UMaine School of Marine Sciences

UMaine Hosting ‘Nor’Easter Bowl 2012′ Ocean Sciences Competition

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:12:57 -0500

UMaine Hosting ‘Nor’Easter Bowl 2012′ Ocean Sciences Competition

The University of Maine is hosting the ’Nor’Easter Bowl 2012 Regional Ocean Sciences Competition , a regional ocean sciences competition on Saturday, Feb. 4 with more than 100 top-achieving math and science high school students from Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the UMaine D.P. Corbett Business Building on the Orono campus, students will compete in a Jeopardy-like Nor’Easter Bowl, answering a range of questions about ocean-related biology, chemistry, geology, geography and social sciences.

The annual event is hosted every third year by the UMaine School of Marine Sciences, and is intended to kindle students interest in marine sciences and in marine science careers. The event also fosters team-based camaraderie and fun with science, and it brings local and national recognition to the competing schools, according to the School of Marine Sciences. In addition, students who compete successfully in regional and national Ocean Sciences Bowlcompetitions receive thousands of dollars in scholarship funds each year.

Many of the questions require graduate school level knowledge and problem-solving skills. Competition rounds are fast-paced, exciting, and display the amazing knowledge and hard work students have invested to prepare for the event, according to Brenda Zollitsch, a Nor’Easter Bowl 2012 coordinator.

The winning team will be awarded an expense-paid trip to Baltimore, Md. in late April to compete in the National Ocean Sciences Bowl Competition. Second-through-sixth-place winners will receive field trip awards to ocean science laboratories with marine scientists and other prizes.

Maine teams participating include: Ashland Community High School, Belfast High School, Lewiston High School, Morse High School, Poland Regional High School, Sanford High School and Waterville Senior High School.

Contact: Brenda Zollitsch, (207) 240-0398 or bmzconsulting@aol.com George Manlove, (207) 581-3756

Tropical Fish ... In Maine?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:17:56 -0500

Tropical Fish…In Maine?

by Muriel L. Hendrix

Maine-grown Picasso Clownfish. Photo courtesy of Soren Hansen

Near the entrance of the 12,000-square-foot building in Franklin that is home to Sea & Reef Aquaculture, numerous tanks hold thousands of brightly colored tropical fish destined for pet stores and wholesalers across the United States. In some, duplicates of Finding Nemo’s hero, the Tomato Clownfish, swim around each other, each confident in its own space; in others, shyer fish like the Percula Clownfish clump together and hide behind each other. Each tank holds ornamental wonders, including Sea & Reef’s popular Clownfish color morphs, the Maine Mocha Clownfish and Maine Blizzard Clownfish.

click to enlarge

Søren Hansen co-founded Sea & Reef Aquaculture while a graduate student at the University of Maine. Photo courtesy of Soren Hansen

All of the approximately 20 species (including color morphs) have been raised from eggs spawned at Sea & Reef, an achievement that ensures no tropical coral reefs have been harmed or fish species further depleted when these fish reach a hobbyist’s salt-water tank.

For Søren Hansen and Chad Callan, who started the company together while students at University of Maine at Orono, this sustainability was a major reason they moved from research with cod to focus on ornamental tropical fish. Hansen, now the sole owner since Callan moved to Hawaii, explains that millions of tropical fish imported each year to fill hobbyists’ reef tanks are harvested with harmful methods such as using sodium cyanide or dynamite to stun the wild fish. As many as 80 percent of the fish die during collection, in transport or while being held for sale. Sea & Reef and a handful of companies like it can help ease the stress on these species and coral reefs. Eventually, Hansen wants to culture every marine animal a hobbyist needs to stock a reef tank, including corals, anemones, ornamental shrimp and sea horses.

By next September, Hansen plans to be selling 16,000 tropical fish a month, a giant leap from the 1,000 a month he and Callan were selling from the Aquaculture Research Center in Orono. This growth has been made possible by multiple sources of support, including grants from Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center, Maine Technology Institute, Efficiency Maine and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The venture began 10 years ago when Hansen, then finishing up his masters degree, started a side project in aquariums located in his apartment closet, raising and selling the progeny of a breeding pair of Clownfish dubbed Moe and Louise. Callan had already graduated and was working in Hawaii. Together they formed a plan to begin a tropical fish hatchery in Hawaii.

David Townsend, who was Director of the School of Marine Sciences, heard about their plans and encouraged them instead to start the business in Maine while earning PhDs. With help from Jake Ward, the university assistant-vice-president for research, economic development and governmental relations, they formed Sea & Reef Aquaculture in 2003 and moved their small business to the campus Aquaculture Research Center.

Townsend says he was impressed by the promise and sustainability of raising tropical fish in Maine, although other faculty members were skeptical, considering the Maine climate. “Actually, Maine’s cold water is a positive factor,” he says, noting that “If any tropical fish escape from a Maine facility, they would not survive. They pose no threat as an invasive species, which is a big problem with tropical fish raised in warmer climates.”

Townsend added that the presence of tropical fish in the aquaculture center was beneficial because unlike cod, which spawn once a year, the tropical species produce thousands of eggs year round. The project provided a constant source of research opportunities and aquaculture training for other students.

Sea & Reef thrived in Orono, but Hansen needed to expand. In 2010, when Seabait, a company doing research and development in the culture of sand worms at the University’s Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research (CCAR) in Franklin moved out, CCAR director, Nick Brown, called Hansen and asked if he was interested in moving there.

Brown secured a $360,000 bond-funded Maine Technology Asset Fund grant to turn the Seabait facility, which was corroded from moisture, un-insulated and had a dirt floor, into an energy-efficient building. R35 insulation was installed in the walls and ceiling and a concrete floor was poured. With a $200,000 Maine Technology Institute development grant, which he will repay, Hansen funded production systems, including a water supply system with heat exchangers, high tech filtration, UV sterilization, and a 13-foot-tall water tank insulated with a covering of six-inch foam that looks like a monster paper mache project. Meanwhile, another Sea & Reef full-time employee, Jonathan Labrecque, who had been working with them at Orono while completing an undergraduate degree in marine science, took care of the operation there.

During a February, 2011 snowstorm, they transported fish in styrofoam boxes with heat packs to keep the water temperature up. Their temporary home was ready. Clownfish broodstock could swim in tanks where flower pots served as surrogate anemones (in the wild they have a symbiotic relationship with anemones), cylindrical tanks held algae to feed zooplankton which provide nutrients for fish larvae, and tanks were in place for larvae and growout.

Presently, Hansen is shipping around 1,500 to 2,000 fish a month, which he says will increase to 3,000 to 4,000 fish a month in the peak season, January through March. He is adding a web site (www.seaandreef.com) and a part-time salesperson by January. After conducting a shipping study funded by the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center, he has developed a shipping protocol for fish densities, water volume and temperature that ensures safe delivery. He notes that his captive-raised fish are more suitable for hobbyist tanks than wild fish: “They’ve spent their entire life in tanks and are accustomed to people,” he says, “and they are free of parasites and diseases. They’re healthier.”

After the logistics of moving and further expanding production systems are complete, Hansen will begin to raise ornamental shrimp and sea horses and return to his research with multiple pairs of beautiful Flame Angelfish (Centropyge loricula). They are pelagic spawners, meaning that they lay their eggs in the water column, rather than on substrate like the clownfish and other species Hansen has been raising, which are known as demersal spawners. He has completed the first stage of successfully rearing pelagic larvae, a tricky process because pelagic fish eggs produce larvae that have such small mouths they are not able to consume the zooplankton normally fed to larvae at the earliest stage of growth. Hansen was able to discover and grow suitable feed to raise the pelagic larvae to the size where they could consume conventional feed. Because pelagics account for 90 percent of tropical species, developing a methodology to raise them will open the way for the culture of many additional species.

When Hansen came to Maine from Denmark to work on his MS in Marine Biology, he says he envisioned some day working outdoors in the field, not in a cavernous building with no windows. But, nearly all his life he has been fascinated by aquariums, both fresh-water and marine, and being indoors much of the time is his trade-off for pursuing this interest, and at the same time reducing stress on coral reefs and their popular inhabitants.

Muriel Hendrix is a freelance writer living in Bath.

Robotic devices

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:57:19 -0500

UMaine aquatic physicist Emmanuel Boss was quoted in a story on the website Miller-McCune about the use of robotic devices that are helping a researcher in California keep track of how tiny organisms and object travel in sub-surface ocean currents. Boss said if the devices work at a reasonable price, they could revolutionize oceanography.

MDI man builds reputation with whale bones

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:06:56 -0500

MDI man builds reputation with whale bones

By Bill Trotter, BDN Staff

Jan. 04, 2012, Posted 5:35 p.m. at
Last modified Jan. 04, 2012, at 6:45 p.m.

Kevin Bennett | BDN
Dan DenDanto removes a rib from a 50-foot-long right whale named Stumpy at his workshop in Tremont on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2011.Buy Photo

Kevin Bennett | BDN
The front spine section a 50 foot long right whale named Stumpy hangs by a chain at Dan DenDanto's workshop in Tremont on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2011. Buy Photo

TREMONT, Maine — Dan DenDanto did not construct his garage for this sort of thing.

Built about a decade ago to fit three vehicles, the structure from the outside resembles many other residential garages on the “quiet” side of Mount Desert Island, where pickup trucks and lobstermen workbenches are commonly found behind the overhead doors.

So when it comes to using the space to piece together the bones of a 52-foot-long right whale — larger than most school buses — it can get a little crowded.

“It won’t fit through the door with its rib cage assembled,” DenDanto said Tuesday about the skeleton as he weaved through a suspended maze of large bones spread about among the garage’s three bays. “It’s 10 feet wide.”

But for the carpenter and whale researcher, accumulating whale bones, some nearly 13 feet long, at his home in the local village of Seal Cove is worth the effort. The whale skeleton is one of two he is reassembling for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. After working on the project since last spring, DenDanto expects to finish preparing the skeleton, deliver it by truck and install it in the coming week. He’ll be paid $80,000 for his work, he said.

The adult whale, a female known since the 1980s as “Stumpy” by whale researchers for her damaged fluke, or tail, was killed in early 2004 by a ship strike off the mid-Atlantic coast. She was pregnant with a near-term fetus that did not survive the collision when she died. DenDanto and a few part-time assistants have been reconstructing the skeletons of both for the museum.

Stumpy was estimated to be approximately 35 or 40 years old by researchers on the East Coast who keep track of the endangered North Atlantic right whale population, which is believed to consist of approximately 400 individual whales.

“This particular right whale was studied pretty intensively,” said DenDanto, a graduate of College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. “This is an iconic individual.”

In addition to being a carpenter and rearticulator of whale bones, DenDanto is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maine and a research associate at COA’s Allied Whale.

Stumpy, DenDanto said, was known to have given birth to other right whales over her lifetime, which scientists view as a crucial contribution to the population’s critically low numbers. He said researchers believe the injury that provided Stumpy her name was caused by a previous ship strike early on in her life. Right whales have a reputation to be slow moving and particularly vulnerable to ship strikes, he said, and female right whales even more so, because of the coastal areas where they tend to be found when pregnant or with young offspring.

Putting Stumpy’s skeleton on display, and that of her 17-foot fetus, should help draw attention to the plight of North Atlantic right whales, he said.

“They stand to have a pretty emotional impact by displaying the two [skeletons] together,” DenDanto said. “Because of her story, the conservation message will have more impact.”

The MDI man is familiar with museum displays of whale skeletons. By his estimate, he has rearticulated roughly a dozen whales since 1993, the first being a relatively small minke whale he assembled for the Bar Harbor Whale Museum.

Since then he has rearticulated the skeletons of four humpback whales, a killer whale, a pilot whale, two other minkes, a northern bottlenose whale, another right whale and a sperm whale. He now has a business, Whales and Nails, specifically dedicated to this kind of work.

Museums where some of DenDanto’s work is on display include the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Mass., the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Biology, the Nantucket Whaling Museum and the Seacoast Science Center in Rye, N.H. The two skeletons he is finishing up will be the first two to be shipped outside New England, he said.

“I’ve garnered a reputation now,” DenDanto said. “Most of it is by word of mouth.”

He guessed that, nationwide, there are maybe between 60 and 70 rearticulated whale skeletons on display at museums and similar institutions.

Assembling the skeletons requires more than just an understanding of whale anatomy, according to DenDanto. He is not an engineer, he said, so his clients usually rely on architecture firms to determine whether a museum ceiling can support a three-ton whale skeleton.

Most of the whale skeletons he gets already have been cleaned of flesh and cartilage, usually by being buried in a manure pile for a year or two, but he sometimes has to clean or bleach them further, depending on the client’s wishes. He frequently replaces missing bones with plastic replicas made from other skeletons. For example, the fetus skull was never recovered, he said, and will be substituted with a model right whale calf skull provided by the North Carolina museum.

Piecing the bones together, he said, is a matter of getting the spacing right, securing them to one another with carefully welded and concealed pieces of steel piping and rebar, and filling in the sections where cartilage used to be. These sections, he said, are usually filled in with expanding foam that doubles as glue and a layer of papier-mache to help minimize the weight load, before being coated with a light gray epoxy.

The skeletons are never really complete until they are installed in the display institutions, he said. They are transported by truck usually in three or four sections to the display site, where DenDanto and his helpers secure the final connections before hoisting the skeleton into place. He estimated that to unload the bones of Stumpy and her fetus, assemble them into two whole skeletons and secure them in their display positions in the museum’s new 80,000 square-foot addition will take five days.

DenDanto said he is eager to be finished with the project, which kept him busy through the holidays. His wife, he added, is eager to get the mother whale’s rebuilt flipper, which resembles a giant human hand and is as big as a twin bed, out of the hallway of their house.

He said he has another project lined up that involves rebuilding two pilot whale skeletons for the Seacoast Science Center, but that one is not due until April.

“We’ll take a breather,” DenDanto said. “I want to celebrate Christmas.”

UMaine to lead new razor clam research

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:33:16 -0500

UMaine to lead new razor clam research

Paul Rawson of the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences is leading an effort to develop ways to grow razor clams on shellfish farms. With a $93,616 award from the Northeast Regional Aquaculture Center (NRAC), Rawson will work with Roger Williams University, Woods Hole Sea Grant and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, Maine Sea Grant and UMaine Cooperative Extension. A news release has details.

Ocean monitoring project

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 07:04:03 -0500

AP story on funding for ocean monitoring project

The Boston Globe website included an Associated Press story about $1.7 million in funding for the Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems, known as NERACOOS, which includes UMaine's Physical Oceanography Group and UMaine Professor Neal Pettigrew. The Bangor Daily News also ran the AP story, which mentioned the funding will enable researchers to collect data that will be used to benefit the fishing industry and commercial shippers.

Working Waterfront features UMaine scallop research

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:27:55 -0500

UMaine researchers Rick Wahle and Paul Rawson was included in a Working Waterfront story about the upcoming re-opening of several scallop fishing grounds in Maine. Rawson's work is in connectivity among different scallop grounds, while Wahle has been conducting a study of whether scallop density on the sea floor affects spawning effectiveness.

Research to prevent toxic red tide

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 06:53:38 -0500

Research to prevent toxic red tide

6:58 PM, Nov 7, 2011 | 0 comments

Written by

Danielle Waugh

FILED UNDER
WCSH 6 News
WLBZ 2 News

ORONO, Maine (NEWS CENTER) -- After the toxic algal bloom called "red tide" closed nearly all Maine fisheries in 2009, researchers at the University of Maine are looking for better ways to detect it.

UMaine has received $574,028 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to develop new technology to monitor for red tide.

Not visible, the algal bloom can contiminate shellfish. If consumed, the fish can be deadly.

Researchers Amber Bratcher and Janice Duy are developing a testing kit that uses a dye to detect the bloom's genetic code.

"We're trying to be able to go out to specific areas, [to see] if there is a red tide presence," said Bratcher.

She said she hopes better methods of detection will eliminate the spread of the toxin, "so that we don't end up closing down the whole coastline and stopping a lot of the clamming."

The project is funded for three years.

As UMaine develops this technology, some are worried that funding for the Maine Department of Marine Resource's Red Tide Detection program will run out.

Darcy Couture, spokesperson for the DMR Shellfish Monitoring Program, said the new research is vital, but is also worried about immediate needs for detection.

The DMR received federal funding during the 2009 disaster season, but that funding is projected to run out by August, when the clamming season is underway.

Some clammers are also worried about where the money will come from.

"There's a definite cause for concern," said shellfish harvester Joe Porada.

"If the DMR water quality people and public health aren't funded properly, it could really cut back their ability to monitor red tide and other bio toxins."

Porada said he is hopeful that UMaine research will produce new, and more efficient ways to detect ride tide.

New NOAA-funded research to provide early warning of red tide effects on Maine shellfish

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:23:20 -0400

New NOAA-funded research to provide early warning of red tide effects on Maine shellfish

November 3, 2011

Scientists at the University of Maine have been awarded $201,187 for the first year of an anticipated three-year $574,028 project to investigate methods that would provide early warning detection of the toxic Alexandrium blooms, also known as red tides, in the Gulf of Maine.

Some species of Alexandrium algae produce a toxin that can become concentrated in shellfish tissue. Eating shellfish tainted with this toxin can lead to paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), a potentially fatal human illness. This project will allow scientists to detect and measure levels of toxic Alexandrium cells in water samples, providing Maine officials with an early warning of increased potential of PSP contamination in shellfish. The project could pave the way to similar projects in other regions affect by harmful algal blooms.

According to Dr. Laurie Connell of the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences and project lead, “The ability to directly detect toxic Alexandrium species using the inexpensive monitoring devices we have developed will increase Maine’s ability to focus limited resources to areas that are either emerging ‘PSP hot spots’ or to safely allow for targeted closures of shellfish harvests focusing only on impacted beds. Our project will serve as a demonstration model for other state and local agencies for the implementation of these detection platforms.”

Darcie Couture, director of biotoxin monitoring at the Maine Department of Marine Resources said, “I am excited to partner on this effort as it has great potential to deliver to our program new, effective technology for monitoring HABs in the field, while keeping operating costs within a workable range for a state program.”

“These resources will enable the University’s world-class scientists and students, in collaboration with the critically important Biotoxin Monitoring program at Maine's Department of Marine Resources, to explore cost-effective ways to properly detect the spread of red tide in the Gulf of Maine,” said U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine. “The technological advances made by research like this, along with continued funding for shellfish monitoring programs, will ensure that our state’s hardworking harvesters have all the tools at their disposal to ensure the continued success of this vital fishery. While we have made great strides in bloom prediction and monitoring, it is clear these problems are continuing to increase in magnitude and demand our ongoing commitment and attention.”

This project was funded to the University of Maine through a national competition of theMonitoring and Event Response of Harmful Algal Blooms (MERHAB) program run byNOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. Research will be carried out at the University of Maine with research partners at the Maine Department of Marine Resources Biotoxin Monitoring Program. These monitoring advancements will improve capabilities and cut costs for the red tide forecast system (October 19 announcement), a NOAA investment in New England to protect public health and jobs, and coastal economies.

The MERHAB program was first authorized by the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act (HABHRCA) of 1998. HABHRCA was last reauthorized in 2004. HABHRCA calls for advancement in the scientific understanding and the ability to detect, monitor, assess, and predict harmful algal bloom and hypoxia events.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and our other social media channels.

UMaine, GMRI Researchers Awarded Grant to Explore Fish Body Size and Resiliency

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:16:47 -0400

Are bigger fish better?

That question is at the root of a collaborative research effort by scientists at the University of Maine and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI). The project will look at how changes in the sizes of fish in a given population influence overall health and ability to resist external pressures such as fishing and climate change.

Andrew Pershing, a UMaine associate professor and ecosystem modeler at GMRI, will lead this groundbreaking study, which has received a three-year, $215,000 grant from the Lenfest Ocean Program. Pershing will be joined on the project by GMRI fishery ecologist Graham Sherwood and UMaine researcher Walt Golet. The team will build a series of computer models to examine the consequences of what is known as “fishing down the size spectrum.”

“As an animal gets bigger,” says Pershing, “its metabolism becomes more efficient, meaning that it requires less food to support each gram of tissue in its body. Consequently, removing a large fish may have a larger impact on the population than removing the same weight of smaller fish.”

The researchers will tailor their models to Atlantic cod and northern bluefin tuna, which are species that have been heavily exploited and are the target of national and international management efforts. The team will generate computer models of feeding, growth and activity costs. The project will look as a whole at the role of body size in fish communities, with an emphasis on understanding the impact of size-selected fishing on their resiliency. The goal is to generate recommendations for increasing the resiliency of the species through fishing quotas, spatial management or gear design that is targeted at shifting efforts away from specific sizes.

The Lenfest Ocean Program (www.lenfestocean.org) funds scientific research on policy-relevant topics concerning the world’s oceans.

GMRI, which is based in Portland, is a nonprofit marine science center that works to find solutions to the complex challenges of ocean stewardship and economic growth in the Gulf of Maine bioregion. For more information, go to www.gmri.org.

Contacts: Andrew Pershing, andrew.pershing@maine.edu; Jessica Bloch, (207) 581-3777 or jessica.bloch@umit.maine.edu; Blaine Grimes, (207) 228-1655 orbgrimes@gmri.org

UMaine Education Scientist Shares First NASA Images

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:55:02 -0400

NASA’s new Aquarius instrument has produced its first global map of the salinity of the ocean surface, according to an announcement from NASA last week, and the map has provided an early glimpse of the mission’s anticipated discoveries.

UMaine Senior Marine Education Scientist Annette deCharon was particularly excited to see the first image, which was released Thursday, Sept. 22. In addition to her work with UMaine, deCharon is the education and public outreach manager for NASA on the Aquarius project.

“We are thrilled to see this first image from Aquarius,” said deCharon, whose education and outreach work targets the public, students and science communicators. “Even at this early stage, it is clear that global salinity maps have great potential to help all of us better understand changes in the ocean, water cycle and climate.”

deCharon, who is based at UMaine School of Marine Science’s Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine, directs one of the national Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence (COSEE), known as COSEE-Ocean Systems, which is also based at UMaine.

In order to increase awareness and understanding of salinity, deCharon and her team have developed a website with information, including an interactive quiz, online data tools and suggested activities for students from elementary to high school. The Aquarius project website, including the new map, can be viewed athttp://aquarius.nasa.gov/.

Aquarius, which is aboard the SAC-D (Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas) observatory, is making NASA’s first space observations of ocean surface salinity variations – a key component of Earth’s climate, according to a NASA news release. Salinity changes are linked to the cycling of freshwater around the planet and influence ocean circulation.

“Measurements of the salt content of the upper ocean provide key data for understanding upper ocean circulation,” said Mary Jane Perry, UMaine professor of marine sciences. “We are lucky at UMaine to have a close link to the project through Annette.”

Maine's Public Universities -- Robert Steneck

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 08:44:37 -0400

Maine's Public Universities Robert Steneck

Professor of Marine Sciences
University of Maine

Professor Bob Steneck and his research assistants are studying marine ecosystems in the Gulf of Maine. The data they’re compiling will be used to help fisheries develop more sustainable practices.

http://think.maine.edu/stories/robert-steneck/

A Balanced Meal? Researchers Study Diversification of Aquaculture Operations

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 11:31:45 -0400

by Dr. Heather Deese and Catherine Schmitt

Some surprising numbers: of the seafood Americans currently eat, more than 50 percent is farm-raised, and nearly 84 percent is imported. But compared to other nations, we don’t eat that much seafood, and the most recent federal dietary guidelines recommend that Americans more than double their current average seafood consumption because of the health benefits.

If we all decide to start eating twice as much seafood starting tomorrow, where will we find the fish?

The National Aquaculture Act of 1980 and federal aquaculture policy encourage the development of aquaculture in the U.S., based on the assumption that future increases in supply are likely to come either from foreign aquaculture or increased domestic aquaculture production, or some combination of both.

Realizing that increasing demand for seafood can’t be met by projected stocks of wild fish, seafood scientists and business leaders continually look for ways to advance and modernize marine aquaculture. In Maine, through funding by NOAA Sea Grant, scientists from the University of Maine and Cooke Aquaculture deployed a mussel raft, one hundred meters in circumference, at one of the company’s salmon farms off the Washington County coast in late August. This experiment, designed to test how water quality and animal health are affected when both species are raised within the same aquaculture site, is the first in Maine to focus explicitly on whether integrated multitrophic aquaculture (IMTA) can be mutually beneficial to farmed species.

The mussels, an anticipated 60,000 pounds, will be ready to harvest in 12 to 18 months. In the meantime, the young, quarter-inch to half-inch seed mussels are encased in cotton mesh “socks” that hold the animals in place until they begin producing byssus threads that help them adhere to a central rope. The 20,000-pound seed lines hang, like garlands on a Christmas tree, from five concentric floating circles of a specialized raft made from old salmon cages.

Dr. Ian Bricknell, director of the Aquaculture Research Institute at the University of Maine, and his students will be conducting parallel research on disease ecology in the laboratory to look at how the mussels and salmon influence each other’s health.

While people have experimented with raising multiple species, or polyculture, in Maine before, IMTA goes beyond simply producing more than one species to seeking mutually beneficial relationships that result in a more sustainable business and a better end product. The idea mimics what happens in the ocean naturally, where species share habitat and influence each other.

In the UMaine/Cooke experiment, the partners are hoping that the presence of mussels may help to control damage inflicted on the salmon by infectious anemia virus and sea lice, a costly parasite. Mussels are filter-feeders: they screen out food particles from the surrounding water. Bricknell and post-doc Sally Malloy recently found in a laboratory study that as mussels filter seawater, they can consume copepodids, the planktonic and infectious stage of sea lice. If this effect is also seen in the field, then salmon farmers will have a new biological control method for managing sea lice, a tool the industry has been seeking for a long time, according to Sebastian Belle, director of the Maine Aquaculture Association.

Why these two species? Salmon is Maine’s second-most-valuable fishery after lobster, and the local mussel market has room for growth. While Maine’s wild mussel harvest is much larger than production of cultured species, farm-raised mussels fetch a higher price because of their longer shelf life and higher meat yields. Mussels also take up excess fish food and nutrients, a service that maintains water quality while enriching the mussel meat with heart-healthy omega-3s. And mussels grow faster at IMTA sites; yields on New Brunswick salmon farms are 25 percent greater than on a typical single-species mussel farm.

Similar IMTA operations elsewhere in the world incorporate various seaweeds, and Cooke has been raising mussels and kelp side-by-side with salmon for years in New Brunswick. The University of Maine will be expanding research and trials to seaweed and other species in the future.

“IMTA is one of our key research themes,” said Anne Langston, associate director of the Aquaculture Research Institute. In addition to expanding to new species and studying biosecurity and health, future aquaculture research needs include nutrient cycling, harvesting strategies and market development.

In addition to testing whether the species can be grown together in Maine for commercial production, the research funding includes support for related industry training and management considerations to get more salmon farms integrating other species. For example, cross-training might be needed to educate fish farmers about mussels and vice versa. And as a producer of seafood, Cooke is of course interested in succeeding in the billion-dollar global salmon industry.

The hope is that the growing demand for seafood could be partially satisfied by safe, locally-produced fish, sea vegetables and shellfish that sustain an industry and a way of life.

2011 RARGOM annual science meeting Oct 5th 8:30-5:00 pm

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:17:54 -0400

2011 RARGOM annual science meeting Oct 5^th 8:30-5:00 pm

Start	Duration
(h:m)	(h:m)	AGENDA
8:30	0:30	REGISTRATION & COFFEE
9:00	0:15	WELCOME
9:15	0:25	Transboundary Ecosystem Based Regime Building in the Gulf Of Maine	John Duff
9:40	0:25	Developing an Integrated Ecosystem Research Program in the Gulf of Maine	Andrew, Allyn
10:05	0:25	MIMES-MIDAS – Dynamic modeling of tradeoffs to inform Marine Spatial Planning	Suchi Gopal
10:30	0:15	COFFEE & POSTERS
10:45	0:35	Winds of Change: Marine Spatial Planning in an era of Rapidly Shifting Baselines	Robert Steneck
11:20	0:25	Variability in a Multi-Decadal Record of Ocean Acidification in Surface Waters of the U.S. Northeast Shelf	Nathan Rebuck
11:45	0:25	A regional ocean data portal supporting coastal and marine spatial planning for the northeast United States	Ru Morrison
12:10	1:00	LUNCH & POSTERS
13:10	0:25	Projected changes in the spatial structure of habitats in the Northwest Atlantic for a species of concern (cusk, Brosme brosme) based upon forecasts from an ensemble of global climate models.	John Manderson
13:35	0:25	Engaging Stakeholders in Planning for Climate Change	Michelle LaRocco
14:00	0:25	Riding the Wave: Informing Tidal Energy Development Through Stakeholder Engagement	Jessica Jansujwicz and Teresa Johnson
14:25	0:15	COFFEE & POSTERS
14:40	0:35	The New Human Condition: The ‘Total Ecology’ of Marine Spatial Planning	Michael Orbach
15:15	0:25	Communicating about marine issues with a lay audience	John Anderson
15:40	0:25	The Role of Marine Spatial Planning in Climate-Related Food Security	Robbin Peach
16:05	0:25	SUMMATION & ADJOURN
16:30
		Poster Session
		Abiotic drivers of benthic megafauna in the Gulf of Maine coastal shelf: A template for marine spatial planning	Jennifer A. McHenry
		Coastal Marine Spatial Planning in the Context of Climate Change	Michael Johnson
		High-Resolution Geologic Mapping of the Inner Continental Shelf: Cape Ann to Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts	Brian Andrews
		Variation in human-driven estuarine productivity shapes rocky shore communities	Marcy Cockrell
		SBNMS is interested in submitting an abstract on our proposed ecological research area.	Ben Haskell

RARGOMagenda1-5-11

Stockbridge starts to bounce back

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:34:39 -0400

Stockbridge, Vermont - September 6, 2011

Getting into Stockbridge no longer takes a Herculean effort, but it's not smooth sailing either. At the beginning of Route 107 the blacktop is gone and only a muddy road remains.

Last week when WCAX News visited Stockbridge, the only sound was rushing water. Now Route 107 is an active construction site.

"We established a center line yesterday. The engineers and survey team are still working on where the road was and where it should be," said Sgt. David Noyes of the Maine National Guard.

While the work is underway, Route 107 is technically closed to traffic. The Maine National Guard is racing to rebuild a road that no longer exists. They're protecting their work by building berms to keep the river out and keeping a watchful eye on the weather.

"We'll kind of play it by ear," Noyes said. "We're pretty flexible and we just overcome any obstacles as they come. We're not easily deterred."

Neither is Frank Lambert. He's been fixing power tools in this town for the last 40 years. His shop sits right on Route 107. The washed-out road pulled the plug on business.

"I think as soon as this gets passable here all my old-time customers will probably be back," Lambert said.

He says the heavy equipment rolling around his front yard is encouraging. And the 84-year-old is determined to rebuild.

"We'll make a go of it. Work is something I love to do and I guess I got plenty of it," he said.

But where business is booming is at the community food shelf. Residents aren't paying for the goods, of course. But the bustling gathering place gives town officials a chance to get a sense of how folks are doing.

"After 10 days I had to get out," said Loretta Wright of Stonybrook.

Wright and her neighbors were trapped in Upper Stonybrook for more than a week before they bulldozed themselves out and ventured down the mountain.

"We're alive, we're healthy, we didn't lose our homes," she said. "What more can you ask for?"

Deborah Butler has been manning the town's food shelf. She says it's encouraging to watch how everyone has taken this storm in stride.

"They're smiling, they're happy, they're joking. It's not the somber mood it was when it first happened," Butler said.

"We have to fight for this," Wright said. "We have to get through it and we will and that's the amazing thing, we keep saying how strong we are and how this has taught us to be even stronger."

Armed with all the essentials the jovial crew loads into their 4-wheel chariot. For now it's the only way home.

One of the big questions is when school will begin in this community. We checked in with the Stockbridge Central School Tuesday and we're told that classes will start on Thursday but there will not be bus service. So hitting the books may still be a challenge for some students.

http://www.wcax.com/story/15404942/stockbridge-starts-to-bounce-back

Newspaper lists UMaine researchers' upcoming talks

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:34:31 -0400

The Village Soup weekly newspapers noted an upcoming lecture series in Castine that will featured several UMaine researchers. The Maine Maritime Academy series will open Sept. 19 with UMaine researcher Andrew Pershing, who will talk about "Finding Whales in a Changing Ocean." UMaine's Beth Campbell will speak Nov. 7 on "Unassuming Engineers: the Effects of Injury and Nutrition on Sediment Disturbance by a Marine Polychaete, Clymenella Torquata." Pershing will wrap up the series on Nov. 28 with a talk on microbes in coastal systems.

A Buried Treasure

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:27:00 -0400

Centuries-old ship just one of three ever discovered
by Jessica Bloch | Art/Photography by Kathleen Riess

Marine archaeologist Warren Riess at the World Trade Center site in New York City, where the remains of a light coaster ship from the late 18th or early 19th centuries were unearthed this past summer.

As far as shipwrecks go, there was nothing fancy about the vessel found this summer at the construction site of the World Trade Center in New York City.

It wasn’t an old military ship with heavy artillery. It wasn’t a great cargo vessel laden with exotic riches from another continent. And it wasn’t a ship that might have been used by pirates.

Yet what University of Maine marine archaeologist Warren Riess discovered several months ago when he examined the boat was, in a sense, more remarkable than anything he could have discovered about a warship, ocean liner or pirate vessel.

Riess, a national expert in marine archaeology of the New England and mid-Atlantic regions, believes the remains, found about 200 yards from where the World Trade Center’s South Tower stood before the terrorist events of Sept. 11, 2001, is a light coaster from the late 18th or early 19th centuries that likely carried goods up and down the East Coast to a growing populace of the post-Revolutionary War era.

Analysis of the ship’s remains is ongoing, but Riess thinks it could be just the third vessel of its kind and age to have been discovered. The other two were found elsewhere on the East Coast.

In its time, the ship wouldn’t have been considered a significant vessel, which is the reason why no drawings or models have survived. Today, however, that insignificance is exactly why the find is so exciting for the nautical archaeological community.

For an archaeologist, it’s the difference between finding a buried treasure of gold and a buried trove of broken pottery.

One find tells a fantastic tale. The other simply tells a tale of daily life.

“The most interesting thing is we don’t know much about these ships,” says Riess, a research associate professor in UMaine’s School of Marine Sciences whose work in marine archaeology includes several shipwrecks and the Penobscot Expedition of 1779.

“The warships, the government ships, there are all kinds of drawings and models of those. But the everyday coasters of this time period, we’ve only found three of them, and we don’t have drawings in any detail. So to be able to study this is very important, because it tells us about everyday life at that time. It tells us about the 99.5 percent of the people who weren’t recorded, and it tells us about the level of technology at the time.”

Satellite Image of Post-Irene Gulf of Maine Shows High Levels of River Discharge

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 08:03:10 -0400

Contact: Andrew Thomas, (207) 581-4335 or thomas@maine.edu; Jessica Bloch, (207) 581-3777 or jessica.bloch@umit.maine.edu

ORONO – A satellite image recorded Monday at the University of Maine after the remnants of Hurricane Irene passed over northern New England the day before shows unusually high amounts of river discharge and suspended sediment in the Gulf of Maine, but UMaine Professor of Oceanography Andrew Thomas says there should be no cause for worry.

The image, which comes from the MODIS instrument aboard a NASA satellite, was recorded midday Monday and processed at the Satellite Oceanography Laboratory in UMaine’s School of Marine Sciences. Thomas, who runs the lab, monitors daily satellite images via a dish on top of Aubert Hall on the UMaine campus.

The image shows the green vegetation on land and much of the darker Gulf of Maine ocean water, which extends south to north from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to southeastern Nova Scotia in Canada, with lighter colored spots along the coast in places where Thomas and his research team normally note clear ocean water.

“What we’re seeing is basically very turbid water pouring out of every creek and stream that’s emptying into the coastal area of the Gulf of Maine,” Thomas says. “It’s like chocolate milk emptying into the ocean. That’s all turbidity, organic matter, and suspended sediment resulting from all the heavy precipitation we had over the weekend, draining out of the rivers and flowing into the coastal zone. Then, over some of the shallow banks you also see resuspended sediment from the wind we had.”

Thomas says he does not believe there is any danger to humans who might wade into gulf waters or consume fish caught in the area. In more urban areas, that much river discharge would be a concern, and would likely mean beach closures due to storm drain overflow. It’s less of an issue in Maine, where there are few urban centers.

Visitors to the coast should be able to see the cloudy river water where it meets the clearer ocean for the next 4-5 days.

Weather events that produce similar conditions are not rare, but they are unusual, particularly for this time of year.

“We see similar things after a very nasty Nor’easter but usually those are much later in the year and it’s harder to distinguish between things that got chewed up strictly by the wind and river discharge,” Thomas says. “This looks like mostly turbid river discharge pouring in. All those little squirts coming out, you would not see that on a normal day.”

Underwater gliders provide unprecedented documentation of aggregate flux event during North Atlantic phytoplankton bloom

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:33:58 -0400

Contact: Mary Jane Perry, (207) 592-0317

Using the latest in optical sensor technology, marine scientists from the University of Maine and the University of Washington have achieved unprecedented documentation of a critical phenomenon that occurs during the spring phytoplankton blooms in the North Atlantic that feeds the deep ocean and contributes to carbon dioxide sequestering.

During what’s called an aggregate flux event, phytoplankton growing on the ocean surface form layers of aggregates and sink, providing food for deep sea ecosystems and a carbon cycling function vital to the global atmosphere.

Despite the importance of aggregate organic carbon flux, scientists have struggled to estimate it. Formation of phytoplankton aggregates depends on such factors as particle concentration, movement and “stickiness,” and their concentrations can vary greatly in space and time.

The ability to detect aggregates for months to years at a time has the potential to inform estimates of carbon flux in the ocean and modeling efforts.

On a three-month sub-polar research cruise in 2008 to study the spring North Atlantic phytoplankton bloom in the waters south of Iceland, the researchers used optical sensors on four autonomous underwater sea gliders and aboard ship to collect data on the flux event. In particular, they studied the optical “spikes” that the aggregates caused in the signals of the low-power optical instruments during the height of the diatom bloom.

In addition to the sink rates, the optical spikes in the signals of the 10 optical instruments also provided information on the distribution, relative abundance and chlorophyll content of aggregates in the study area.

The research, led by UMaine oceanographer Mary Jane Perry, was the focus a master’s thesis by UMaine graduate student Nathan Briggs and published inDeep-Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers.

NSF site features UMaine research

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:33:46 -0400

Limited Iron Availability Shown to Exacerbate Coral Bleaching

UMaine researchers Malcolm Shick and Mark Wells measuring the photosynthetic efficiency of Stylophora pistillata in shallow water at Davies Reef, Great Barrier Reef

It is widely held that coral bleaching occurs when temperatures and solar radiation are high, overwhelming antioxidant defenses in the algal endosymbionts and their coral hosts. Little understood are the biological mechanisms underlying such destabilization under stressful conditions.

An international research team led by marine biologist Malcolm Shick and chemical oceanographer Mark Wells of the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences studied the symbiotic coral Stylophora pistillata from the Great Barrier Reef to fathom the role of iron limitation on coral bleaching. Iron and other trace metals are essential for photosynthesis, antioxidant defenses and other metabolic processes.

Stylophora pistillata at Myrmidon Reef, Great Barrier Reef

Their study is the first to demonstrate that limited iron availability exacerbated the high-temperature stress in S. pistillataby decreasing its photosynthetic efficiency and antioxidant defenses.

The implication is that the degree of coral stress in natural environments under high light and temperature may be modulated by trace-metal nutrition.

The findings of the research team, which included scientists from the University of Western Ontario, King’s College London and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, were published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography.

Contact: Malcolm Shick, 207-581-2562; Mark Wells, 207-581-4322

Stylophora pistollata at Pith Reef, Great Barrier Reef

Stylophora pistillata at Little Broadurst Reef, Great Barrier Reef