Marine Debris

Many of our programs include a service project, and we especially love having students help our island community by cleaning up Hurricane Island's coastline. We quantify the amount of garbage we collect by filling out beach cleanup forms created by the Rozalia Project, a great organization that works to protect the ocean through innovation, education, cleanup and research. Although we clean parts of our coastline at least once a month in the summer, we are always surprised by the amount of marine debris we are able to collect in a relatively short amount of time. During our last shoreline cleanup, 29 students from the Logan School picked up 637 pieces of trash in one hour. Here is a breakdown of what they found:

 One team of Logan students with their trash haul, which included 68 of the 131 buoys that the full group collected from Hurricane's shoreline

Gulf of Maine lobster settlement lower than in years past...

Dr. Rick Wahle, one of Hurricane Island's science advisors, and his lab annually quantify the number of newly settled lobsters at 11 sites in the Gulf of Maine from Rhode Island to Lobster Bay, Nova Scotia. This year's results from the American Lobster Settlement Index  show a steady decline in the number of settling lobsters since 2007 which could mean an end to the record high lobster landings we've seen over the last few years to a decade. Based on the 2012 Lobster Settlement Index Update, the southern Gulf of Maine sites typically had lower settlement rates than the northern sites, but that has changed and the regional difference in settlement has since narrowed. A newly settled lobster reaches a harvestable size after approximately 8 years. For the survey, young-of-the-year lobsters are collected via diver-based suction sampling and passive post-larval collectors. In October 2013, Alice went out and helped sort samples.

This is an example of the lobsters being surveyed for the settlement index

License to Kill... in the Name of Scallop Research!

Atlantic Sea Scallop (Placopecten magellanicus)

We were recently approved for our 2014 special license through the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). We are required to file a special license application for our research because we are asking for an exception from existing legislation that prohibits collecting undersized scallops, tissue and shell samples. The tissue samples are being saved for genetic analysis which will help us understand the connectivity between different scallop population locations, and we will also keep the shells from each individual collected for aging and growth rate analysis. 

The DMR Application describes the purpose of our project, how project findings might be useful in future management decisions, the specific activities we will be carrying out as part of the project, and gear types used to collect samples. For this application, we worked with Kevin Rousseau, who is part of the regulations, hearings, and special licenses division of the DMR.

Special license applications are reviewed and voted for approval by the Department's Advisory Council, which is made up of 16 members: five commercial harvesters who each represent a different fishery, four people who hold a non-harvesting-related license, a recreational fishing representative, a member of the public, and an aquaculture industry representative. The chair of the Lobster Advisory Council, the chair of the Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat Advisory, the chair of the Sea Urchin Zone Council, and the chair of the Shellfish Advisory Council are ex officio members of the council. 

We Aren't Being Shellfish, We're Just Hoping to Grow Them!

This is one technique for growing scallops called "ear hanging," which uses plastic Age-pins to secure the scallops in pairs along a line.

Cait and I had a great meeting with Dana Morse, on Monday, April 7th to talk about opportunities for Hurricane Island to set up educational aquaculture sites around the island. Before we can set up a site, we need to identify what types of shellfish we want to grow, how we want to grow them (bottom seeding, bottom cages, floating gear...the list goes on) and, most importantly, we need to identify good sites with the right conditions for our shellfish, and then apply for Limited-Purpose Aquaculture (LPA) licenses through the DMR. Dana has a cool blog that chronicles his extensive work and research into shellfish aquaculture, and serves as a great additional resource explaining all of the different techniques that exist to raise oysters, scallops, mussels, and clams in Maine waters. Dana is going to help us identify sites for our LPA's this May, and then we hope to apply for a license and be able to start growing in the spring of 2015!

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!