level 2 of UMaine’s youth Aquaculture Microcredential through our workshops; these students are on their way to receiving the first stage of UMaine’s adult Aquaculture Microcredential.

We are thoroughly excited to continue to integrate our marine research with Hurricane Island’s education initiatives. In the meanwhile, Chloe will fix the bilge pump on the skiff, and Micah will keep monitoring the saltwater aquarium he built to develop sugar kelp spores. Fortunately, they are comfortably accustomed to the range of competencies required for marine work.

Welcome Research Director Anya Hopple Ph.D.!

By Essie Martin

You may have met Dr. Anya Hopple at our Field Research Station Opening, or perhaps you know her through her most recent work as a scientist at the Smithsonian Ecological Research Center, where she was leading an effort to understand the effects of extreme weather events on forest systems. Here is a link to her most recent publication exploring carbon fluxes in microbial systems as they respond to a changing climate. She brings with her a wealth of ecological, climate and collaborative knowledge and we are so excited that she’s finally here.

We are getting to know Anya through the lens of island work and living, which is generally a little muddier and a little saltier. Anya has joined us on island the last two weeks getting to know our systems and habits on the island while acquainting us with her own organization tools, which are helping us become even more efficient and focused on our research efforts. 

Anya has taken to island life with ease; she joins us with a smiling face for daily morning meetings, she offers solutions for the riddles and crosswords we puzzle out over breakfast, and has forged her own island routines. Anya is also acclimating to island research after dissecting a scallop perfectly on her third try, taking a turn behind the wheel of our skiff, and grappling our longline to collect scallops. She has transitioned into a directing role beautifully, challenging and questioning the way and the why of how we do things, creating new organizational setups, and encouraging us with high fives. 

Yesterday, after a long season of spawning attempts, our Lead Scientist Phoebe Jekielek convinced our scallops to spawn and we were able to deploy a trial fertilization experiment. Anya sprung to action and hopped on the boat to be our surface support for our SCUBA team! Anya tackled surface support with the same attitude she has joined the rest of island life– with enthusiasm, a method-minded brain, and a knack for anticipating the needs of those around her. 

We are delighted to have Anya as the newest member of our team, we can’t wait to see where her vivacity and zeal take us in the future! 

Head in the Clouds... In the Best Way

By Essie Martin

As a new member of the hurricane island crew, I had no way to picture, before coming to the island, how intertwined our lives would be with weather. Days of fog and sun have a great impact on not only the mood of the island, but also how much (and what kind of) work we can get done in a day. 

I often bemoan the fact that I have no way to predict rain, and harbor a certain envy for those in sync with the atmosphere. Without a trick knee, I am sorely reliant on my phone’s weather app. More than just predicting precipitation, I want to learn to read the sky. One of the things that has struck me most about this place are the clouds. On the island’s aquaculture site we have a clear view of clouds that catch over the Camden Hills and spill out into Penobscot Bay. They bloom in great stacks, long wisps, checkerboard expanses, or fluffy pillars with flat bottoms. 

Cumulus clouds underneath cirrus

Clouds in Maine play an important role in local folklore: Most people have heard the phrase “red sky at morning, sailors take warning, red sky at night, sailors delight.” A red sunrise results from dust particles of a storm system passing from the west (typically in the form of cirrus clouds), indicating that a storm system may be moving from the east, and rain is on its way. This phenomenon has been recognized for many centuries: in the Bible Jesus told a fisherman “When in evening, ye say, it will be fair weather: For the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be foul weather today; for the sky is red and lowering.” (Matthew XVI: 2-3,)

Mackerel sky

Another cloud formation attributed with predictive power on the Maine Coast is the mackerel sky– an expanse of dotted or waved clouds said to indicate a change in the weather. Propagation of high altitude atmospheric waves creates this pattern of clouds to represent the scales on a mackerel. While the fish itself is common, and generally only used as a bait fish, its zebra pattern has become infamous along the working waterfront for predicting changes in pressure systems. 

Mare’s tails

Fishermen are also quick to point out mare’s tails: high-altitude-cirrus clouds shaped like lackluster check marks. These are said to point to an approaching storm. Cirrus clouds trap warm air close to earth, hampering the cycling of warm and cool air currents, and creating a positive warming feedback loop. On the aquaculture site we often see these whisps pointing out thunderheads rising over the Camden hills. 

Sometimes, the island is stuck in a whole cloud bank as thick fog settles in. Our weather-dependent life on the island dictates indoor work during these times: splicing line, puttering around the lab, writing blog posts. I can’t say I have ever lived so much at the mercy of the atmosphere. So, with our lives so tangled in salt and weather, what meaning can we seek from the clouds? Where will storms settle in over our little island? Will mares tails mark days of fog and rain? Will I start to feel this place not in my joints, but in my bones? 

Cumulus clouds underneath cirrus

Spat Color Variation

Over my time at Hurricane this summer, I’ve developed a very curious question about our baby sea scallops that inhabit our coastal waters. Also referred to when they’re young as spat, these little guys show great diversity in their shell patterns and colors, and I’ve been very interested as to why they have so much diversity when they’re small, but lose that as they grow older.

According to the Oxford University Press, these variations have been typically associated with differences in growth, survival and other characteristics. As far as shell color goes, most sources say it's often been associated with environmental effects, but in other circumstances have been said to be more genetically controlled (Winkler, 2001). With the Gulf of Maine slowly warming, I wonder if that will make an impact on the variance? A study published on the NOAA Fisheries website in March of this year has already found that juvenile growth is hindered due to ocean acidification and warming, but would that suck the color out of them, too?

Photo Credit: Arturo Aguirre-Velarde

However, because the effects of environmental stressors, genetics, and other characteristics impacting color and shell patterning vary depending on species, I wanted to share some other information I found on the scallop of northern Chile and southern Peru- the Peruvian scallop. In hatchery production of these scallops as juveniles, other characteristics relating to shell colorations have been observed. On many of the juveniles, researchers noticed a white marking appearing on the center of the upper valve (See photo to the right). Researchers were able to make a reasonable assumption that hereditary mechanisms control color patterns more than environmental conditions (Winkler, 2001).

So, a lot isn’t known about this question specifically towards our native Atlantic sea scallop, but some generalizations can be made based on what we know concerning the Peruvian sea scallop!

I hope you all found this information interesting!

Yours in scallops,

Olivia

Sources

F. M. Winkler, et al. “Inheritance of the General Shell Color in the Scallop Argopecten purpuratus (Bivalvia: Pectinidae).” Journal of Heredity, https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/92/6/521/2187385. 

NOAA Fisheries (2023, March 1). New study finds ocean acidification and warming hinder juvenile atlantic sea scallop growth | NOAA Fisheries. NOAA. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/new-study-finds-ocean-acidification-and-warming-hinder-juvenile-atlantic-sea-scallop

Pousse, Emilien, et al. “Juvenile Atlantic Sea Scallop, Placopecten Magellanicus, Energetic Response to Increased Carbon Dioxide and Temperature Changes.” PLOS Climate, journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pclm.0000142.

Introduction to Stable Isotopes

Like everyone who works on Hurricane Island, I spend a decent amount of time interacting with students. As researchers we are often called upon to answer questions about our aquaculture farm, spat bags, and general scallop facts. One question I get a lot (and a question I ask myself) is if there is a difference between our farmed scallops and the adjacent wild populations. Genetically the scallops are homogenous– we seed our farm with wild spat. But the two grow in different conditions; different depth, different proximity to other scallops, different temperature, etc.… So is there a chemical difference brought on by their divergent growing habitats? What might that indicate? Thanks to a grant from the Davis Conservation Foundation I am pursuing answers to these questions using stable isotopes this season. 

Perhaps you’ve heard of radioactive isotopes — the kind used to date dinosaur bones; but most people haven’t heard of stable isotopes. When I first signed up for a stable isotopes class in college, my dad made fun of me, saying I’d just put two big words together to sound impressive. So what are stable isotopes for all you curious minds in the audience? (Yes, even you, Dad.) 

Isotopes are any atom of an element with an atypical number of neutrons. For example, a normal carbon atom has 12 neutrons, and a carbon isotope has more or less neutrons than the normal 12. Some forms of isotopes are unstable– they will eventually return (“decay”) to the “normal” number of neutrons for their element. For our carbon example, an unstable form of carbon is carbon 14 (a carbon atom with 14 neutrons). Overtime those carbon 14 atoms will decay to carbon 12, and the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 allows us to date artifacts. Other forms of isotopes are stable and can exist indefinitely in their state. Carbon 13 is a stable isotope form of carbon. 

Stable isotopes are used in geochemistry to detect source materials (such as food and water), recreate paleo climates, and even in forensics. The way we measure stable isotopes is by taking the ratio of normal atoms of an element to the corresponding target isotope. Depending on the situation we measure different elements. For the purposes of identifying differences between farmed and wild scallops, we chose to use organic isotopes: Nitrogen 15 and Carbon 13. Organic stable isotope analysis can help us differentiate energy fluxes from local primary production, nutrient gradients at depth, and general food sources. This information may help to inform shellfish closures, best farming practices, and possible impacts of ocean acidification and warming on scallop physiology.  Nitrogen isotopes may also indicate possible anthropogenic influence close to scallop growth due to signature isotopic composition of human waste and fertilizer. 

We plan to sample scallops for isotope analysis in the middle of each month from June-October (with an additional sample at the end of August during scallop spawning) from aquaculture nets, aquaculture cages, and adjacent wild beds. We will sample 5 female and 5 male scallops from each source. Thanks to our continued collaboration with Bates College, we will analyze scallop samples on the Bates campus using their Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer (IRMS). 

Stay tuned for results soon!