Entomologist Frank Drummond has been a member of the UMaine community for a quarter-century. He is a professor in the School of Biology and Ecology, and University of Maine Cooperative Extension. The breadth of his career is reflected in his research interests that range from pollination ecology to insect pest management, and scientific techniques that span statistical modeling and computer simulation to molecular genetics. His research venues range from Maine’s blueberry and potato fields to Australian sugarcane plantations. Drummond has always worked in cooperative research with other researchers at UMaine and beyond. Today, his productivity and project diversity involves 60 research colleagues. Drummond has been the principal or co-principal investigator on more than $15.7 million in research funding. That funding includes USDA grants investigating the genetics of blueberry production and pollinator conservation to address colony collapse disorder in honeybees. Since joining the UMaine community, Drummond has been leading bee research, focused on their health, conservation and role as crop pollinators. As an applied entomologist, Drummond finds solutions to important agricultural insect problems, especially in Maine. One of his many successful efforts to help farmers manage the blueberry maggot fly, an effort that saved growers money and reduced the environmental impact of insecticide applications. With several UMaine colleagues, Drummond has researched and developed organic methods for blueberry production — the only complete organic insect pest management plan for wild blueberry production in North America. Drummond also created a model to predict the impact of human activity on streams, which became the basis for Maine law and informed national Environmental Protection Agency guidelines.

A team of University of Maine graduate students and their faculty adviser Jennifer Middleton are the recipients of the 2013 President’s Research Impact Award for the research project “What Happens Next? Examining Child Protection Outcomes in a Cohort of Opioid-Exposed Infants.”

Alison Mitchell, Meagan Foss, Leah Agren, Jenifer Koch and Middleton won the annual President’s Research Impact Award at the 2013 GradExpo where Mitchell presented the project. The award is given to a graduate student and adviser who best exemplify the UMaine mission of teaching, research and outreach. The $2,000 award will be split among the grad students and their adviser.

The community-engaged research project, part of a research methods series for the Master in Social Work curriculum, is being conducted by the graduate students in collaboration with Middleton.

“The Graduate Student Leadership and I created this award last year to recognize the high-quality research of University of Maine graduate students occurring in so many academic areas across the campus,” says UMaine President Paul Ferguson. “I wanted to specifically recognize the research that has tangible impact for our state with the potential to make a difference — in this case, in the lives of some of Maine’s youngest citizens. This is an outstanding example of the research excellence that a land grant university offers to the people it serves.”

Though the population of infants born with prenatal opioid exposure in the Greater Bangor region is growing — from 23 in 2003 to 183 in 2012 — little is know about what happens to the infants after they leave Eastern Maine Medical Center, Mitchell says.

The project aims to clarify what happens, from a child welfare system perspective, after the infant is discharged. The team plans to explore rates and reasons families with opioid-exposed infants become subsequently involved with child protective services through the Office of Child and Family Services, or OCFS, at the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.

Currently, there are no other studies tracking the child protection outcomes of opioid-exposed infants in Maine, Mitchell says, and the project represents the first attempt to share data between EMMC and OCFS.

“Winning this award is enormously gratifying,” says Mitchell, noting that the project is a team effort. “Social workers in general aren’t particularly recognized for their research very often so for that it’s really exciting.”

The project was proposed to Middleton by EMMC contact Mark Moran, a graduate of UMaine’s Master’s in Social Work Program who works with families of substance-exposed infants.

There has been a significant increase in the number of drug-exposed babies born in Maine, from 165 in 2005 to 667 in 2011, and Maine’s opiate addiction rate is also the highest in the country per capita at 386 per 100,000 as opposed to the national average of 45 per 100,000, according to data collected by the research team.

The Bangor area, which is home to three methadone clinics and a hospital equipped to handle drug-exposed infants, has a concentration of opioid-exposed births compared to more rural areas. Drug-exposed babies who are delivered in regional hospitals get transferred to EMMC for treatment, Mitchell says.

When a substance-exposed infant is born at or transferred to EMMC, the hospital makes a notification and sends it to OCFS, she says.

“All of those infants in our cohort were already in the OCFS database so what this project is trying to do is just match cases,” Mitchell says.

By using the name and birth date of the drug-exposed infants from the EMMC record and having OCFS run a query on the infants one year from their birth date, the team was able to see if the child showed up in protective services’ database again, Mitchell says.

“It really is a three-way partnership,” Mitchell says of the involvement of the UMaine School of Social Work graduate students, EMMC and OCFS. “Each of the partners has had quite a bit of influence in shaping how the project has evolved.”

From their data collection, the team has determined that 68 percent of their sample does not show up again in child protection, while 32 percent showed up as having an open case with OCFS within their first year.

The students expect to receive information from the hospital on the severity of the 60 cases once the hospital eliminates identifying information and clears the data for release.

In the remaining weeks of the semester, the students will conduct statistical analyses. Agren and Koch will graduate in May 2013, while Mitchell and Foss, who are scheduled to graduate next year, will continue to do analyses over the summer once they find out where the cases fall in terms of severity.

Mitchell says she believes one of the reasons the project won the President’s Research Impact Award is because it’s a community-engaged partnership.

During the course of the class, the region received a $4 million federal grant for the Penquis Regional Linking Project, a five-year effort aiming to enhance the network of over 25 agencies in the Penobscot and Piscataquis counties supporting trauma-informed services for substance-exposed children and their families. Middleton is the lead researcher and co-director of evaluation for this project.

The team members think their research will help the agencies in the project reach their goal, and Mitchell says they have already received positive feedback from project members.

“What Happens Next?” also aims to generate knowledge useful in advancing local practice and policy efforts and pave the way for future collaborations.

“The primary aim is right in the title, ‘What happens next?’” Mitchell says. “The goal of the study is to see if we can figure out what happens from a child protective perspective and to establish those precedents of how to come together as a service-providing community.”

Contact: Elyse Kahl, 207.581.3747

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

The award recognizes the best research projects in the fields of nutrition, food science and technology throughout the Americas.

Wu will receive $5,000 for her technology project, “A piezoelectric immunosensor for specific capture and enrichment of viable pathogens by quartz crystal microbalance sensor, followed by detection with antibody-functionalized gold nanoparticles.”

A scientific jury of researchers and experts chose Wu’s project the best of 107 entries.

Inventive, imaginative, resourceful and innovative are synonyms for creative.

And in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, they also were synonymous with better employment prospects, according to a new study by a team of researchers.

The team, including University of Maine economist Todd Gabe, found that from 2006–11, members of the creative class — including those with careers in knowledge-based, creative fields of computers, architecture, arts, business, health care and high-end sales — had a higher probability of being employed than people in the working and service classes.

Having a creative career was even more valuable in the two years after the Great Recession, which may indicate the U.S. economy is undergoing a structural change, say Gabe, Richard Florida of Martin Prosperity Institute in Toronto, Canada, and Charlotta Mellander of Jönköping International Business School in Jönköping, Sweden.

Florida labels the change resulting from the economic crash “The Great Reset.” In his book of the same name, subtitled How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, Florida says a vibrant future of innovation and dramatic change in lifestyle will result due to the shift in the framework of employment.

Unemployment rates for creative class occupations were lower than unemployment rates in the U.S. economy prior to, during and immediately following the recession, according to the researchers’ analysis of 2006–11 data from Current Population Surveys, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Before the recession (2006–07), the unemployment rate for all occupations was 4.7 percent; for the creative class it was 1.9 percent; for the service class it was 5 percent; and for the working class it was 6.5 percent.

During the recession (2008–09), the unemployment rate for all occupations was 6.9 percent; for the creative class it was 3 percent; for the service class it was 6.9 percent; and for the working class it was 11.1 percent.

In the two years following the recession (2010–11), the unemployment rate for all occupations was 9.4 percent; for the creative class, it was 4.1 percent; for the service class it was 9.3 percent; and for the working class, it was 14.6 percent.”

Working class jobs include those in production, construction, transportation and maintenance. Service class occupations include those in home health care, customer service, food preparation and retail sales.

Researchers say creative class workers may fare better than service and working class members because the work they do is less standardized and thus they are more difficult to replace. They also may be more equipped to reinvent themselves and their jobs are locally driven, rather than export-based, say the three-person team.

The researchers’ article, “The Creative Class and the crisis,” was published in Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society.

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

Juvenile wood frogs emigrating from their birthplaces in vernal pools into the terrestrial ecosystem may transfer mercury they accumulated during larval development into the food web, according to a team of University of Maine researchers.

The team, led by U.S. Geological Survey and UMaine wildlife ecologist Cynthia Loftin, conducted its study at four short-hydroperiod (likely to dry by mid-June) seasonal woodland pools in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, Maine.

The researchers found mercury levels in the 1- to 2-week-old embryos were near or below detectable amounts, indicating that transfer of mercury from mother to eggs was absent or minimal. However, mercury accumulated rapidly in the 6- to 8-week-old tadpoles.

Mercury, a heavy, toxic metal, occurs naturally and is introduced into the environment by metal processing, coal burning and mining. People are exposed to mercury by eating contaminated fish and wildlife. Over time, low-grade mercury exposure in people can impact cognitive thinking and fine motor skills.

While concentrations of total mercury differed among the pools and were greatest in the unburned softwood-dominated setting, the levels increased in all pools throughout the season. The pools dried in June and refilled with September and October rain.

Wood frogs can travel some distance from their natal pools. During summer, fall and winter, they live in wetlands and on land. In the winter, they hibernate underneath leaf litter, woody debris and soil. They return to pools in the spring to mate.

For a better understanding of the transport of this contaminant from seasonal pools into the surrounding environment and potential for uptake into the terrestrial food web, future studies should focus on the ratio of total mercury to methylmercury (produced by burning of fossil fuels) in embryos, tadpoles and juvenile frogs leaving natal ponds, according to the research team, writing in the journal Northeastern Naturalist.

Loftin teamed with Aram Calhoun, professor of wetland ecology; Sarah Nelson, assistant research professor at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center; Adria Elskus, associate professor of biological sciences; and Kevin Simon, assistant professor in the School of Biology and Ecology, to conduct the study.

Retrospective thinking — learning to evaluate reactions to the legacy we leave — is a means of raising awareness of the potential implications of current actions on the future, according to UMaine School of Economics researchers Mark Anderson, Mario Teisl and Caroline Noblet, writing in the journal Ecological Economics.

It is broadly understood that successful sustainability awareness and action require intergenerational equity and stakeholder engagement. It also is generally argued that we cannot presume to know future preferences — both individual and collective — that change over time.

For a community to engage the future as stakeholders in sustainability, the researchers propose four steps, which will be tested in a survey this spring.

• A broad cross section of community members think about previous societal decisions they are grateful for, indifferent to or regret.
• Participants discuss their regrets and gratitude in small group settings to identify common elements of past decisions to help uncover the community values expressed in historical regret or gratitude.
• Common elements are used in a survey of the whole community to gauge consensus.
• Community groups consider the survey data and how this information helps people think about future reactions to current decisions.

“Reflecting on what about previous decisions contributed to or detracted from sustainability is a concrete exercise in intergenerational thinking,” according to the economists, whose research is supported by Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative, a program of UMaine’s Senator George J. Mitchell Center.

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.