Updates from the Field
Explore the latest science news in the Gulf of Maine, our ongoing research projects, Information about STEM and science education, and the natural history and phenology of Hurricane Island.
Just one month after spying initial buds on several different trees around Hurricane Island, we have some incredible leaves bursting out and greening the island! If you are interested in tracking the phenology of plants in your own backyard, check out Nature's Notebook, a platform to enter phenology data that goes into the USA National Phenology Network database.
Left to Right: Horse Chestnut, Speckled Alder, Mountain Ash, Elderberry
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
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
Steve explains how the quarrymen drilled holes in the 1830's before the advent of steam drills. This was a 4 person job, with 3 "strikers" wielding 8 pound hammers, and one man seated on an iron box who was in charge of holding and turning the drill to chip out a 2.5" hole.
Cait and I were down in Bar Harbor yesterday (April 24, 2014) and had a chance to stop by the Maine Granite Industry Historical Society Museum, which is tucked away just past Somesville on Mount Desert Island. The Museum was founded, curated, and is run by Steve Haynes, who is a fantastic wealth of knowledge about the quarrying process, and who, over the past 46 years, has personally collected and polished granite samples from all of Maine's quarries, interviewed tool boys who worked in the quarries, and collected historic photos and documents of the era. Steve is a stone carver himself, and he took time away from preparing granite memorial stones to step us through the quarrying process and to explain all of the tools that helped cut, shape, move, and polish the granite. We are looking forward to getting Steve out to Hurricane Island, and you should definitely visit the museum if you find yourself on Mount Desert Island! Thanks for everything Steve! You can read about Hurricane's history as a granite quarry town here.
If you're looking for some springtime reading that will help you gain some perspective on the scale of marine resource exploitation, I recommend The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts. This is a great nonfiction book that provides an in-depth account of marine resource exploitation dating back to the 11th century medieval Europe. Using firsthand accounts from early mariners and a variety of other sources, Roberts creates a colorful illustration of human reliance on marine resources and inspires awe about the life our oceans once supported. Roberts also warns about the dangers of shifting ecological baselines--a phenomenon where each generation assumes the current conditions they personally experience are the norm rather than looking at historic landings, species diversity, and average body size of different species. The ocean has historically supported a greater diversity of species and in higher abundance than today. If we look at the ocean's current status only within the context of our lifetime, we easily lower our standards, and a "successfull" rebound of a species may be only a fraction of its historic abundance. You can see a great photo series of shifting baselines here. While it is a sobering subject, Roberts' writing is very engaging and his call to action is inspirational and necessary if we want to improve the state of marine resources. I do believe that we can achieve a balance between resource extraction and protection and hopefully maintain the commercial fishing industry as a viable livelihood that honors past generations of mariners.
For his work, Roberts was awarded the 2008 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists.
