An ecological chain reaction triggered by the boom and bust of sea urchin fishing in the Gulf of Maine demonstrates the importance of comprehensive ecosystem-based ocean management, says a University of Maine marine scientist.

Conventional fisheries management regulates for a “maximum sustainable yield” for each managed species. However, this usually ignores strong interactions between predators and their prey that can affect the entire ecosystem, says Robert Steneck, a professor in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center.

Steneck and three university graduates pooled 36 years of Gulf of Maine ocean data to examine how a stable ecosystem state composed of green sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis) and a pavement of crustose coralline algae switched, or “flipped,” to an alternate stable state dominated by erect macroalgae, or kelp and other seaweed.

When fishermen began abruptly removing large numbers of sea urchins from the Gulf of Maine in the late 1980s, the seaweed on which they grazed began to flourish, Steneck says. The abundance of seaweed, in turn, created a nursery habitat for Jonah crabs (Cancer borealis). The crabs, say the researchers, subsequently preyed on the sea urchins that remained.

The entire coastal ecosystem flipped and “locked” into a seaweed-dominated alternate stable state that has persisted for nearly 20 years.

In 2000 and 2001, Steneck and crew tried to “break the lock” of erect macroalgae by reintroducing 51,000 adult sea urchins into plots off the coast of Cape Elizabeth. But both years, large crabs migrated to the plots and wiped out the reintroduced urchins.

The consequences of sea urchin decimation “can be costly, and recovery may be difficult or impossible to achieve” for decades, Steneck says.

Fisheries management may need to focus on increasing the number of crab predators in order to return to a stable state of crustose coralline algae and sea urchins, he says.

The Gulf of Maine crab population increased in density because the seaweed nursery habitat became abundant and because, over time, commercial fishing has reduced the population of crab predators, including Atlantic cod.

Sea urchins, Steneck writes, were “highly abundant and a highly valued food” in 1987 when Maine fishermen began harvesting them along the southwestern coast before moving northeast toward Canada. The Maine harvest peaked in 1993, then declined rapidly.

In 1995, Maine’s sea urchin industry fishery was second only to that of the American lobster in value, Steneck writes. At that time, the local fishery supported more than 1,500 full-time urchin fishers.

Today, Steneck says the sea urchin fishery in the Gulf of Maine has declined 84 percent in value; no full-time fishers remain.

The study was conducted with nearly four decades of UMaine thesis research, starting with Steneck’s master’s thesis. Bob Vadas, UMaine professor emeritus, was Steneck’s thesis adviser. University graduates who co-authored the paper are Doug McNaught, assistant professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine at Machias; Amanda Leland, vice president for oceans at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington D.C.; and John Vavrinec, senior research scientist with the Coastal Assessment and Restoration technical group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Sequim, Wash.

The paper, “Ecosystem Flips, Locks, And Feedbacks: The Lasting Effects on Fisheries On Maine’s Kelp Forest Ecosystem,” is featured in the January 2013 Bulletin of Marine Science and is recommended by peer scientists on the F1000Prime website.

Contact: Beth Staples, 207.581.3777

A University of Maine doctoral student hopes her appearance in a comedy clip on the late-night satirical The Colbert Report will shed light on the serious topic of fishery management.

Skylar Bayer, a doctor of philosophy student in marine biology at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine, studies the reproductive ecology of giant sea scallops, Placopecten magellanicus.

Her goal is to glean information that will contribute to best fishery management practices and thereby support the next generation of scallops and the next generation of scallop fishermen.

The giant sea scallop, says Bayer, represents a lucrative commercial fishery on the East Coast. Three years ago, due to overfishing, the Department of Marine Resources closed 20 percent of Maine’s coastal waters to rebuild the population. Some of those areas are now reopening.

Giant sea scallops are broadcast spawners, she says, meaning males and females release gametes into the water column, where sperm fertilize eggs and larvae develop.

Bayer is researching whether local environmental conditions such as currents and temperature, as well as the timing of the release of eggs and sperm, impact the proportion of eggs that get fertilized and, in turn become larvae. She’s also experimenting to determine whether shrinking population densities of scallops dilutes gametes and decreases the chances that sperm will come into contact with and fertilize eggs.

Sea scallop reproduction, says Bayer, is no laughing matter. Tell that to Stephen Colbert.

In the 7:16 clip titled “The Enemy Within” that aired March 4 on the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning show, Bayer was jokingly described as “a lonely lady scientist” collecting scallop reproductive organs, perhaps with the evil intent to create Scallop Man.

“My parents are huge fans of The Colbert Report,” Bayer says, explaining one reason why she accepted the offer to be on the show. “It does a particularly good job of promoting science with humor and in a backwards way.”

Plus, she says, the mishap that drew the attention of Colbert field producer Nicole Savini was benign and silly. While it served the show’s over-the-top style well, Bayer says the topic wasn’t controversial and wouldn’t likely alienate academic or fisheries contacts.

The clip reenacted a Nov. 26, 2012 incident when scallop diver Andy Mays was supposed to meet Bayer at a Somesville convenience store and give her sea scallop gonads for her research.

He mistakenly placed a covered bucket of scallop gonads intended for Bayer into another University of Maine vehicle parked at the convenience store.

Gail Garthwait, an associate professor in the College of Education, was driving the vehicle in question. She was buying a snack in the store when Mays put the samples in the back seat; she discovered the formaldehyde-labeled bucket later that day.

Thanks to Mays’ wife, Michelle calling local police and the Bangor Daily News, and the subsequent explosion of the “missing scallop guts” on social media, the mystery was solved in a couple days.

Bayer wrote about the incident in a blog she edits — strictlyfishwrap — and The Colbert Report took notice.

The Massachusetts native says the feedback she’s received about the clip, much of it from the scientific community, has been resoundingly positive.

She says she’s grateful the clip included viewer-friendly information about her research. Bayer says she’s wanted to join the Darling Marine Center (DMC) since she read Trevor Carson’s The Secret Life of Lobsters when she was a teenager. UMaine researchers Bob Steneck, Rick Wahle and Lewis Incze were three real-life characters in the book.

At DMC, Bayer likes the mix of academia and interaction with local fishermen, including Mays. “They are a wealth of knowledge,” she says of those who earn their livelihood on the water.

In the wake of her appearance, Bayer is continuing her experiments and is applying for funding to continue her research.

Perhaps Colbert was angling to have something related to sea scallops named in his honor. He reportedly already has a couple of scientific namesakes — Stelephant Colbert, an elephant seal that’s part of a University of California Santa Cruz study; and Agaporomorphus colberti, a Venezuelan diving beetle.

Contact: Beth Staples, 207.581.3777

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has awarded a University of Maine marine researcher up to $957,871 to improve ways to detect and track changes in the oceanic carbon pool, subsequently allowing scientists to better understand its role in oceanic ecosystems and the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Ivona Cetinić, a research associate in the School of Marine Sciences and the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine, is leading a four-person team that will develop a novel way of detecting particulate organic carbon (POC) in oceans, using data collected by satellites.

POC — which includes phytoplankton, zooplankton and marine debris — is part of the oceanic mechanism that “pumps” carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean to be stored.

Oceanographers seek to better understand how POC distribution varies in oceans around the world. Together with policy makers, they are interested in learning whether the changing climate is impacting POC and the global carbon cycle.

Cetinić and her team will analyze seawater collected from multiple places in the world’s oceans, including from coastal Maine, equatorial and polar regions, to see how POC distribution varies in different marine ecosystems. The team will use those oceanographic measurements to develop an algorithm — a set of calculations that can be used to detect POC from space.

NASA’s Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry program is funding the three-year project through November 2015. Mary Jane Perry, a professor at the School of Marine Sciences and Ira C. Darling Marine Center; Nicole Poulton, a research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine; and Wayne Homer Slade, who earned a doctorate in oceanography at UMaine and is now at Sequoia Scientific Inc. in Bellevue, Wash., are collaborating with Cetinić on the study.

Contact: Beth Staples, 207.581.3777

Climate Change Institute Involved in Successful Recovery of a New Deep Ice Core from Antarctica

A team of scientists from nine nations, which included two University of Maine graduate students, has made a breakthrough in Antarctica — successfully drilling more than 760 meters through the ice to bedrock on an island in the Ross Sea.

The international team, led by Nancy Bertler, Victoria University’s Antarctic Research Centre and GNS Science in New Zealand, completed the drilling on Roosevelt Island in late December when the drill bit brought sediment up from the base of the ice sheet.

The drill cores from the Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution project will provide the most detailed record of the climate history of the Ross Sea region for the last 30,000 years — the time during which the coastal margin of the Antarctic ice sheet retreated following the last great ice age, says Bertler, who is an adjunct faculty member in UMaine’s Climate Change Institute (CCI).

Graduate students Skylar Haines and Tom Beers of the Climate Change Institute and the School of Earth and Climate Sciences each spent several months working in Antarctica on the ice core drilling project as part of their master’s research. Now they will work under the direction of Climate Change Institute Director Paul Mayewski and Research Associate Professor Andrei Kurbatov to develop highly detailed reconstructions of past climate in CCI’s W.M. Keck Laser Ice Facility.

Core analysis could help determine the stability of the Ross Ice Shelf and West Antarctica.

“With the success of the deep ice drilling at Roosevelt Island, Antarctica, we have the ice core material necessary to make significant insights into the past, current and future behavior of the West Antarctic ice sheet — one of the greatest potential contributors to future global sea level rise and one of the major controls on Southern Hemisphere climate,” Mayewski says.

More information about the Roosevelt Island project is online.

Russian geologists at the University of Silesia in Poland have discovered two minerals new to science and have named them “edgrewite” and “hydroxledgrewite” in honor of University of Maine geologist and research professor Edward Grew.

The new minerals were discovered by mineralogists Evgeny Galuskin and Irina Galuskin in the Chegem caldera in the Northern Caucasus, near Mount Elbrus in the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic in Russia. A caldera is a crater-like structure produced by very large explosive volcanic ash eruptions, like those found Yellowstone and Crater Lake national parks.

Grew began working with the Galuskins as associate editor of the journal American Mineralogist, when he helped them prepare papers for publication, and in person at the International Mineralogical Association meeting in Budapest in 2010. The Galuskins were familiar with Grew’s reputation for working successfully with Russian scientists throughout his career.

The honor of having a mineral named for him “is a lifelong dream come true,” says Grew, whose research focuses on rare minerals containing boron and beryllium, and the role of the two elements in the changes that rocks undergo at high temperatures and pressures in the Earth’s crust. “I have always valued my international collaborations in science, and so I was especially honored that colleagues in Europe proposed my name for the new minerals they discovered.”

A UMaine research faculty member for 28 years, Grew has been involved in the discovery and characterization of 13 new minerals, including six from Antarctica. He has been on nine expeditions to Antarctica with researchers from the former Soviet Union, Australia, Japan and the United States, in addition to research projects in Australia, India, Germany, Japan, Tajikistan and Siberia. His first expedition to the Antarctic was in 1972–74, when he wintered at Molodezhnaya Station. He has published extensively on the composition and evolution of minerals, and has served in leadership capacities for national and international professional organizations and mineralogical publications.

Identifying undiscovered minerals involves detailed microscopic analysis. Edgrewite and hydroxledgrewite were found as tiny crystals smaller than the period at the end of a sentence in a newspaper, according to Grew.

“Recognizing a new mineral involves a measure of good luck and familiarity with known minerals,” he says. “Several new minerals I have discovered simply looked different under the optical microscope. Chemical tests confirmed my hunch that the minerals were new. Sometimes a new mineral does not stand out optically under the microscope, but (its) distinctive chemical composition suggests it is new. Once a mineral is suspected to be new, it is studied in detail so its physical, chemical and crystallographic properties are fully characterized and then it must undergo a complex process of approval by an international commission.”

The Galuskins and research colleagues from four European countries discuss the discovery of the new minerals edgrewite and hydroxledgrewite in a peer-reviewed scientific report in the November–December issue of the journal American Mineralogist.

Contact: George Manlove, 207.581.3756

A project designed to assess and improve commercial fishermen’s perceptions of aquaculture production is one of three University of Maine Aquaculture Research Institute projects to receive a combined $1.2 million in funding recently from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, Sea Grant and UMaine.

The two other funded research projects will help ARI continue its research in the areas of sea lice management efforts and sea urchin production.

Teresa Johnson, an assistant professor of marine policy in the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences, is the principal investigator of the Aquaculture in Shared Waters project. Commercial fishermen face resistance and challenges to becoming aquaculture producers, but factors such as the decreasing profitability of the lobster industry may improve openness to aquaculture production. The project has received a $299,219 grant, plus $160,058 in matching funds.

Johnson and Dana Morse of Maine Sea Grant and University of Maine Cooperative Extension will combine social science research with community research and an applied education plan to understand the attitudes, knowledge and concerns of both the fishing industry and coastal communities. A better understanding of these issues will help increase aquaculture production nationwide and therefore improve the economic prospects of commercial fishermen.

Investigators from UMaine and Maine Sea Grant will identify two groups of commercial fishermen on the Maine coast to engage in an education program in shellfish and seaweed aquaculture. The program will be designed to prepare participants to file applications with the state and begin production operations.

Project partners include the Maine Aquaculture Association, Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center, Coastal Enterprises, Inc., and Island Institute.

UMaine’s Aquaculture Research Institute (ARI) has also received a $461,438 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with a $236,388 match, to continue sea lice research in collaboration with Cooke Aquaculture.

Ian Bricknell, ARI’s director and a professor in the School of Marine Sciences, will lead the research project that seeks to establish and model where and when sea lice infect migrating or farmed salmon near the shore, and identify potential wild reservoirs of sea lice. The researchers will also investigate the impact of fish farms on the infective pressure of sea lice.

The goal is to provide information to help understand the infectious pressure of sea lice near the coast, the role of wild fish as hosts for sea lice, and sea lice infection dynamics over an aquaculture production cycle. The data gathered will help industry-driven collaborative pest management efforts, and inform lease-granting bodies and marine resource users of sea lice risk factors.

Research will take place in Cobscook Bay, which has a number of active salmon aquaculture operations. Atlantic salmon sentinels, which are used to monitor pathogens in the environment, will be placed at four locations in the bay during an 18-month period to determine the effect of different factors on sea lice infectious pressure. Wild fish in the bay will also be monitored for sea lice infection to establish whether a wild host species exists.

Other investigators include ARI assistant director of research Deborah Bouchard, and Damian Brady and Gayle Zydlewski of the School of Marine Sciences.

The third project to receive funding, which involves researchers in Maine, New Hampshire, Alabama and Texas, will allow researchers to address issues of aquaculture development of sea urchins, both in hatcheries and in sea-based nurseries. The project will be headed up by Nick Brown, director of UMaine’s Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research (CCAR) in Franklin, Maine.

As stocks of wild sea urchins decline in both the Gulf of Maine and worldwide, the development of green sea urchin aquaculture has the potential to provide a boost to the economy of the Gulf of Maine region. The $51,963 grant will be used to develop cost-effective hatchery and sea-based nursery production of urchins. A team that includes researchers at CCAR will address issues that now hinder the growth of the industry by using both field- and land-based urchin culture systems.

The researchers have a three-stage research plan. In the first stage, they will use two hatchery facilities to develop algal feeding and settlement strategies that maximize larval growth and survival while decreasing costs. In the second phase, the team will use tank-based trials to test variabilities, such as density and diet to promote growth while decreasing variabilities.

In addition, hatchery-reared juvenile urchins from the first stage of the project will be stocked into a field-based nursery system to examine stocking density and site location variables. In the third stage, urchins will be introduced for winter seeding at three lease sites in the Gulf of Maine, where the individuals will be monitored for survival, movement and growth.

Contact: Anne Langston, 207. 356.2982

University of Maine School of Earth and Climate Sciences associate professor Christopher Gerbi has been selected a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He participated in the 2012 Chinese-American Symposium, which was held Oct. 12–14 in Irvine, Calif., and will serve as an organizer of the 2014 Chinese-American Symposium to be held in China.

Gerbi’s research is in the field of tectonics, with a focus on the mechanical properties of the continental crust.

The program is sponsored by the Kavli Foundation, which supports scientific research, honors scientific achievement, and promotes public understanding of scientists and their work. The National Academy of Sciences’ Kavli Frontiers of Science symposia bring together outstanding young scientists to discuss advances and opportunities in a broad range of disciplines.

U.S. symposium participants are selected from among recipients of prestigious fellowships, awards, and other honors, as well as from nominations by NAS members and other participants. In addition to learning about research at the frontiers of fields other than their own, the program is intended to create a network of connections that can be maintained as participants advance in their careers. Since its inception, 136 program alumni have been elected to the NAS and eight have won Nobel Prizes.

Contact: Jessica Bloch, (207) 581-3777

Spring in the North Atlantic is formidable. Storm-lashed, frigid, gray. The subpolar region is so tumultuous that ever-vigilant space satellites often can’t penetrate the almost perpetual cloud cover, unable to provide a clear view of one of the most important life-sustaining events on the planet — the spring phytoplankton bloom.

That means if researchers ever hope to understand the phenomenon, they have to take to the high seas.

In 2008, an international expedition called the North Atlantic Bloom Experiment, funded by the National Science Foundation, did just that. It was the first to put marine scientists in the North Atlantic to observe the entire progression of the spring bloom over a three-month period, from development to demise.

They did that by using underwater robotic gliders and a float developed by University of Washington researchers that reported conditions between the surface and 1,000 meters several times per day, from early April through late June. High volumes of data were literally “phoned home” by the robots via Iridium satellite.

Now, the discoveries made possible by unprecedented, in situ data collection are being made public. The most recent announcement came in July when the National Science Foundation and the journal Science reported the results of one of the experiment’s studies — the discovery that the spring bloom can begin up to 30 days earlier than previously thought as the result of eddies stratifying the near-surface waters, rather than springtime warming of the ocean surface.

These new contributions to our understanding of the North Atlantic spring bloom, one of the largest in the world, will inform modeling by marine and climate scientists, according to University of Maine biological oceanographer Mary Jane Perry, who was among the 26 researchers from five countries on the expedition. The research findings also have implications for the Gulf of Maine, which is fed by the waters of the North Atlantic and supports similar species.

Major changes in the Gulf of Maine — including the influx of freshwater from accelerated melt in the Arctic and Greenland, and shifts in the marine food web — often occur first in the North Atlantic. But unlike the terrestrial ecosystem, scientists understand much less about North Atlantic phenology, Perry says, including annual variability, patterns and mechanisms.

“The North Atlantic is a really special place — a really important part of the ocean — because what happens there is so important to the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide cycle,” says Perry. “This subpolar region is responsible for more than 20 percent of the entire ocean’s uptake of carbon dioxide, and phytoplankton have an important role in that drawdown.”

Phytoplankton, which include diatoms and dinoflagellates, are microscopic plants at the base of the marine food web that fuel the ecosystem. The photosynthetic organisms also help maintain the health of the atmosphere by absorbing and sequestering carbon dioxide caused by the burning of fossil fuel.

For more than a quarter-century, starting at the University of California, San Diego, Perry has studied marine phytoplankton in an effort to understand its biomass variability and production dynamics. In recent years, her focus has been on the interaction of phytoplankton and light in the ocean.

The quest to better understand phytoplankton has taken Perry on two major expeditions to the subpolar North Atlantic. Her first research cruise was as a faculty member at the University of Washington in the early 1990s as part of a Cold War-era initiative. The focus was on light propagation in the open ocean, where phytoplankton play a role in how deep in the ocean light can penetrate. That variability was particularly important when employing laser technology to detect Russian submarines and for friendly undersea laser communications.
While it was the shortcomings of technology — the inability of moorings to provide a comprehensive spatial view and of satellites to see through clouds — that sent Perry to the North Atlantic, it was the latest in autonomous underwater profiling floats and sea gliders equipped with sensors that made the second expedition so successful. A mixed-layer float hovered in near-surface waters, moving with the ocean. The 6-foot gliders surveyed the area to depths of up to 1,000 meters, returning to the surface to transmit data.

The autonomous underwater robots compiled information about the physical environment, including temperature, salinity and velocity of the water, as well as data about the chemistry and biology of the phytoplankton bloom, oxygen and nitrate levels, and unique optical signatures of the tiny plants.

“When we started the expedition in 2008, a big storm greeted us and we were thrown about for three days,” Perry says. “We were tossed about by the waves that were crashing over the wheelhouse. It’s one of the many good reasons for doing data collection autonomously with this kind of technology.”

Just after joining the UMaine School of Marine Sciences in 1999, Perry was instrumental in the development of autonomous glider technology for remote deep-sea data gathering. Her contribution focused on leading a project that designed optical sensors to measure phytoplankton and particulate carbon in the water column. Her efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the sensor technology, including miniaturizing it from the size of a football to a hockey puck, is reflected in every autonomous marine glider manufactured in the United States today.

Perry’s interest in robotic technology was driven by her life-long interest in trying to measure and observe the patterns and amounts of phytoplankton as the base of the food web, and understand why the patterns change. On the 2008 expedition, which involved four research cruises of up to 21 days south of Iceland, data collected by optical, chemical and physical sensors on four gliders, a float and the ship were coupled with a 3D biophysical model. The result was unprecedented documentation of the spring bloom from beginning to end, including previously unknown aspects of its mechanics.

The discovery announced in July was the result of a study led by Amala Mahadevan of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Eric D’Asaro Craig Lee of the University of Washington, and Perry. Their research revealed that eddies or small whirlpools of swirling seawater can switch on the bloom up to 30 days earlier than the natural confluence of seasonal heat and light.

Until this latest research, scientists using climate models understood that springtime warming of the ocean surface triggered the near-surface vertical density gradation, known as stratification. That stratification, which prevents vertical mixing of the phytoplankton, and the increased seasonal light exposure that occurs every spring were thought to be the primary prompts of the bloom.

Among the other breakthroughs was unprecedented documentation of critical phenomena essential to carbon sequestering. One study focused on the aggregate flux event that feeds the deep ocean and contributes to carbon dioxide sequestering. During these events, 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 atmosphere.

Scientists have struggled to detect or estimate aggregate flux events that could ultimately inform estimates of carbon flux in the ocean. The study, led by Perry and the subject of a UMaine master’s thesis by Nathan Briggs, used optical sensors to collect data on the flux event, including sink rates, distribution, relative abundance and chlorophyll content of aggregates.

Perry has also co-authored other papers with expedition colleagues, including one to be submitted shortly, that reveals the importance of a specialized life cycle stage of a diatom species in carbon export from surface waters. Researchers discovered that as an essential nutrient, silicic acid, is depleted, the diatom enters an encapsulated life stage that makes it highly resistant to degradation and extremely efficient for transporting carbon to the depths of the sea.

“It’s all coming together in terms of our abilities to observe complete cycles in remote places for extended periods of time,” Perry says. “That’s important, because if the ocean changes, how will we know if we don’t look?”

“We have to be able to be there more than once or twice with a ship,” she says. “Such a snapshot is biased by whatever is occurring at that moment. We need a better view than what we get from satellites. We need long-term, sustained measurement. A persistent presence. We need a combination of autonomous sensing and detailed validation sensing — important parts of moving our understanding of the ocean forward.”