Saving Seafood

UMaine launches marine product program to help drive the state’s ‘blue economy’

August 31, 2021 — A new University of Maine program aims to deepen partnerships between science and business experts in the state’s fisheries, aquaculture sector and other working-waterfront industries.

UMaine’s Darling Marine Center and Maine Business School are launching the UMaine Blue Economy Program, where students, faculty, communities and industry partners will work together to conduct research and develop products related to Maine’s ocean-based commerce, according to a news release.

The graduate education and research initiative is supported with a $50,000 award from the William Procter Scientific Innovation Fund.

“The UMaine Blue Economy Program builds on more than 55 years of creative collaboration at the Darling Marine Center among scientists, entrepreneurs and other professionals,” Darling’s director, Heather Leslie, said in the release. “It will enable us to deepen partnerships among science and business experts while enhancing UMaine’s contributions to fisheries, aquaculture and other working waterfront-dependent industries of the state.”

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Lobster research explores ocean warming effects

February 22, 2021 — A team of researchers from the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center in Walpole and Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay and the Maine Department of Marine Resources in West Boothbay Harbor recently published their research on the effects of ocean warming and acidification on gene expression in the earliest life stages of the American lobster.

The work was published in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution with collaborators from the University of Prince Edward Island and Dalhousie University in Canada.

The team’s experiments examined the gene regulatory response of post-larval lobsters to the separate and combined effects of warming and acidification anticipated by the end of the 21st century. They found that genes regulating a range of physiological functions, from those controlling shell formation to the immune response, are either up- or down-regulated. Importantly, they observed that the two stressors combined induced a greater gene regulatory response than either stressor alone.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Research reveals diverse community benefits of small-scale fisheries

December 22, 2020 — Marine fisheries provide many benefits to coastal communities. Fisheries generate food, provide employment and economic profit through the supply chain, and play an important role in a sense of community and individual identity.

University of Maine researchers Heather Leslie and Kara Pellowe are studying the diverse benefits provided by fisheries in partnership with harvesters and other local experts in multiple regions, including Maine and Mexico.

Pellowe, a former UMaine postdoctoral scholar now at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, and Leslie, director of the UMaine Darling Marine Center in Walpole, contend that the benefits provided by fisheries are more diverse than is often accounted for in fisheries management.In a recent study published in the scientific journal Ambio, Pellowe and Leslie study the diverse benefits that small-scale fisheries provide to coastal communities. The research indicates that non-fishing families recognize the diverse benefits associated with coastal fisheries. The study specifically investigated how these benefits were recognized in the community of Loreto in the northwest region of Mexico, where both fisheries and tourism play important roles in the local economy, much like the Maine coast.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Reading the genetic signature of the sea scallop

October 12, 2017 — Scallops are one of the most profitable fisheries in Maine, with a statewide value of nearly $7 million in 2016. The scallop fishery is also one of the most local, with small “day boats” staying close to shore.

Landings (and populations) have fluctuated over the years, with the latest peaks in the mid-1980s and 1990s. After severe declines in the early 2000s, the state instituted adaptive management, closing some areas and closely monitoring others. The approach seems to be successful, as landings have increased significantly, although the exact reasons are unclear and there are many questions left unanswered. Does closing a scallop bed protect spawning? How long does population recovery take? If a scallop bed is large, does that mean it’s healthy? Are all scallop beds equally productive?

Skylar Bayer, who graduated this spring from the University of Maine with a Ph.D. in marine biology, has been studying scallops for six years in Richard Wahle’s lab at the Darling Marine Center. Her research addresses questions about scallop reproduction. Scallops are broadcast spawners, releasing their eggs and sperm separately into the water. Fertilization happens by random encounters.

Bayer has learned what she knows about scallop spawning events from both laboratory and field experiments, manipulating the temperature to induce spawning, and weighing reproductive organs from scallops (the subject of her infamous Colbert Report appearance). Even under a microscope, however, it is difficult to distinguish the eggs, sperm, embryos and larvae of scallops from those of other bivalves. So, how can scientists understand how what happens in the open ocean?

Read the full story at Phys.org

MAINE: Eel farmer wants to keep Maine’s wriggly gold close to home

December 1, 2016 — SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — Sara Rademaker wants to give the East Coast’s most valuable eels a much shorter commute from river to sushi roll.

Baby eels, also called elvers, are at the center of a lucrative business in Maine, which is home to the only large-scale fishing operation for them in the country. Fishermen sold them for more than $2,000 per pound last year, and they typically are sent as seed stock to Asian aquaculture companies so they can be raised to maturity and processed into sushi and other food products.

But Rademaker, a Maine aquaculture farmer, is looking to change all that and keep more of the state’s valuable baby eels closer to home. She’s operating a small eel farming operation in South Bristol, Maine, that raises the elvers so they can be sold live and fully grown to local restaurants.

Rademaker launched American Unagi in 2014 and sold her first eels to Maine sushi restaurants this summer. She is hoping to scale up production in the coming years.

“The local food movement is shifting toward seafood,” she said. “Having products that are produced local, that have traceability, that can show they are sustainable is going to be important.”

Eel aquaculture in America is underdeveloped, as most of the business takes place in Asia and Europe. Rademaker buys her elvers locally from purchasers who acquire them from Maine fishermen, and she is raising her eels at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center. She said she expects to sell more than 2,000 pounds of the eels within two years.

Maine is one of only two states with an elver fishery; South Carolina’s fishery is much smaller.

Rademaker has set an ambitious goal. America’s entire wild-caught eel fishery, which is mostly centered around Maryland, only yields between 800,000 and a million pounds of eels per year. Wild-caught older eels, which make up most of the fishery, are worth much less than the baby eels Maine fishermen take from rivers and streams.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Herald & Review

Warming waters threaten young lobsters, study finds

SOUTH BRISTOL, Maine — The Gulf of Maine’s lobster population, which has boomed even as climate change and overfishing have hurt other commercial species, could suffer if water temperatures keep rising, according to a University of Maine study.

The study suggests that, as the Gulf of Maine continues to grow warmer, the state’s $495 million lobster industry — by far the most valuable commercial fishery in Maine — could face the same kind of population decline that has affected urchins, scallops, groundfish and shrimp. Overfishing greatly reduced harvests for many of these species, but warming waters have been identified as an impediment to recovery.

The new lobster study, conducted by UMaine’s Darling Marine Center and by Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, indicates that larvae reared in 66-degree water had a distinctly higher mortality rate than those cultivated in the water 5 degrees cooler, the temperature now typical in the western Gulf of Maine. Water temperatures in the western Gulf of Maine are expected to rise 5 degrees by 2100.

The study looked only at larval lobsters, which spend all their time floating, and not at juveniles or older lobsters that live on the ocean floor.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Sara Rademaker is letting little eels get big in Maine

May 31, 2016 — SOUTH BRISTOL, Maine — “They are like little torpedoes,” Sara Rademaker says, looking down at a tank full of year-old eels in a feeding frenzy.

Her tone is fond, almost as if the eels wiggling in and out of a submerged laundry basket were a basket of lively kittens, but this is all business. Rademaker is doing what no one has tried to do in Maine before – grow out elvers to eels for the commercial food market.

Rademaker is a young woman, but has 12 years of farming and aquaculture experience. A graduate of Auburn University in Alabama, she’s worked with subsistence farmers in Uganda as part of a U.S. AID project and farmed tilapia in Ghana. She’s taught middle school students how to farm tilapia and lettuces.

Three years ago she began studying European and Asian systems for growing elvers into eels in contained areas, asking herself the question, why not here in Maine, the biggest source of American baby glass eels in the country?

Although she’s just starting her third year developing her eel aquaculture system, she’s gearing up to bring her first eels to market this summer, with plans to tap into the local sushi market to begin with.

“She’s already so far ahead of anyone else in the state,” says Dana Morse, a UMaine Cooperative Extension associate professor and researcher based at the Darling Marine Center. “It’s impressive.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Odor plays a role in whether mussels stay or go

April 29, 2016 — For people looking to settle down, a location’s odor can be a factor in whether they stay or go.

Turns out the same is true for mussel larvae.

Mussel larvae swim toward odors from adult mussels, and swim away from odors from predators, including green crabs and dog whelks, says Scott Morello, a visiting researcher at the University of Maine Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine.

Morello found mussel larvae can recognize and respond to a broad range of odor cues when deciding whether to settle in wild beds or on aquaculture lines.

And, says Morello, the predator odors he used are from species that do not directly feed on mussel larvae, or even on newly settled mussels. The odors were from predators that feed on older mussels, which indicates larvae assess future risk on some level when they make settlement decisions.

Read the full story at the Boothbay Register

Ocean acidification threatens future of aquaculture, shellfish industries

October 29, 2015 — In seawater tanks in a refrigerated room at the Darling Marine Center, the baby mussels are thriving.

Two months ago they were near-invisible larvae, swimming around in the tanks. Now tens of thousands of the tiny mollusks, each just a few millimeters long, have attached themselves to the different kinds of rope scientists have been testing here, and are eating the lab’s stock of algal food at an impressive clip.

Mick Devin, the lab manager at this University of Maine marine research facility, has been overseeing this experiment, part of an effort to master the art of hatching mussels, something mussel farmers – who grow their product on lines hanging in seawater – have never previously needed to do.

“Mussel farmers have been able to just throw their lines out and collect all the larvae they want from nature,” Devin says. “But mussel populations are down drastically in this state, so that may not be working so well now.” Hatcheries, he expects, may have to step up in the not-too-distant future.

Mussels have been vanishing from stretches of coastline where they once were ubiquitous, and scientists remain uncertain as to why. Green crabs, whose population exploded after an “ocean heat wave” in 2012, may have stripped many sections clean. But warmer water and increased rainfall – both problems expected to grow in Maine as a result of global climate change – may be creating a far worse problem: an acid sea.

“We know this affects larval development in bivalves, (and) chances are it will result in decreased numbers, whether it’s a natural population on a bed or one in a farm,” says Paul Rawson of the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences, who is in charge of the research. “We need to make sure the technology is in place so the farms will have a reliable source of seed.”

The world’s oceans are turning more acidic. Since the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have grown by more than 70 percent and now stand at the highest level in at least 800,000 years. As the oceans absorb additional CO2, they’ve become 30 percent more acidic over this period. By 2050, scientists estimate surface pH levels will be lower – that is, more acidic – than at any time in several million years and by 2100 more acidic than any time in the past 300 million years – two or three times more so than today.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald