August 21, 2025 — The Maine Department of Marine Resources’ (DMR) Aquaculture Division has purchased a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to assess aquaculture lease applications, replacing a failing older model.
The remote vehicle was purchased with USD 51,024 (EUR 43,934) in funding from the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center (MAIC)
August 21, 2025 — From afar, the series of 100-meter rings that constitute an Atlantic salmon farm site in the Gulf of Maine appear unchanged since the transition from steel cages to high-density polyethylene pens in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Atlantic salmon aquaculture has been practiced in Maine since the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the first commercial lease being issued by the Maine Department of Marine Resources for a farm site in Cobscook Bay near Eastport in 1982. The industry has evolved and modernized tremendously since then, with the adoption of precision farming defining the last 20 years or so.
So what is precision farming? Also known as precision agriculture, precision farming refers to the use of advanced technologies and data analysis to optimize farming practices. Farmers who embrace precision farming, in theory, increase efficiency and productivity and minimize environmental impact.
For aquatic farmers, that translates to more precise and scalable ways to feed fish and to monitor fish health and growth, ocean conditions and water quality.
Cooke USA has been farming Atlantic salmon in Maine since 2004, celebrating 20 years of aquaculture operations in the state last year. Today, Cooke USA’s operations consist of marine farm sites in Downeast Maine, a processing plant in Machiasport, and three land-based freshwater hatcheries in both the eastern and western parts of Maine. Its fresh farmed Atlantic salmon is sold at supermarkets and restaurants throughout New England and the United States.
It was around the early 2000s that the company, and the industry by and large, began embracing precision farming. It’s what a passerby on a boat or an onlooker from the shore can’t see that’s revolutionizing Atlantic salmon aquaculture in Maine and globally — hardware such as underwater cameras and sensors, which have been used for years, and the AI-enable software behind the hardware.
August 15, 2025 — The state says there’s more than one reason behind the recent shark sightings off Maine’s coast, and climate change is one of them.
On Monday, drone video captured a shark, believed to be a great white that was 10 to 12 feet long, near Richmond Island, Higgins Beach, and Scarborough Beach.
It was spotted again near Pine Point Beach on Tuesday.
Matt Davis, a scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, says shark sightings are becoming more common because people are more on the lookout and warming waters in Maine are something sharks are “warming up to.”
August 11, 2025 — Maine’s coastal communities have been hooked on the Atlantic bluefin tuna since at least the late 1880s—first as bycatch, until the 1930s when the fish became a prized target in fishing tournaments. Through the subsequent decades, bluefin tuna have and continue to support working waterfronts in Maine and beyond.
Despite a decline in prices, a single bluefin tuna can land over $10,000, and in 2024 alone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that commercial and recreational landings exceeded 3.5 million pounds, fueling a range of economic activities from food markets to boat building and gear sales.
Sammi Nadeau (’18, ’21G), the lab manager at UMaine’s Pelagic Fisheries Lab, conducted a study recently published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series that illustrated a shift in the tuna’s diet and described the role of foraging in the tuna’s lifecycle.
“You can imagine that those migrations from across the ocean and things like reproduction are extremely energetically demanding,” said Nadeau, “So being able to get a really good meal, fill back up and get ready to go back across the ocean is important to fulfill their life history.”
August 7, 2025 — Last year, Harpswell oyster farmer Samantha Bohan learned the town was considering a one-year moratorium on new aquaculture leases because of concerns about their impact on traditional fishing.
Bohan had just started her own farm a year earlier and was worried she wouldn’t be able to renew her two small, annual leases. Instead, Harpswell created a working group to study the issue, and Bohan volunteered to serve on it.
“It’s kind of funny. I always told my husband I don’t ever want to get into politics,” she said in an interview. “And he said, ‘The moment you got an oyster farm, you signed up for politics.’”
Created in May 2024, the town’s Aquaculture Working Group set out to examine how Maine’s aquaculture licensing process works, assess its impact on Harpswell and gather public feedback on the growing number of seafood farms in local waters.
The group’s efforts culminated in the creation of a new map of local commercial fishing areas, which it urged state officials to use when evaluating applications for aquaculture leases to help avoid conflicts with fishermen. Its final meeting was on June 11.
August 6, 2025 — Much of the scallop farming techniques used in the U.S. derive from practices in Japan, where scallops have long been a part of the country’s seafood industry. Researchers from the University of Maine are working to test and adapt those practices to help grow the industry in the Gulf of Maine, where oyster farming is currently the most well-known form of aquaculture in Maine’s blue economy.
Building off a four-year study published in the spring, which compared the effectiveness of two different Atlantic sea scallop farming techniques, UMaine researchers further analyzed the economic advantages and disadvantages of the same two methods of scallop aquaculture. Lead researcher Damian Brady, professor of marine sciences at UMaine, and co-author Chris Noren, a postdoctoral researcher, used their results to develop a user-friendly application that helps interested parties compare the different costs and possibilities associated with building their own scallop farms.
“Now new farmers can make educated decisions on what option is going to be most viable for them, taking into account their location, timeframe, budget and all the other pieces that go into scallop farming,” Brady said. “Ultimately, our goal is to help Maine grow this industry to its fullest potential and preserve Maine’s working waterfronts—an integral part of the state’s culture and history.”
Published in the journal Aquaculture, the study looked at two of the most common options for scallop farming: lantern net and ear-hanging. Previously, lantern net methods were thought to be more cost-effective, but this study shows the ways in which the ear-hanging method can be more cost-efficient over a longer period of time.
August 4, 2025 — This story is part of “Cultivating the Coast,” a special report that explores Harpswell’s rapidly growing aquaculture industry.
Last year, Harpswell oyster farmer Samantha Bohan learned the town was considering a one-year moratorium on new aquaculture leases because of concerns about their impact on traditional fishing.
Bohan had just started her own farm a year earlier and was worried she wouldn’t be able to renew her two small, annual leases. Instead, Harpswell created a working group to study the issue, and Bohan volunteered to serve on it.
“It’s kind of funny. I always told my husband I don’t ever want to get into politics,” she said in an interview. “And he said, ‘The moment you got an oyster farm, you signed up for politics.’”
Created in May 2024, the town’s Aquaculture Working Group set out to examine how Maine’s aquaculture licensing process works, assess its impact on Harpswell, and gather public feedback on the growing number of seafood farms in local waters.
The group’s efforts culminated in the creation of a new map of local commercial fishing areas, which it urged state officials to use when evaluating applications for aquaculture leases to help avoid conflicts with fishermen. Its final meeting was on June 11.
August 1, 2025 — Jared Golden of Lewiston represents Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
This piece was originally published on July 31 in “Dear Mainer,” Golden’s Substack. It is reposted here in its entirety, with permission.
I had a few goals when I successfully pushed to get a seat on the House Natural Resources Committee, but chief among them was using the position to advocate for the men and women who work on Maine’s waters.
It was only three years ago that Maine’s lobster industry was on the verge of shutting down because of a regulatory process that was based on flawed interpretation of federal law and biased modeling that relied heavily on hypothetical threats that fisheries posed to the North Atlantic right whale.
That is why one of my proudest accomplishments in Congress was the successful effort in 2022 — working with the entire Maine delegation and our governor on a bipartisan basis — to enact a moratorium on these regulations until 2028, coupled with additional funding to support right whale research.
However, based on developments in the last few years and my conversations with fishermen, I believe more time is needed to incorporate the research and data collected during the pause into future right whale regulations.
July 31, 2025 — The Trump administration has erased all wind energy areas in federal waters, including two million acres in the Gulf of Maine.
The zones were developed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to offer wind power leases to energy developers.
Amber Hewett director of offshore wind energy at the National Wildlife Foundation said removing the areas is a follow up to the administration’s earlier order to stop all wind power lease sales.
“The change here is that now, when a new administration comes in, those areas won’t be ready and waiting. They have been deleted, and the process will need to start again at the beginning,” Hewett said.
Establishing the areas took years of consultation with fisheries, coastal communities, shipping companies, tribes, environmental groups and other interests.
Through those discussions regulators set aside areas that were the least disruptive, Hewett said.
July 31, 2025 — “We’ll start with six lobster rolls,” the man in sunglasses and madras shorts said when he reached the front of the line at McLoons Lobster Shack on the tip of Sprucehead Island in Maine.
That was only his opening bid. By the time everyone in his family had weighed in, his lobster roll count was up to nine.
There are other things on the menu at McLoons — chowders and burgers and grilled littleneck clams — but the lobster roll outsells them all by far.
On the Sunday in July I spent at McLoons, in South Thomaston, Me., the place never got truly mobbed. The sky was the color of a fishing sinker and everyone knew an afternoon thunderstorm was on the way. But still they came, the locals and the visitors, almost all of them with the same thing in mind. As Mariah Watkinson, who was working the order window, put it, “There’s usually a lobster roll in every order.”
In 2012, McLoons Lobster Shack’s first season, its manager, Bree Birns, worked almost completely alone and sold about 40 lobster rolls a day. Now, on a busy summer day, the shack will make 500 of them, and she needs 10 full-time workers and 16 part-timers to keep up.
In the intervening 13 years, the demand for lobster rolls has been pushed higher and higher by forces that are often external to Maine. Entrepreneurs in New York City and Los Angeles, taking advantage of deflated lobster prices and the ascent of trucks, stalls and windows devoted to affordable, portable treats, helped build a vast, urban audience for the sandwich. One of these businesses, Luke’s Lobster, now sells about a million lobster rolls a year at its shacks in 12 states, Singapore and Japan.