DMR's Rockweed Harvesting Working Group Meets to Designate No-Cut Areas

Ascophyllum nodosum is a common type of brown alga found on Hurricane. It is commonly found with the red alga epiphyte Polysiphonia lanosa.

On December 18th, 2014, the Maine Department of Marine Resources Rockweed Working Group met to discuss locations that should be designated as "no-cut areas" where commercial harvest of Ascophyllum nodosum (known both as Knotted wrack and Rockweed - common names can be confusing...) will be prohibited. 

Thirteen coastal and island field stations and marine labs submitted a brief letter to the working group requesting that the intertidal zone at their facilities be designated as no-cut areas in order to maintain the ecological integrity of the intertidal community and habitat. The only exception to this no-cut designation would be for removing seaweed biomass for scientific sampling as part of research or for educational activities. Rockweed plays an important part in the ecology of the intertidal because it helps improve water quality by removing nutrients and metals from the water column, it is a source of food for a variety of grazing mollusks and crustaceans, and it provides shelter from predation and desiccation for other organisms at low tide. The list of stations and labs, in addition to the Hurricane Island Foundation's Center for Science and Leadership, includes:

• Bowdoin College's Coastal Studies Center, (Orrs Island, Harpswell, ME)
• Roque Island Gardner Homestead Corporation & the Roque Island Archipelago (Roque Island, Anguilla Island, Double-Shot Islands, Lakeman’s Islands, Middle Island, Great Spruce Island, Little Spruce Island, Shag Ledge, Halifax Island, Eastern Brothers, Western Brothers, Pulpit Rock, and the intertidal ledges within the archipelago)
• Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park (Schoodic Point, Winter Harbor, ME)
• Cornell University & University of New Hampshire's Shoals Marine Lab (Isles of Shoals, NH/ME)
• University of New England Marine Science Center in Biddeford and Ram Island (Saco Bay, ME)
• National Audubon Society's Hog Island Audubon Camp (Muscongus Bay, ME)
• Suffolk University's R.S. Friedman Field Station (Cobscook Bay, ME)
• Eagle Hill Institute (Steuben, ME)
• Downeast Institute of Applied Marine Research & Education (Beals, ME)
• College of the Atlantic's Alice Eno Field Research Station (Great Duck Island, ME)

• College of the Atlantic's Edward McC. Blair Marine Research Station (Mount Desert Rock, ME)

• The University of Maine's Darling Marine Center (Walpole, ME)

This group of field stations and marine labs will provide boundaries of the areas that they would like to protect for education and research prior to the DMR working group's next meeting in January.

Dive Master Training 101

On December 12, 13, and 14th, 2014, I began my dive master training with Blue Horizons Dive Center in Glen Mills, PA. By gaining this certification, I will be able to lead other certified divers on local diving excursions and build my confidence in supervising interns who dive with the Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership as part of research projects. Successfully earning this certification will also bring me one step closer to getting an instructor certification which means we could provide dive training opportunities as part of our programming on Hurricane Island. 

To earn the Professional Association of Dive Instructors (PADI) dive master certification, an individual must complete timed waterskill exercises and challenges; master underwater demonstration-quality skills including how to conduct a diver rescue, how to complete the 24 skills in the basic open water skills circuit (e.g. partial and full mask clearing, swimming without a mask), and how to accomplish practical skills (e.g. dive site setup and management, mapping a dive site, giving a dive briefing, and executing a search and recovery scenario); demonstrate they can teach workshops including SCUBA Review in confined water, skin diver course and snorkeling supervision, discover scuba program in confined water, and discover local diving in open water; complete practical assessments in working with open water diver students in confined and open water, continuing education students divers in open water, and certified divers in open water; and demonstrate their knowledge with a final exam. Finally, dive master candidates are also evaluated on their professionalism. 

In the video, I was in the midst of working through my first skill circuit as part of my dive master training. I definitely have a lot to learn and improve upon. For example, I'm not always using the correct hand signals and I don't quite have a great handle on my buoyancy which is an extremely important component of diving to limit damage to the marine environment. Going forward, I am excited to continue to improve upon the skill circuit and increase my comfort level with teaching scuba skills rather than just practicing them while conducting dives for the scallop project. Stay tuned next month for more updates about my progress! 

Understanding Green Crabs in Maine

Yesterday, December 10, 2014, I had the opportunity to travel down to Castine, Maine, to attend an Eastern Maine Skippers Program cohort gathering hosted at Maine Maritime Academy-- the first time the skippers have connected as a full group since their kickoff event on Hurricane Island. The focus of this day was to give students a chance to explore and discuss some of the more nuanced facets of "the green crab problem, " and start to explore project ideas that they can research or test this school year.  A variety of experts attended to share their expertise from the perspective of marketing, management, harvesting, and mitigation and ecology, including Les White, biologist at the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR), Dr. Brian Beal, professor of Marine Ecology at University of Maine at Machias, and Mark King from the Department of Environmental Protection. 

The session I sat in on was run by Dr. Brian Beal on Understanding green crab population dynamics and their effects of cultured and wild populations of soft shell clams. Dr. Beal is the director of research at the Downeast Institute on Great Wass Island, and has worked extensively with clams in a hatchery setting, but also expanded his work to look at the impacts green crabs have on clam populations.

The first part of his talk was focused on understanding the life history of green crabs (Carcinus maenas). It is important to have this background when brainstorming potential solutions to "the green crab problem," because the way that green crabs reproduce, the habitat they prefer, and their tolerance to a wide range of temperature and salinity conditions explain why they have been so successful at invading Maine's coastline, and can give us clues on the best strategies to mitigate (reduce or manage) green crabs to help maintain the coastal systems and commercial fisheries they impact. 

Green crabs originated from Ireland or England, and have since spread to different parts of the world including Japan, Australia, Sough Africa, and Patagonia. The first green crab sighting in Maine was in 1905 in Casco Bay, and, Dr. Beal noted that from that point they slowly spread north reaching Lubec in 1951. The net flow of Maine's tides is south, which means that green crabs likely traveled in ships ballast (the same strategy that brought them over from Europe in the first place) to spread up to northern Maine rather than migrating against the tides.

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A female green crab carrying a large mass of eggs (orange), secured to her telson with an excreted glue-like substance

Dr. Beal describes green crabs as a "consummate invader of new ecosystems," because several aspects of their life history make them well-suited to quickly expand their populations when they reach a new area. Green crabs are highly fecund, which means that they produce a TON of eggs, and the number of eggs female crabs can produce increases exponentially as they get larger (a 2-inch carapace length female can hold an estimated 165,000 eggs). Females protect and carry their eggs under their telson ("tail" flap) until the eggs hatch into planktonic (floating) larvae.  Larvae are then carried long distances by the wind, tide, and ocean currents-- so by the time they settle out of the water column onto the ocean floor (after 50-80 days of floating) one female's offspring may have dispersed to locations miles away. Another aspect of their life history that makes green crabs really resilient is that the larvae can survive in a wide range of temperatures (a range from 8-25°C or 46.4-77°F) and salinities (10-30 ppt). Adult crabs can survive even more drastic temperature and salinity ranges, and researchers have seen green crabs survive completely out of water for nearly 10 days in typical Maine summer conditions. Finally, green crabs aren't picky: they thrive in mud, cobble, sandy, and rocky intertidal and sub-tidal environments, and they eat just about anything--clams, mussels, lobsters, marine worms, cord grass, and eel grass--so  they can be successful nearly anywhere along Maine's coastline.

One parameter that does seem to keep green crab populations in check is really cold temperatures (at least -1°C or 30.2°F) that are sustained over several winter months. If the average minimum monthly temperature increases by just a few degrees (2°C or 5°F) a large portion of the population survives the winter and continues to grow and reproduce. This type of change happened between 1940 and 1950 (which caused populations of green crabs to explode), and again on a smaller scale between winter conditions in 2013 to 2014. Dr. Beal's initial green crab data collected during his research in 2013 shows how much difference one cold winter can make: his team caught an average of 10 pounds of green crabs per research trap in 2013, and a pound represented an average of 12 crabs. In 2014, he only caught 1-1.5 pounds of crabs per trap, and the crabs caught were much smaller--it could take up to 56 crabs to make up a pound. Maine experienced a particularly warm winter in 2012-2013, allowing the green crab population to thrive and grow, but then a cold winter in 2013-2014 killed back a lot of the adult crabs, leaving Dr. Beal and his researchers with a catch of mostly small young crabs in 2014.

As we continue to see global changes in water temperatures (the Gulf of Maine Research Institute found that the Gulf of Maine is warming 99% faster than the rest of the worlds oceans), it appears that this "green crab problem" isn't going to just go away. This is where our Eastern Maine Skippers come into the picture. They are working hard this year to develop projects to figure out creative ways to mitigate the impacts of green crabs in Maine. Stay tuned!

Integrated Sentinel Monitoring Network

On November 12, 2014, I attended a workshop in Chelmsford, MA for the Integrated Sentinel Monitoring Network (ISMN), which was initiated in recognition that ecosystem level changes, such as ocean acidification, sea level rise, or changing storm patterns, are expected to intensify and put important marine species and commercial fisheries at risk. This effort is a collaboration between NERACOOS (Northeast Regional Association for Coastal Ocean Observing Systems) and NROC (Northeast Regional Ocean Council) and involves a number of organizations focusing on the Northeast region from the border with Canada to as far south as Long Island Sound. The steering committee is developing a science implementation plan to "inform researchers, managers, and the public about ecosystem vulnerabilities and impacts," and encourage regional approaches to improving community and ecosystem resiliency.

If you're wondering why NERACOOS sounds familiar, You may have accessed information from one of a series of weather buoys in the Gulf of Maine that collect information about water temp, wind speed, salinity, and water density. You can click through to check out their data visualization tool--a pretty cool resource to compare a parameter such as water temperature this year to the mean of 2001-2013. These buoys provide valuable data for Gulf of Maine-scale questions about changes in the water column.

To tackle this enormous task, the steering committee and participating organizations have been divided into three work groups to focus on three different regions of the ocean-- pelagic (in the water column), benthic (ocean floor), and estuarine (where the river meets the ocean) and nearshore habitat. Each work group has been charged with identifying sentinel ecosystem indicators, gathering information on existing monitoring efforts that relates to their assigned habitat and identified sentinels currently underway in the Northeast, highlighting gaps in current monitoring, and providing a synthesis of their work for the final report. Ideally the report and this work will leverage funding to monitor the gaps identified by this group and to provide continued support to current monitoring efforts underway that are deemed critical to providing information about ecosystem level change. 

At the workshop, I participated in the estuarine and nearshore habitat work group and believe this discussion will be particularly helpful in guiding which indicators we choose to monitor on Hurricane Island in the future. We want the parameters we monitor on Hurricane to be comparable with other field sites so we can understand how that variable changes over time and along a latitudinal or regional gradient as well as consider monitoring the gaps in current efforts. Collecting this data will also ideally support the work of visiting researchers as well as our education programs. 

Ocean Acidification Workshop

Participants listen to opening remarks.

On October 7, 2014, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop co-hosted by the Island Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council focused on "Increasing Community Resilience to Ocean Acidification in Maine: Analyzing and Responding to the Economic, Cultural, and Social Impacts." This event is part of broader efforts underway to understand and address ocean acidification effects in Maine. The Maine Ocean Acidification Commission, a 16-member panel, was established by the Legislature in early summer 2014 to synthesize our current understanding of the issue, its implications for Maine, and identify actions that can be taken to increase our knowledge base about ocean acidification, its effects, and options for remediation, adaptation, and mitigation. The Commission held it's first meeting on the state of ocean acidification science at the Darling Marine Center in August 2014. The October workshop focused on the human and community dimension of the ocean acidification issue.

The speaker lineup started with the mechanics of the acidification process and implications for marine species in response to changes in ocean chemistry. The next set of speakers focused on how communities can define vulnerability, resilience, and identify threats to coastal economic sectors such as fisheries or tourism and biodiversity. Once the morning session wrapped up, we broke into small groups to brainstorm the aspects of our coastal communities that we value and would like to maintain as well as indicators and data sources to measure those values. 

The afternoon speakers provided an overview on solutions, both regulatory and non-regulatory that have been implemented elsewhere to address ocean acidification. For example, local mitigation of ocean acidification is possible through certain measures. Since nutrients are known to increase the rate of ocean acidification, enforcement of regulations meant to control point and non-point pollution sources can reduce nutrient runoff thus eliminating a contributing factor to the acidification process. The break-out groups were tasked with developing strategies to implement in Maine. It was reassuring to see people from different sectors - nonprofit, government, industry - coming together to tackle a very serious issue for Maine. The work done throughout the day will be summarized in a report. We will plan to share the final products once they have been made available... stay tuned!