CASCO BAY, Maine — August 30, 2015 — The survey map in Ann Thayer’s hand showed fat red splotches that wrapped around two-thirds of Bangs Island’s shoreline, meaning that the intertidal zone – the zone between the high and low water marks – was supposed to be densely packed with mussel beds. The tide was nearly three hours past high, leaving plenty of rockweed exposed.
Thayer began systematically flipping over the weed, looking for mussels, aka Mytilus edulis, attached to the rock below.
“Nothing,” she said. She said this over and over.
By the time she got back into her dinghy to row back to her Boston Whaler, she’d found only two mussels. Two where surveys from the 1970s and 1990s indicated there should be thousands, mollusks wedged into almost every nook and cranny in the rocks, the blue-hued shellfish nearly as commonplace as the barnacles living on their shells.
Thayer, who serves on the board of directors of Friends of Casco Bay, was not surprised by her findings.