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.

DMR Lobster Settlement Survey Dives

I spent Friday Oct 18 and Monday Oct 21 helping (by sorting samples) DMR scientists Robert Russell and Carl Wilson, who are conducting their annual dive survey of larval lobster settlement rates at 50 sites along the Maine coast. At each site they sampled 12 quadrats via underwater suction sampling. Samples were then sorted and processed on the boat. The suction sampler pulls up all loose sediment and other organisms, so we needed to sift through it and pull out any lobsters and crabs we found. Many of the samples also had shrimp, urchins, seaweed, brittle stars, marine worms, asst. shells, and occasionally rock gunnels and cunner (fish). Once the sample was sifted, we measured the lobsters and crabs carapace length, and we also collected data about the lobster's sex and number of claws.

The boat they used for these dives was the 38' Lady Anne, operated by Sea Ventures Charters, Captained by Dave Sinclair.

Some of the sites we visited during these surveys were Head Harbor at Isle Au Haut, Ragged Island, Allen Island, Matinicus, Hurricane, and Monhegan

Overall, Carl and Robert said that they were seeing far fewer settler-size lobsters across all of their sites than in previous years (this survey has been going on for 22 years). For example, we only found 6 settlers from the 5 sites that were surveyed on Friday, when in the past Robert and Carl have found 4-5 settlers per site in that area.

The data from these surveys will feed into the American Lobster Settlement Index.

Hurricane Geology

Last weekend Bowdoin undergraduate students came to Hurricane, and I tagged along as they toured the different pocket beaches around the island. Although all of Hurricane's bedrock geology is granite, there are other types of (mostly igneous) rocks found on the island that traveled over from Vinalhaven and North Haven when the whole region was covered by a large glacier. Glacial till is characteristic because it is unsorted, which means that there are several different clast sizes and many rock types. The Flow-banded rhyolite, pictured below, was found in a pocket beach just east of Gibbon's Point. Flow-banded rhyolite is chemically equivalent to granite, in that it has high amounts of potassium and silica, but it formed in very different conditions. 

A professor holds out small clasts of Flow Banded Rhyolite,  

Tracking Lobster Movement Through Traps

Lizzie's GoPro setup

Lizzie Morris, an undergraduate student majoring in neuroscience at Middlebury College, stepped out of the traditional bounds of her major and dove headfirst into the world of lobsters as our inaugural summer intern on Hurricane. Using our demonstration lobster traps, Lizzie captured and marked both sublegal- and legal-size lobsters and staged them in a monitoring trap rigged with GoPro video cameras in order to track their movement and intraspecies trap dynamics over a two-hour deployment off Hurricane’s pier. Lizzie poured over hours of video footage and found that there was a lot of trap traffic-- a surprisingly high number of lobsters (both sublegal- and legal-size) staged in each test round were able to escape the traps within two hours. Two hours was also enough time to attract new entrants, mostly sublegal females. Her summer concluded with more questions and possible avenues for this experiment, and we are excited to turn this pilot study into a longer-term project that involves our participants in the future!

Algae on the Ice Pond

Well, I've finally taken the time to do some time-lapse photography of the algae blooms that grow, change colors, and shift on the ice pond.  Check it out: 

Time lapse footage of algae being blown across the surface of the Ice Pond on Hurricane Island, Vinalhaven, Maine.