September 24, 2025 — The Maine lobster industry, along with e-commerce suppliers and restaurants, are promoting the crustacean during National Lobster Day on 25 September and Maine Lobster Week, which runs from 21-28 September.
National Lobster Day honors the hardworking individuals who sustain Maine’s iconic lobster fishery, the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative (MLMC) said in a press release.
September 10, 2025 — On a sunny, 85-degree day in August of 2025, some 9,300 oysters were loaded into ice-filled containers on southern Maine’s Casco Bay. The boat shuttling them from the warm, shallow waters of Recompense Cove to the marina two miles away hummed quietly. Notably missing: the roar of an engine and the smell of diesel.
Heron, the boat in question, is a 28-foot aluminum vessel that runs on two 100% electric outboards, the motors that hang off of small and medium-sized boats. It’s one of the first commercial workboats in the United States to use electric outboards. The vessel officially splashed into the waters of South Freeport, Maine on July 17, 2025. The moment, though, had been years in the making. It required a coalition of industry-wide partners, a $500,000 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant, and at least that much in matching funds from the operating businesses’ cost share agreement and philanthropic investments through the Rockland, Maine-based Island Institute, the Maine Technology Institute, and others. Altogether, the $1 million private-public investment covers Heron’s $425,000 sticker price and the costs to install two high-capacity shoreside chargers. A portion of these funds also supports data collection and research to assess the viability of electric technology in the greater aquaculture industry.
Willy Leathers is the director of farm operations and owner of Maine Ocean Farms, the mid-size aquaculture business that operates this particular boat. The 10-acre plot he and farm co-founder Eric Oransky tend to on Recompense Cove holds about 3 million oysters. The two farmers are among a growing group of small business owners on the cutting edge of marine innovation along rural and remote parts of Maine’s coast. They’ve been in operation together just shy of a decade, and have seen the aquaculture industry spring up around them in the coves and small islands that make up Casco Bay. Beyond the bay is the wide-open Gulf of Maine, which has been documented as one of the world’s fastest-warming bodies of water. Between 2004-2016, it warmed more quickly than 99% of the global ocean, a trend scientists attribute to climate change caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
September 10, 2025 — Awarded in 2019, the NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 Maine-eDNA project has reached the conclusion of its NSF funding. The program, which investigated Maine’s coast, inland lakes and the waterways in between, championed environmental DNA (eDNA) as a powerful and cost-effective approach to monitoring an environment as small as a stream to as large as Maine’s coastline. Maine-eDNA Co-PI Michael Kinnison, University of Maine professor of evolutionary applications remarked, “The real power that we were seeing for eDNA is being able to look at the biology of the Maine coast at not just local but by very large scales that span habitats. That sort of snapshot of the coastal system is broadly something that’s really hard to get a handle on with other approaches.”
Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences Senior Research Scientist and Geomicrobiologist David Emerson served as a Co-PI for Maine-eDNA and authored the white paper that developed into the project’s proposal. “There are three things that really excite me about eDNA. Scientifically, it is the opportunity to study all organisms, from microbes to whales, within an ecosystem to see how they interconnect; collaboratively, it is the opportunity to work together with researchers from many different disciplines using a common language, DNA, and practically, it is the opportunity to develop an important new tool for ecosystem management and sustainability,” explained Emerson.
This genetic tool leverages the DNA shed by organisms in their environment. Researchers take a sample from the environment, in the case of Maine-eDNA as little as a liter of water, and, depending on method, identify the likely presence of a specific species or range of species in the vicinity. While like any technology there are tradeoffs, this allows researchers to accurately detect species presence in a relatively unobtrusive manner that does not rely on visual identification.
Researchers across Maine saw potential in the technology. “We saw an opportunity to push an emerging technology forward, become a leader in the field and benefit the lives of Mainers,” explained Kody Varahramyan, Maine-eDNA PI and UMaine Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. “Maine-eDNA’s achievements exemplify the power of partnership and collaboration.”
eDNA technology has developed quickly over the past decade. When the original proposal for Maine-eDNA was in its infancy, researchers were exploring the capabilities of eDNA and interested in finding more applications, but the depth of real-world applications was limited. Fast-forward to 2024 and the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy released their National Aquatic Environmental DNA Strategy which directs government offices to invest resources in the technology. During the interim years it was projects like Maine-eDNA that pushed the technology forward by improving methodologies, standardizing approaches, making data accessible to others, and pushing the scope of application into new areas.
Maine in many ways was a perfect testing ground as the technology offered a way for researchers to survey the vast expanse of Maine’s waters over the course of several years at a fraction of the price presented by other approaches. A survey of this size also demands the standardization and ground truthing the technology needed. Maybe most importantly, the project put eDNA technology in the hands of students, researchers, resource managers, businesses and other stakeholders through outreach and collaboration.
August 21, 2025 — The current federal moratorium on whale rule regulations could be extended from 2028 to 2035, and local stakeholders are sharing their thoughts with the Islander on what the proposed extension could mean for the lobster industry and the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
Last month, U.S. Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) urged the House Natural Resources Committee to extend a moratorium on regulations aimed at the lobster industry and designed to help protect the North Atlantic right whale from gear entanglements.
Golden said that the initial moratorium listed in the Maine Mammal Protection Act, which lasts from 2023 to 2028, is not enough time for the Maine government to gather data that would inform new regulations.
Several conservationists and scientists, on the other hand, think that there is already enough data to support implementing the original regulations.
“The premise behind the original regulations has since been struck down by the courts. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service had distorted the science and relied on egregiously wrong interpretations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in crafting its proposed rules,” Golden told the Committee on July 22. “The Court admonished the agency for basing its edicts on arbitrary, worst-case scenarios that were ‘very likely wrong.’”
He argued that an extended moratorium would provide adequate time for the state of Maine to collect data to inform new regulations.
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.