Coastal & Marine Conservation

Marissa McMahan spent that notoriously warm summer of 2012 lobstering with her father out of Georgetown and encountered a different visitor, a large, stout gray-and-black fish she’d never seen before. The fish, which began turning up in lobster traps up and down the coast, was the black sea bass, a succulent mid-Atlantic species normally unable to tolerate Maine’s cold sea.

Pascal Yaa is a small-scale octopus fisherman who has been fishing the coral reefs off Mombasa, Kenya since 1968. As a spear-fisher, Pascal swims the reefs daily with a mask and snorkel. Recently, he has been disturbed by what he is seeing. Increasingly, fishing nets and boats are damaging and killing large, old corals. From Pascal’s perspective, reef protection and restoration are critical to ensure long-term, sustainable fishing. In his own words, Pascal says, “Corals are the homes of fish and other animals like the octopus.

From April 23rd through April 28th, 2015, I attended and presented at the 20th International Pectinid Workshop in Galway, Ireland with support from the Switzer Foundation Professional Development Grants program. From a professional development perspective, this workshop provided me with my first opportunity to give a presentation in front of a scientific audience beyond my thesis defense in graduate school.

Jonesport native Brian Beal, a marine ecologist at the University of Maine at Machias and director of research at the state’s principal clam hatchery, the Downeast Institute on Great Wass Island, has been studying soft-shell clams for three decades. His data paint a stark and consistent picture of a resource driven to the brink by warm water-loving predators, from green crabs to worms.

Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have developed and successfully tested a method of collecting vital data on whales. According to a WHOI release, researchers used "whalecopters" to photograph and take non-invasive samples from humpback whales in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in July.

The Geological Society of America will award the 2015 Doris M. Curtis Outstanding Woman in Science Award to Priya Ganguli, who earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. The award recognizes Ganguli, now at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for the impact of her Ph.D. research, which shed light on many unknown and uncharacterized processes that influence mercury dynamics in coastal ecosystems. Her work has created a rapidly growing area of research.

Sarah Moffitt recently published two research papers on climate change in ocean systems, both with a significant media splash. On the other side of that experience, she has some hard-won perspective about what worked for her — and what she still needs to practice.

If you’ve looked out over the water off the coast of Stamford and seen an old-timey, green three-masted schooner, you may have seen the future of Long Island Sound sail past. The schooner SoundWaters, based in the city, brings thousands of school children to local coastal waters each year, teaching them about the ecology and delicate environmental balance of the Sound, with the hope of preserving what might be the area’s most precious natural resource.

first-ever ecosystem health report card released today shows Long Island Sound earning grades of very good for water quality in Eastern Long Island (an “A”) to very poor for water quality in the Western Narrows (an “F”) near New York City. The evaluation covers the entire Long Island Sound, a vast watershed home to 9 million people that includes about 1,300 square miles and close to 1 million acres of open and coastal waters. The report card assessment was conducted by scientists at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.