| School of Marine Sciences : The University of Maine

Maine lobster: Endangered species?

The School of Marine Sciences welcomes you to our site and encourages you to join our mission to develop scientific understanding of the marine environment that is Maine’s heritage, to integrate and communicate that knowledge through interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate studies, and to apply it toward stewardship of sustainable marine resources. Our back yard, the Gulf of Maine, is the cradle of North American marine sciences, where the systems thinking of Henry Bryant Bigelow converged on the biological diversity explored by pioneers such as William Stimson, Louis and Alexander Agassiz and Addison Emery Verrill and later melded with the Hutchinsonian tradition of quantitative ecosystem analysis in the works of Gordon Riley.

Times, methods and environments have changed.  The School of Marine Sciences is the intellectual home of the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS).  We measure diversity genomically as well as with classic taxonomic keys. We observe with scientific diving methods, satellites, ships, buoys, floats, gliders, AUVs and cabled instruments.  We synthesize with real-time, assimilative models.  Despite these differences, we sustain the pioneers' passion for both scholarship and integration of marine sciences across the waterfront and all the depths beyond in terms of our expertise. Our faculty is well known for its research over a broad spectrum of marine studies from molecular biology and biotechnology to fisheries science, fisheries economics and anthropology, and from marine geology and coastal engineering to shellfish and finfish aquaculture, marine ecology and most aspects of oceanography. We don't stop with the science; we include the policy that uses it intelligently.

Marine sciences have entered an era of new problems and new solutions to old problems.  Climate change and ocean acidification threaten Maine's and human kind's ocean heritage.   Climate change itself cannot be understood without attention to the oceans, which store vastly more heat than can the more rarified atmosphere. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy eyed tidal power in Maine. Their visions will be realized in modified form in Barack H. Obama's first term. Vast offshore wind resources will be harvested off Maine's coast within a decade.  Micro- and macroalgae will be grown for biofuels and nutraceuticals.  If you want to be prepared to participate in this future and the sound policy needed to manage it, you have come to the right place.