Scallop Nerds Unite!

From April 23rd through April 28th, 2015, I attended and presented at the 20th International Pectinid Workshop in Galway, Ireland. Scientists from all over the world participated and session topics included ecology and general biology, aquaculture, fisheries, marine protected areas, biotoxins, resource management, and two sessions were dedicated to physiology, biochemistry, and genetics. A special session focused on Pectinids as witnesses of their environment in a changing ocean. This session featured work by French scientists to develop analysis tools which will use the shells of scallops to determine environmental characteristics at the time when the shell is formed. They have yet to determine the method for Placopecten magellanicus, the species found in Maine, but when they do, we hope to send them samples from the Muscle Ridge and Ocean Point closed areas.

Maine representatives L-R Skylar Bayer, Caitlin Cleaver, Trish Cheney, Carla Guenther, and Dana Morse

Maine was well represented at the conference, with four of us presenting our current research including Skylar Bayer, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences, who presented on her dissertation work studying fertilization success in the Atlantic Sea Scallop (Placopecten magellanicus). Trisha Cheney, Resource coordinator for scallops, urchins, groundfish permit bank at Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) presented on state scallop management efforts, and Dr. Carla Guenther, Senior Scientist at Penobscot East Resource Center (PERC) and a member of the Scallop Advisory Council, followed up Trish's presentation by sharing the work that PERC and DMR have done to build trust within the scallop fishing community and to implement the rotational closed area management system currently in place in Zone 2. I provided preliminary results from quantifying the effect of the Muscle Ridge Closed Area on scallop populations. 

Dr. Kevin Stokesbury, Dr. Dave Bethoney, and Dr. Susan Inglis from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (You can find info about their work here) and Dr. Dvora Hart who works in the Population Dynamics Branch at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, MA, presented on their work on the federal scallop fishery which ranged from a parasite in scallops that causes the white meat of the adductor to turn gray to larval dispersal.  

Conversations with workshop participants have inspired me to consider additional methods for the Collaborative Scallop Project that would improve the power of the study. In the near term, I am hoping to organize a visit to the Northeast Fisheries Science Center to learn their shell aging and growth rate methods so we can apply it to the shells we've collected over the past two years. 

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A full group photo from the conference (I am hiding in the back row at the left edge of the blue background)

Gulf of Maine Field Research Station Workshop

Workshop attendees tour the Bowdoin Coastal Studies Center in Harpswell, ME. 

Alice, HIF Science Educator, and I had the opportunity to participate in a weekend Gulf of Maine field station gathering (March 28th - 30th, 2014) at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME. Participants included representatives from 12 Gulf of Maine field research stations, including: the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and the Coastal Center at Shortridge (Bates College), Bowdoin College Marine Laboratory & Coastal Studies Center and Bowdoin Scientific Station at Kent Island, College of the Atlantic's McCormick Blair Mount Desert Rock Field Station and Great Duck Island Eno Marine Field Station, Suffolk University's R.S. Friedman Field Station and Cobscook Bay Laboratory, Schoodic Institute's Schoodic Education and Research Center, Shoals Marine Lab which is associated with the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University, the UMass Boston Nantucket Field Station, the UMass Marine Station at Hodgkins Cove, and Acadia University's Evelyn and Morrill Richardson Field Station in Biology on Bon Portage Island.

We came away from this gathering excited about all of the opportunities there are for collaboration in the Gulf of Maine, and we look forward to becoming part of a formal network of field stations that will coordinate monitoring efforts, share resources, and leverage our collective expertise to promote the role of place-based science in our changing world. We gained invaluable knowledge about how other field stations operate, their research agendas, and how Hurricane Island's Field Research Station can fit into but also build upon and improve the research capacity in the Gulf of Maine. Stay tuned-- more Gulf of Maine Field Station Network updates soon!

HIF to coordinate a collaborative research project

In June 2013, I had the opportunity to organize a collaborative research project with a number of partner organizations and some scallop fishermen. This project has been some of the most rewarding work I have done to date because it brings a diverse group of people to the table who are all genuinely interested in sustaining the state's scallop resource and would like to better understand how small-scale closed areas might be an effective management tool to help do so.

It all started with a group of Midcoast Maine scallop fishermen who decided to close a small area of western Penobscot Bay to harvesting for three years starting in 2013. Working directly with scallop managers from the state's Department of Marine Resources (DMR), the fishermen identified the area's boundaries. The closure was officially implemented on October 10, 2013 (more information about closures in the scallop fishery is available here). DMR and other organizations, including the Island Institute, Penobscot East Resource Center, Dr. Wahle's lab at The University of Maine, Maine Sea Grant, Husson University, and Dr. Stokesbury's lab at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth developed monitoring protocols to gather baseline data from inside and outside of the closed area with the objective of assessing the effectiveness of the closure in rebuilding local scallop populations. In October and November 2013 the research team, working from fishing vessels, completed five days of dive surveys and two days of drop camera work. In addition, we deployed spat bags which will be collected and processed (we will measure and count the juvenile scallops caught in the bags) in May 2013 to understand general source-sink dynamics in the Lower Muscle Ridge area of Penobscot Bay. 

I will continue to coordinate this project through the Hurricane Island Field Research Station and work with the fishermen and other project partners this summer to repeat surveys and analyze the data collected to date. We hope to see an increase in scallop populations inside the closed area, indicating that this particular small-scale targeted closure may be an effective management tool to protect scallop populations near the Lower Muscle Ridge Channel. However, we may find that the designated closed area is not actually increasing scallop populations and should therefore be re-opened.... stay tuned!

For more information about the progress to date, please see the Island Institute's press release.