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. 

Phenology Friday: Hurricane's Trees have Buds!

Cait and I visited Hurricane Island yesterday (April 10th, 2014) and were excited to see that some of our favorite trees have buds on them! It must finally be spring! If you are interested in tracking the phenology of plants around you, be sure to join Project Bud Burst or the USA National Phenology Network and submit your observations throughout the seasons.

From left to right: Horse Chestnut, Speckled Alder, Mountain Ash, Common Elderberry

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!

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.