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Posted on December 19, 2000

Back to the Docks for UMaine Graduate from Bath

As a boy hauling lobster traps with his dad out of West Bath and trawling for shrimp with his uncles, Lessie White came to love the sea. Today, as the first graduate of a new University of Maine marine biology master's degree program, he is back on the docks monitoring sea urchin and shrimp harvests for the Maine Department of Marine Resources. He completed his research on juvenile cod in November and received his degree in December.

“I interview the fisherman and inspect the urchins and other catches. Most of them are perfectly willing to cooperate because they're interested in the fishery too,” says White. “I understand their concerns. A few months ago, I was one of them. I come from a family of fishermen.”

His working experiences complement the scientific skills that White learned in the course of six years of academic training, first as an undergraduate at the Southampton College campus of Long Island University and then as a graduate student at UMaine. He bridges two worlds, the docks and boats on one hand and the scientific laboratories and journals on the other.

White graduated in 1993 from Morse High School in Bath. He worked summers to earn money for college and, during an honors research project, went to Australia to study the efficiency of light traps for collecting larval fish. When he came to UMaine in 1997, he jumped at a chance to study the physiology of feeding by juvenile cod, a subject with important implications for aquaculture.

His experiments were conducted at the Aquaculture Research Center on the Orono campus under the guidance of Ione Hunt von Herbing, assistant professor in the School of Marine Sciences.

White worked with young cod that measured only about two inches long. He measured oxygen consumed by the fish during periods of swimming activity and again during periods of rest. His goal was to understand how much energy is used for growth by young fish. An animal has only so much energy available, he says, and energy that is not used up by growth processes can be devoted to other tasks.

He found that, in the hours immediately after eating a meal of pelletized food, the fish devote most of their energy to growing. That is beneficial in the long run because larger fish are less vulnerable to predation, he points out. However, by favoring growth over movement, young cod also run a higher risk of being eaten in the short run.

White's thesis is titled “Growth and Specific Dynamic Action in Juvenile Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua).” Since completing his research, he has decided that there is too much financial risk in raising and selling fish. Instead, he prefers to work with fishermen who are the soul of Maine's coastal communities.

“This work is a little like hauling traps, because you never know what you're going to find when you pull a trap out of the water. Likewise, when you ask a fisherman how his day has gone, you can hear just about anything,” says White.

White's academic training has given him the skills to stay up-to-date on the latest research and to discuss the results with fishermen and other scientists. It also allows him to keep up with those fishermen who follow what's coming out of the nation's marine science laboratories.

“We walk a tight line in regulating fisheries,” he says. “If we over-regulate, we risk driving more fishermen to the few species that are doing well or putting fishermen out of business altogether. If we don't regulate, the fishery might be gone in a few years.”

In addition to working on the docks, White attends meetings of the sea urchin advisory councils and other bodies that have a role in managing Maine's fisheries.

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