Science for Everyone

Scallops, and Clams, and Mussels, Oh My!

Post by Bailey Moritz, Scallop Research Intern

Mussel jackpot! We’ll put these guys back to grow bigger.

The dock has become my office. Since retrieving the spat bags in late July, I have been whiling away the hours, fog or shine, sorting and measuring the baby scallops in all 35 bags that we collected. Eventually, we will map the data to get a picture of where in Penobscot Bay scallop settlement is higher, which can inform fishery management policy. Even though my scallop count is a whopping 14,000 and counting, I can still say that baby scallops are adorable and surprisingly entertaining. These tiny guys are anywhere from 0.1 to 2 cm in height. By rapidly clapping their shell halves together, they can propel water and thus swim to the surface of the jar I collect them in. Check out Hurricane Islands Instagram for a great video of this phenomenon! My swimming jar of baby scallops has been an excellent show and tell for visitors and students pulling up on the dock. In addition to their cute little performance, juvenile scallop shells have colorful and varied patterns worthy of being called art.

An invasive form of encrusting tunicate forms orange and black mats on the mesh. The little white shapes are clams!

Baby scallops come in a beautiful array of colors and patterns that they’ll eventually lose in adulthood.

Mesh spat bags are not selective. Any larvae floating in the water column can enter the bag and start to grow. While there are upwards of 500 scallops in each bag, there are usually more than 5000 little clams filling the bag as well. Thank goodness I’m not counting clams! The spat bags came from different locations in Penobscot Bay, and you can tell. Each spat bag displays distinct characteristics from the others. One might have lots of healthy juvenile mussels hanging on tight with their byssal threads. Another may have only larger scallops compared to bags with handfuls of practically unseeable small ones. A number of bags contain starfish, thought to be a predator to the scallop, which might be the cause behind a number of empty, crushed shells. I have seen 7 species of beautiful sea slugs, called nudibranchs, and am now well acquainted with tunicates and sea squirts that find the thick blue mesh a perfect point of attachment. I won’t say the number of times I’ve accidentally squirted myself (or others) in the eye trying to peel them off the bags.

Over the course of the past month witnessing the ebb and flow of the tides from my workspace, I have come to appreciate the diverse and unique ecosystem that is a spat bag. What may at first appear to be a mess of muddy shells, shrimp, and slime, actually holds a snapshot of a coastal marine world in an early stage of growth. I still have a few more spat bags to pick through. But with the dock as my office and swimming baby scallops to keep me company, I really can’t complain.

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Mushroom Buoys and Beyond

Post by Jacque Rosa, Science Education Intern

Just yesterday, Island Ecology students were given a line of 16 buoys to deploy off the coast of Hurricane Island that are going to be monitored over the next few months. However, these weren’t your typical lobster buoys. These buoys were made of mushrooms…does it get any cooler than that?

This story begins with two engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who invented “Mushroom Material” as part of a senior project. This product, now manufactured by their company Ecovative, consists of 100% plant based farm waste and fungal mycelium (root structure of a mushroom). After testing, Mushroom Materials proved to be strong, insulative, flame-resistant, and buoyant. With the help of Sue Van Hook, now chief mycologist of Ecovative, their business has taken off, and aims to reduce the use of petroleum based plastic foams.

Sue explains how the idea behind Mushroom Materials came about

Sue Van Hook, whose grandfather was a lobsterman in nearby North Haven, grew up painting wooden buoys and witnessed the transition to foam buoys. Van Hook saw the potential of Mushroom Materials to replace foam buoys and reduce the overall amount of debris entering the marine environment. Currently, 80% of plastics in the ocean can be traced back to landfills, and 25% of that is Styrofoam. Van Hook is utilizing stations in Maine (like Hurricane Island) to test her products in the field. Van Hook visited Hurricane Island yesterday while acting as guest scientist aboard the American Promise, the home base for the Rozalia Project, which focuses on ocean health through education, marine debris cleanups, and research. Her presentation on Hurricane blew us away. As a community that finds hundreds of buoys washed up on our shores, we were incredibly excited at the prospect of a natural solution.

Taking a closer look at our trial buoys. The brown buoys have the resin coating.

So how are Mushroom Materials made? Its simple: mushrooms are collected from the woods, cloned in a lab, and then grown on plant waste where their mycelium penetrate the material and create a strong mass by gluing the material together as they digest it. Unlike plastic and Styrofoam, Ecovative’s product requires a fraction of the energy to manufacture, contains no toxic chemicals, and is completely biodegradable. You can even crumble it up in your garden as compost! Mushroom Materials can also be grown into variety of shapes and sizes in only a few days.

Mushroom buoy field trials are currently taking place in Boothbay and here off Hurricane Island. The trial buoys we received were either coated with a silica-based paint or a 40% biowaste resin, which is resistant to marine decay. Hurricane Island staff and students will monitor the buoys weekly, by weighing them and checking for any damage, mold, or algae growth. This project presents an opportunity for students to participate in research project that supports a shift away from plastics. Ecovative is certainly headed in the right direction, and we more than happy to be a part of the movement to a healthier, happier ocean.


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Updates from the Field Naturalist

Post by Ben Lemmond, UVM Field Naturalist

Just for a moment, rewind your mental tape back late March of of this year: that time when everybody starts talking about spring (because, you know, the equinox and all) but, if you live in New England, the actual idea of anything turning green anytime soon seems pretty far-fetched. It’s that magical time of year when the petrified dog poop and cigarette butts of last Fall start to emerge from underneath the ash-colored snow on city sidewalks, not to be covered up by anything green for another two months. Poet and author Ranier Maria Rilke once said “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” Think back to early spring. Even in that grey season, with the gears of spring still stuck in neutral, what big moments were setting the stage so that they unfold as soon as things warmed up?

It was around this time of year when I found out that I would be working with the Hurricane Island Foundation for my master’s project, though I hadn’t a clue what exactly that would mean. Being a graduate student, I’ve learned, means constantly doing things you feel wildly unprepared to do. It’s a special kind of limbo, one where you’re constantly travelling between paradoxical versions of yourself: student and teacher, professional and newbie, expert and idiot savant. This way of life almost guarantees surprises, since everything moves too quickly for any part of it to become familiar. Suddenly I am standing in front of a lab room full of college sophomores, explaining how to pipette solutions through a channel slide with a thin slice of rabbit psoas muscle mounted on it, in the hopes of making it twitch with the right combination of solutions. In what strange spring was that vision of myself planted?

Field fashion

I’ve now been on Hurricane for four full weeks, conducting an initial ecological survey and developing my own coarse-filter map of general landscape and vegetation patterns here. This means that I’ve been spending most of my time wandering through the island with a canvas bag full of nature-nerd paraphernalia: field guides, a GPS, binoculars, a hand lens, plants to be pressed, many of these items (except the plants) cycling through my free hands and pockets or slung around my neck, depending on the terrain and the amount of backup I needed to make my way knowledgeably through it. I have to admit, this task has been more challenging than I expected, mostly because the better I feel I understand the plant communities here, the more fragmented, temporary, and in transition they appear to me.

The flip side of this apparent chaos is that every day in the field is another opportunity to be surprised. The other day, I found the island’s one and only eastern white pine next to the island’s one and only red maple on a hillside of an obscure outwash I decided to explore on a whim, after my field foray was officially over for the day. White pines and hardwoods certainly used to be a presence on Maine islands, but were almost entirely cleared for shipbuilding or lumber by the mid-1800s. On a 125-acre island where many of the spruce are ageing out, the presence of these two species is significant, even though I don’t know exactly what to make of it yet.

An interesting facet of the island is that, species-wise, there are many of these lone individuals here: in addition to the pine and the maple, there is exactly one American elm, one grey willow, one royal fern, and one steeplebush here – at least that I’ve found after four weeks of walk-throughs. The other week, a bird-banding class caught the first robin and red-eyed vireo that any of us had seen on the island. Anywhere else, many of these species would be completely unremarkable. But on this island where things are moving constantly and complexly, a place where chance encounters often teach me more than what I set out to look for, even a robin or a pine tree regains some of the magic of something seen for the first time. I know that sounds hokey, but it’s true: I have never been so excited to see a pine tree. That might not be what I write in my official report at the end of it all, but for now, I’m really enjoying the way that being on a small island brings these small surprises in to sharp focus.

Ben Lemmond is a graduate student in the Field Naturalist program at the University of Vermont. Learn more about the program at: http://www.uvm.edu/~fntrlst/

Looking out from the high cliffs

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A Bloom of Jellies Make for an Exciting Morning

Post by Olivia Lukacic, Science Education Intern

 

This lion's mane is one of three seen this morning ranging from five inches in diameter up to a foot! These jellies are most dangerous to us humans as their stinging cells can leave a harmful rash.

When Bailey, the scallop research intern, got up early to see the sunrise and get a start on processing another spat bag on July 10, 2015 she was in awe of what she saw off of the dock. It seems that overnight a whole bloom of jellies had entered Hurricane Sound. We often see mats of rockweed around our main pier with the flow of tides, but this one brought a high density of jellyfish and other wonders. In this group there were comb jellies, moon jellies, and lion's mane, all of which are routinely found in coastal Maine. But what was stumping us was that these were far and few between to the hundreds of a type of jellies that we had never seen before. These were clear to opaque jellies with a white to pinkish purple cross on their main bell. We determined that these curious jellies are white cross hydromedusa (Staurophora mertensii). Not much is known about them, with their range thought to be worldwide but specifically from the arctic to Rhode Island. A quick row out into the cove showed that these jellies were mainly around the floating rockweed and we think they are moving with a current.

A few of the hundreds of white cross hydromedusa found near the dock this morning. These are pictured with a few scallop spat bags. 

Our bloom of white cross hydromedusa is not a unique occurrence for Maine right now, at least in broad terms of jellies. This spring to summer season has already seen many areas of high density jelly blooms raising concern among the public. Although the lions mane is the only common Maine jelly that could pose health risks to humans, the large quantities of moon and comb jellies are still disconcerting. Jellies are a largely understudied group of marine species in Maine, so finding an answer for these blooms is a challenge. The best hypothesis to explaining the influx of jellies range from a response to overfishing, to oxygen depletion from land runoff, to warming waters. Although this winter was cold in comparison to the past decade or so, cold winters only affect the waters close to shore. In fact the Gulf of Maine is warming much faster than the most other oceans, raising concern in all aspects of fisheries and marine studies. We hope that here on Hurricane and in the greater scientific community we can begin to understand what is happening to our coastal waters and what each new tide brings in. 

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Desperately Seeking Spat Bags

Some of the bags were completely covered in fast growing seaweed!

Dripping with muddy water and covered with tiny dancing skeleton shrimp, we spent the day searching for and hauling up lines of spat bags. Cait deployed them this past October, so they have been collecting scallop larvae for the past 9 months. A spat bag is constructed of 2 layers of mesh; the outside green layer having very small netting that only larval stage scallops can enter and exit through, and the inside blue layer with larger netting that they can attach and grow on. 5 bags are tied to a line with a cement block on one end and buoys on the other, suspending them at different depths throughout the water column. Soon, we’ll count all the scallop spat in the bags to gain an understanding of how many scallops are entering these areas and how much settlement might be occurring around Muscle Ridge. The bags don’t select for species, so we’re sure to find lots of little clams and mussels as well. 

Keeping the pile of spat bags cold and wet with ocean water

It takes a whole team of eyes to hunt down the right color in the sea of buoys.

Lobstermen generally don’t leave their traps out during the winter and you can see why. The buoys were harder to spot with the colors washed off and some of the bags looked more like we had undertaken seaweed aquaculture! Luckily our fantastic captain, Skip, had a knife handy to clean the outside of the bags as we hauled them up. Strong winter storms can also push the cement blocks across the ocean floor, far away from the GPS point where they were dropped, making it a challenge to find them again. In the end, we recovered 5 of the 12 lines, which luckily included all 3 lines that had the HOBO temperature loggers tied to them! To keep them wet and out of the hot sun, we covered them in burlaps sacks soaked in seawater. After multiple transfers in and out of the water, the spat bags made it on the boat out to Hurricane Island, where we’ll start counting those adorable little scallops.

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