A New Leader with New Ways of Thinking About Leadership

Will Galloway Joins Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership as Education Director, Leads North Haven & Vinalhaven Teacher Professional Development Program Funded by Maine Dept of Education

East Boothbay, Maine - On an uncharacteristically beautiful mid-April Monday, applause erupted from a conference room inside the Graham Shimmield Residence Hall at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Inside, 13 educators from Vinalhaven and North Haven had just come to the conclusion of Phase I of a three-day Climate Education Professional Development Grant funded by the Maine Department of Education and delivered by Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership.

“This has been really helpful to work with Hurricane. There’s been time to connect with fellow educators and time for things that don’t really happen in our day to day - especially in a small school where you have so many different roles to take on.” said Amanda Labelle, North Haven Community School’s Arts & Enrichment Coordinator. 

Temptations of April break aside, the educators came together from their respective islands to collaborate on integrating hands-on, climate-focused, project-based learning into their classrooms. This opportunity not only strengthened the professional skills of island teachers, it allowed them to coalesce and build relationships to one another internally across departments as well as across islands. 

Bryan Feezor, Assistant Principal at the Vinalhaven School shared “There’s not a lot of people who face similar realities and know what it’s like to go from a 6 year old to High School to Middle School in just a morning.”

The program is called Teaching Resilience: Professional Development for Climate Curricula, and brings in a diverse range of teaching talents including science, statistics, the arts, and included humanities teachers such as North Haven Community School’s Fred Emerick - “We’ve got a project idea that’s in place and ready to begin and I have a model for continuing that beyond this project and a network who I knew but didn't have a relationship with before.”

Newly at the helm of the Education Team for Hurricane Island is Will Galloway - With over 30 years of experience as an educator, mediator, consultant, and most recently as the Head of School for Watershed in Camden, Maine. Galloway’s talent is bringing people together, and that talent has already been put to great use, and will continue as Hurricane Island anticipates the busiest year of programs yet. Whether it is bringing together families, schools, nonprofits, for-profits, students or community organizations, Will hopes to create opportunities for convergence. 

Will has a knack for understanding the nuances of leadership as well, “Leadership is the capacity to demonstrate fluid expertise. Which means knowing when to lead and knowing when to join. It’s not one or the other but knowing how to be a part of, and support a group and also knowing when a group looks to you for direction.” and as Hurricane Island continues to evolve and think about how to make change in the world, leadership matters, “It’s not a leadership that imposes but a leadership of supporting.” shared Galloway 

He has a track record of success in implementing community-wide sustainability initiatives in midcoast Maine and that track record stretches back to his time in the Peace Corps in Thailand. These successes only come from a sense of coming together in consensus and harmony  

“I see Hurricane Island as a really good opportunity to build on the convergence that happens on the island, both with the staff and the students. My hope is to see the sense of community we create here be fully realized when participants return home. I want to use this experience to help plant the seed of what is possible when engaging with one another and their environment”.

Galloway plans to bring a more explicit awareness to the community-building, leadership development aspect of Hurricane Island - something that many feel is necessary against the current backdrop of American and world politics. Concepts like social emotional learning and resiliency draw on moral growth, sense of self, and relationships, and these ideas are increasingly being quantified and prioritized in formal and experiential education alike.

“Through our work at Hurricane Island, our participants gain confidence and grow more vulnerable, they have the courage to engage with one another on a deeper level, and leave seeing one another differently.”

This approach to consider the relationships between individuals and groups, different perspectives, and how to support one another is key to reaching the consensus necessary to approach the politicized large-scale issues posed by climate change in coastal communities like Vinalhaven and North Haven. 

In Phase I of this program teachers workshopped with leaders in place-based education and found guidance around curricular design in climate specific content areas, with the ultimate goal of designing a learning project to be implemented in the remainder of the school year. These projects were timely, responsive and relevant to the major changes happening in Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine at large

With an eye towards the fisheries, Vinalhaven science teacher Ruth Brooker, is looking at the lobster industry. In Vinalhaven, lobstering is an extremely visible and important part of the local economy and lobster boats dominate the harbor. “We’re focusing on lobster and sea temperature data” shared Brooker. A Georgia transplant in her first year at Vinalhaven School, she is becoming fully immersed in the ecology around her - just a week earlier she had students participating in marine field research with Hurricane Island, part of a NOAA-funded collaborative study on Maine scallops which includes Colby, Bates and Maine Center for Coastal Studies.

Break out sessions led by the Hurricane Island staff included year-round Hurricane Island Educator Claire Gabel, who is returning from the 2023 season. She took teachers on an ecology walk and with prompts of ‘what do you notice, what makes you wonder, and what does this remind you of?’; and Assistant Education Director Kyle Amergian led a foray into the intertidal zone and introduced the five E’s of teaching - Engage, Explain, Explore, Elaborate, and Evaluate.

North Haven Community School Project Coordinator Maddie Hallowell is also considering environmental impacts on her island - with a background in environmental monitoring and her experience with surveyors and drone use. Her idea is to collect “ consistent and regular measurements on coastal erosion around North Haven with students” with a component of outreach to seasonal and year round residents. “I have access to students of all ages, and I think students are interested in this especially after the storms this winter.” said Hallowell. 

It is important to consider the necessity for scientific literacy as well. Teacher presentations transitioned into goals and desired outcomes, this was evident as a Vinalhaven math teacher David McKechnie offered the collaborative services of his statistics class; “Many projects are going to be using data and my goal is to help the various projects in both islands use their numbers in the most efficient, careful, realistic and scientific ways possible. My superpower is my students … No exaggerations or assumptions allowed!”

Thinking about the projects goes hand in hand with considering the results; for Ruth Brooker on Vinalhaven “One of my successes would be students that are able to communicate understand past historical trends in temperatures in the Gulf of Maine and lobster populations and identifying a correlation for future comparison - we could start a community conversation about trends and have interviews with what folks see now”. 

Likewise for Maddie Hallowell and her coastal erosion project, “My success would be creating a data collection protocol sheet and making nice graphic pieces that community members could see, creating consistent data and perhaps a suggestion sheet for landowners on how to mitigate erosion. This could include planting native plants, landscape changes, or even things not to do.”.

The teachers will be supported by Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership, which has year round professional researchers and educators with time set aside for this collaboration. Local community organizations will play a role as well, partnerships have been identified with Vinalhaven Land Trust, North Haven Conservation Partners, The Climate Working Group and the Town of North Haven.

These projects are now entering Phase II, wherein the research projects will be organized and carried out and in Phase III these teachers will come together again on Hurricane Island in late summer to share their experiences implementing their community-based projects.

Assistant Education Director Kyle Amergian was ready to lean in with everything that Hurricane Island has to offer, “We’re excited for the next step in all of this and hope that you’ll utilize me. I’m ready to come help and put these plans into action.”. This offer of support includes access to Hurricane Island’s scientific and educational resources, which includes a fleet of vessels with scientific gear to deploy and take oceanographic measurements and samples. It also includes staff such as Amergian, who is the Assistant Director of the organization’s Education Department, as well as the Hurricane Island’s Science & Research team, led by Dr. Anya Hopple. 

Sitting just a few miles away from both Vinalhaven and North Haven, the staff and educators of Hurricane Island are equally familiar with the opportunities and challenges presented by the island landscape and local ecology. Hurricane Island’s Research and Education staff are no strangers to the classrooms and coastlines of either island and as such they are an ideal connector for this professional development opportunity. 

North Haven science teacher Sam Taggart summed up the overarching theme of the effort, “You’re trying to get people to think about and care about what is going on around them”. This motivation combined with a long overdue sense of creating inter-island relationships could be felt even by the end of the 3 days at Bigelow. Amanda Labelle, Arts & Enrichment Coordinator for North Haven shared that “finding our throughlines in these trainings will help us in the future because we will have established a process of collaborative practices with our disciplines and be able to feel like that’s something we can continue to do. We can use this as an opportunity to generate that continued collaboration in this hands-on interdisciplinary approach.”.
For more information about the Maine Department of Education Climate Education Professional Development Grants contact Teddy Lyman, Climate Education Specialist at the Maine DOE Office of Innovation at theodore.lyman@maine.gov

Microcredentials on Hurricane Island

Microcredentials on Hurricane:

Training for Maine’s Marine Economy Future

Chloe Finger is a bonafide marine engineer. Borrowing from her growing up on the schooner J&E Riggin and her expertise from working last year on Hurricane Island’s Facilities team, this week she completed an oyster grader on island to efficiently sort the oysters that we grow on the Hurricane Island aquaculture farm. She’ll begin using this tool with Micah Conkling, her fellow Aquaculture Farm Assistant this season who brought oyster-farming and aquaculture-development research experience to the farm, but only after he finishes removing the encrusting organisms that foul the nets that we use to grow our scallops.

While Chloe and Micah’s tasks this season varied weekly—from boat handling to animal husbandry to SCUBA diving on our farm’s moorings—their duties for the season overlapped with the hands-on aquaculture curricula that we designed with the Hurricane Island Education team for this year’s two cohorts of high-school aquaculture workshop participants. In all, the skill-building Micah, Chloe, and our aquaculture students experienced is part of innovative occupational-development programming in vocational education: namely, that of “microcredentials.”

Microcredentials are certifications of proficiency awarded once a learner of any kind completes a training that an established institution recognizes as sufficiently rigorous. In our case, Hurricane Island has been building a curricular pathway with UMaine’s Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research (CCAR) and Aquaculture Research Institute (ARI) and other partners to teach the basics of saltwater aquaculture such that Chloe, Micah, or our high-school students may receive official, résumé-ready certifications of their skills without needing to enroll in a traditional school. As a college student completes credit hours in a classroom to show they know their stuff, so can a student learning maritime skills outside the classroom, as long as an education authority approves their learning path.

While they also award official certifications, microcredentialing programs are often much shorter than conventional college courses (weeks instead of months) because they are aimed at making skill-certification more broadly attainable. Says CCAR’s Melissa Malmsteadt, “microcredentials are kind of brilliant—you can get a baseline level of interest in a topic to see if it interests you without needing to commit to a four-year college.” Microcredentials differ for youth and adult learners, and microcredential development accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic as educators foresaw future impediments for traditional learning systems. However, professionalization programs for marine aquaculture are especially new because ocean-farming industries are still maturing in Maine and nation-wide (shout-out to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s 2020 strategy report on aquaculture workforce development in the state).

Thus are Hurricane Island’s adult and high-school aquaculture microcredentials still pilot programs while Chloe and Micah provide feedback on their skill-development, and as we field-test lesson plans to guide youth students through at least the first of three levels of ocean-farming proficiency. This season, however, we are proud that our youth participants completed Level 2 of UMaine’s youth Aquaculture Microcredential through our workshops; these students are on their way to receiving the first stage of UMaine’s adult Aquaculture Microcredential.

We are thoroughly excited to continue to integrate our marine research with Hurricane Island’s education initiatives. In the meanwhile, Chloe will fix the bilge pump on the skiff, and Micah will keep monitoring the saltwater aquarium he built to develop sugar kelp spores. Fortunately, they are comfortably accustomed to the range of competencies required for marine work.

Back in the Water

By Essie Martin

As we get into the 2023 season, we are looking forward to getting back in the chilly Maine waters!

Earlier this season we had our second (my first) dive of the season to collect wild scallops in our mooring field. During the summer season the research team spends several days a week SCUBA diving in Penobscot Bay. We do everything from population surveys, to wild scallop collections, to setting up gear on our aquaculture site.

Needless to say, diving is a big part of our jobs, and for me it is a major highlight of working with Hurricane Island. Many people have asked me what we see on the bottom in Penobscot Bay since most underwater media portrays colorful coral scenes with clear crystal blue waters.

While this is not exactly our reality, we are still privy to the kind of beauty only seen underwater.  This time of year is especially beautiful – the clear cold waters make all the life we see seem so purposeful. Kelps and irish moss are stunning shades of pink and orange while the shells of tiny hermit crabs are bright white. On almost all our dives we see lobsters that scuttle and hide under whatever they can find: rocks, abandoned traps, pieces of kelp.

We often see big jonah crabs burrowing into the mud to hide with just their eyes poking out. On our shallow dives when we survey for kelp, we see more fish than on our deeper scallop collection dives. Sometimes we’ll see schools of pollock in the distance, but often it's the smaller cunner we get to see up close in the kelp. When we are lucky, we’ve seen small bright lumpfish tucked between blades of kelp on ledges, or along a mooring line.

On my first dive off Hurricane Island, Phoebe and I saw a giant sea robin, lethargic in a hole just off our main pier. On sandy dives we see flounder, some the length of my pinky, some as big as my forearm, rushing off from place to place just above the sea floor. 

One of my favorite locations to dive is in Gaston Cove on the south end of the island. The sea floor there is completely covered in sand dollars and pastel colored seaweeds that sway with the water. As you get deeper away from the island there are ledges dotted with scallops on the sea floor around them. 

Diving Into Another Season

By Essie Martin

Welcome back to another Hurricane Island season with the research team! We are grateful this year to not only be returning to the familiarity of the island, but also the familiarity of our team which, with the exception of our intern joining in June, is made up entirely of returners. Our team arrives on the island this week after nearly six months of off island work and adventure. 

We are lucky to have continued collaboration with Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, Bates College, and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) through our spat (baby scallops) project. This project has expanded spat collection to the entire Maine coast in an effort to understand their distribution and further develop scallop aquaculture (read Phoebe’s blog from the Fall here). Since then we’ve collected the first round of spat bags we deployed in the Fall. Our team, with other project partners, Bates students, fishermen, aquaculturists and other volunteers spent long cold days in January and February sorting spat from other critters that had settled on our bags, estimating numbers of spat collected, and collecting samples for later genetic analysis.  Many hands helped along the way– a big thanks to all that did! Our spat project continues as we head out over the next 4 weeks to collect bags deployed over the winter for spring sorting. I am looking forward to joining the fray and saying hello to the newest generation of scallops. 

Lucy and I successfully completed our advanced open water and rescue diver certifications in Key West in January. Thanks to the generosity of my uncle and aunt who live in Key West, Lucy and I were able to dive in warm water for the first time ever. The amount of color and biodiversity was a shock to our systems that had already settled into the monotone of winter in Maine. We are grateful that Hurricane Island was able to support these certifications which will ensure safety of future dives. While I can’t speak for Lucy, I am certainly ready to hop back in chilly Maine water, and say hello to the scallops. 

While my fellow research team tackled spat in Maine, I had the opportunity to travel to Africa for two months and visit family friends. Said family friends are big game veterinarians in South Africa, and I spent my time there on jobs catching and treating big game… needless to say it was not a boring trip. We traveled to Botswana where I spent an exciting afternoon lost in the bush, to South Africa where I sat on a live giraffe, and to Mozambique where I helped with cyclone repairs. My time there was filled with the staccato of never ending new experiences and automobile repair, and I am grateful for the tenacity I learned while away. 

This season we are looking forward to several Aquaculture Workshops and our Aquaculture Skills Sessions. The workshops are geared toward engaging the general public, K-12 teachers and researchers and offer an opportunity to join the research team for a day to learn about our 3.2 acre experimental aquaculture lease, aquaculture curriculum development, and research-based opportunities within aquaculture. The Skills Sessions are more focused on engaging new or current farmers and highlight development of the specific skills and knowledge needed on the farm. We are grateful for our Aquaculture Manager Madison Maier, who is the main organizer behind these events and worked hard off island to make them possible with funding from SEA Maine’s Marine Living Resources Economy Capacity Building Grants. 

We are excited to get back into the swing of things with on island research, and look forward to seeing new and old visitors to the island. 

Spat Research Takes A Leap Forward

By Phoebe Jekielek

We are lucky to be on Hurricane Island. We are lucky to be in Penobscot Bay.

We are lucky to be in Maine.

We’re lucky for many reasons, but one of my favorite reasons is all of the opportunities we have for collaboration with local aquaculturists, fishermen, resource managers and other organizations to answer locally-relevant questions. For example, we recently partnered with Dr. Carla Guenther from the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries and Dr. Caitlin Cleaver from Bates College to apply for funding to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC). And guess what, we got the funding! 

Figure 1: Spat bags ready to be deployed

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) is an interstate initiative that unites states along the eastern seaboard in the joint effort and shared vision to realize a sustainable and cooperatively managed fishery. Since the 1940s the Commission has served to coordinate the promotion and protection of the fishery through collaboratively overseen conservation and management practices, including through the disbursement of highly competitive grants.

Many of you are familiar with the spat collections efforts we’ve been doing around Muscle Ridge and Hurricane Island for a number of years (check out previous Research Intern Hallie Arno’s blog here). Our project is titled “Toward resolving wild sea scallop (P. magellanicus) larval spatial and temporal distribution along the Maine coast in support of developing scallop aquaculture.” The funds awarded by ASMFC support a community-based collaborative project that engages fishermen and farmers in a pilot investigation to determine patterns of larval abundance and distribution along the Maine coast.

The initiative has the goals of:

• Evaluating the variability in scallop larval supply

• Developing a low cost monitoring and data management system

• Strengthening relationships between fishermen and farmers as they team up to understand a resource upon which they both depend

• Providing authentic education experiences for high school and undergraduate students

• Determining patterns of larval abundance and distribution requires expertise from fishermen and farmers, oceanographers, marine ecologists and resource managers. 

Figure 2: Example of spat sorted from spat bags on Hurricane Island.

We worked with local scallop growers and fishermen to identify sites to deploy our spat lines in Casco, Muscongus, Jericho, and Narraguagus Bays. Each transect has ten lines deployed and each line line has 10 bags on it and a temperature logger, two lines in each transect have salinity loggers. Most of the lines were built on Hurricane Island by the Research Team and handed off to the fishermen who deployed them from their boats. All of our lines were deployed by October 1 and we’ll be retrieving this first set of lines at the end of January while deploying a whole new set to be retrieved in April. This will give us an idea of the seasonal variability of spat supply along the coast. When we retrieve them, we’ll have around 400 bags to sort through! But don’t worry, we’re working with the Eastern Maine Skippers Program and other local schools to help us sort the bags, count the baby scallops, and identify other species that settle in the bags.  

Figure 3: Map of sites with deployed spat lines for this ASMFC-funded project.

This has truly been a collaborative effort that has required communication, coordination, and lots of logistics along the entire coast. The efforts of the fishermen, farmers, researchers and managers who have been involved illustrate the commitment to a cooperative approach to research, one that integrates knowledge from all of these stakeholders with a common goal of supporting our scallop industries. Stay tuned as we approach our first spat line retrieval…there will be a lot of scallops to sort!

UPG Leader: What I have learned on Hurricane Island

By Louize Oliveira

Last year, I was part of the UPG Sustainability Leadership Program, there were nine weeks of digital training with more than 500 young people from several countries. At the end of the training, 60 young people were selected to have an experience at Hurricane Island.

I had the honor to be selected and voyage to Hurricane this summer and I would like to share some insights I had:

1. Be Kind

People around the world have been working hard to do their best. Each country, each culture, and each person is peculiar. Being kind to ourselves to be kind to others. I realized that what we need to be to others is the same we need to be with us. If you want to be more patient with others, start with yourself. Many times, we reflect our own needs on others. 

2. Honor our history

If we respect people that came before us, we will honor the journey they had to do for us to be here. Therefore, we should think about everything that some people needed to face for us to be here today. Honor is a way of respect. If we respect our past, we can build a better future, with peace, values, and consideration for the environment.

3. Think about climate change

Thinking about "climate change" is not only the responsibility of people and companies that work with environmental topics. It is a responsibility for all of us. Climate change has been transforming our environment, our economy, our business, and our life. In Hurricane Island I realized that: to honor our past, we need to think about climate change. We need to talk about this. We need to act, each one in their context, we need to act.

4. Be open

In some times, building a network looks like a professional thing. However, this is not true. Being open to meeting people, talking about everything, and learning something different is a way to expand our minds and become better human beings.

Sometimes, I would like that the people who came before me could have the same opportunity to be at Hurricane Island and learn about all of this. Therefore, I realized that being there, was a way to honor these people. If I could give some advice, I would tell you to enjoy each minute of your journey.

Learn more about United People Global and how to apply to this amazing and unique partnership program with Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership

Louize Oliveira is a Project Manager and UPG Sustainability Leader based in São Paulo Brazil. Louize is Co-founder of SafePlace, a social digital platform with the purpose to promote gender equality in the work environment, in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 - Gender Equality, of UN 2030 Agenda.

Sorting Spat Bags with Commercial Growers

By Lucy Williams

Throughout the summer weeks you will find our educational programs on our main pier. Front and center, students, educators and researchers are sorting through muck, squishy tunicates, skeleton shrimp, and piles of clams. The goal is to find juvenile scallops in these green and blue mesh bags, called spat bags. 

Research Assistant Sam Poratti and (then) Research Intern Lucy Williams sorting spat on Hurricane in 2021

Every year in September, our research team sets out spat bag lines at twelve locations surrounding Hurricane and the Muscle Ridge. Last year, our Director of Education, John Van Dis, set out some additional educational spat bags with Belfast and Oceanside schools in October. These lines are usually retrieved in the late spring and organized on our aquaculture site. Our spat bag research is an undertaking that takes the entire summer for students, participants, the occasional island visitor, and the research team to sort through. While collecting the juvenile scallops, we count the precise amount of living scallops, measure a percentage of them, and account for other species present in the bags such as tunicates, sea stars, and mussels.

However, for commercial scallop farms like Pen Bay Scallops, the process is much faster and does not include precise counting, measuring, and biodiversity analysis like we do on Hurricane. Commercial farmers are usually most interested in the amount of scallops collected year to year wherever they set their bags. With dual commercial and research applications, spat bags are a great teaching tool for introducing students and interested growers to scallop aquaculture and the unique qualities of the animal that make farming different (and maybe a little more complex) from other bivalves.

On May 16th, Pen Bay Scallops farmers Marsden and Bob Brewer hosted the Eastern Maine Skippers Program, a high school collaboration with Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries,  as well as a few interested farmers for sorting their spat bags with the help of the Hurricane Island Research team. We were able to boat over from Rockland to Stonington in the morning fog in our new vessel, Sunny. On the Stonington public dock, three groups sorted through ten bags received by the Brewers from the approximate 200 they set out each year. Madison Maier, Aquaculture Manager on Hurricane, devised a scheme for estimating the total amount of scallops per bag. For perspective, our first few bags this season have had 170, 243, and even 434 scallops per bag. Pen Bay Scallop’s spat bags averaged 4,038 per bag! 

Logan Leach (left) and Emery Leach (right) sort through the netron mesh from one of the Brewer’s spat bags and the juvenile scallops fall into the barrel to be measured  (right image). 

To get this estimate, students collected 10 mL of scallops by scooping up from the piles of scallops that came out of every bag or by individually picking them up. Once they had 10 mL, they counted the total number of scallops that filled that 10 mL volume. Three measurements were made for each bag and the average number of scallops in 10 mL was calculated. Then, the total volume of scallops for each bag was measured using 1000 mL graduated cylinders. Once the total volume of scallops was obtained, the students simply multiplied the number of scallops in 10 mL by the number it would take to get to the total volume.

The total scallops in each bag ranged from 1700 scallops to 7160 scallops. The total scallops collected in all 10 bags was estimated to be 40,380! That is a lot of little scallops! Marsden and Bob, with the help of the students, sorted the juvenile scallops by size and then put them in appropriate gear for them to grow up on their commercial aquaculture lease near Crotch Island. 

Benthic Ecology Meeting Wrap Up

Lead Researcher Phoebe Jekielek brings us a great review of the Benthic Ecology Meeting - Not sure what that is? Read on!

The past few years have been years full of seclusion for everyone, including the scientific community. Meetings, conferences, and workshops were all moved to Zoom in order to keep us all safe as the pandemic unfolded. But now, the scientific community is also starting to “open up” with in-person events and the re-introduction to networking, sharing ideas, and debating research…it’s kind of anxiety-inducing and awkward and exhilarating all at once. The Hurricane Research Team got to participate in this re-introduction last week at the Benthic Ecology Meeting (BEM) in Portsmouth, NH. 

All in a day’s work - Lead Scientist Phoebe Jekielek reaching for the data on a research trip to Pen Bay Farmed Scallops’ aquaculture site near Stonington, ME. It all starts out in the field!

The BEM is put on by the Benthic Meeting Ecology Society (BEMS), a non-profit organization established to run a yearly meeting to exchange scientific information focusing on marine benthic ecosystems (e.g., rocky intertidal, coral reef) and to foster the next generation of benthic biologists. Their mission is to promote research in benthic ecosystems, support the exchange of information about benthic ecology, and encourage student participation to develop the next generation of benthic ecologists. This year there was a lot of representation from Hurricane Island staff, both past and present!! 

Hurricane Research Assistant Lucy Williams presenting at the Benthic Ecology Meeting

Our current Lead Scientist (Phoebe, me), our Aquaculture Manager (Madison), and our Research Assistant (Lucy) all got to attend. I was totally overwhelmed by the number of talks that I wanted to attend and had to make some hard decisions! Sessions spanned climate change, aquaculture and fisheries, invasive species, new technology and many more. Lucy also led the charge to create an amazing poster with Madison highlighting our scallop reproduction work and presented it during the poster session on Thursday night. Presenting posters is a great way to network, exchange ideas, and practice communicating about the research we and our partners are undertaking.

2021 Summer Intern and Bowdoin College junior Sophie Lisle presenting at the BEM

There were also presentations given at the conference by Carl Huntsberger and Sophie Lisle, two past Hurricane staff!! Carl was our Research Assistant during 2020 and is now a Research Biologist at the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF) in Rhode Island and leads the Sea Scallop Research Fleet effort and a project to assess fisheries species at the South Fork Wind Farm. He presented on lobster stock structure research with commercial harvesters. Sophie was an Education Intern on Hurricane last summer and is now a junior at Bowdoin College where she’s been working on evaluating microplastic consumption across trophic levels. Can’t wait to see what she does in her senior year and beyond. 

Aquaculture Manager Madison Maier gives students a tour of the 3.2 acre experimental aquaculture site on Hurricane Island

All in all it was really great to get back to a bit of in-person connection and information sharing. The conversations that arise when you’re getting your coffee or walking from your hotel to the conference might create new collaborations and generate new ideas in just a few minutes. This conference only stoked my fires about the work we’re doing on Hurricane, the role we’re playing to create sustainable solutions to the ecological, social, and economic challenges of a changing world, and how we can best mentor and prepare the next generation of scientists and change makers to face those challenges. Onward ever onward ☺

For more information on Lucy’s Research be sure to check out the recent blog posts and research pages on our website.