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Coastal Maine Marine Ecology
Marine Ecology | Sunrise | Terrestrial Ecology
Coastal Maine is a wonderful place to investigate marine ecology with kelp and barnacle crowded coastal cliffs, tide pools packed with fascinating marine invertebrates and an abundance of coastal and marine vertebrates including bald eagles, porpoises and seals.
For the first time in a decade of offering this course, we caught lobsters in the intertidal waters. This one looks like he is having a bad day "NO, not the pot, please not tha!" (No worries, this was National Park waters, so all the critters went back where we found them.)
The students pose with their lobsters, 8 in total collected at the tidal riffle at the outlet of Schooner Harbor. At low tide this narrow channel runs like a stream between tides, but never dries up, providing abundant and diverse intertidal marine life that is easy to access.
A rock gunnel, a species of intertidal fish.
Gretchen Harz '12 and Dan Chilton '13 look under rocks in the tidal riffle, a sure way to find marine invertebrates.
An intertidal microcosm: a sea cucumber (the oval ball on the left), a carnivorous polychaete worm, snails, kelp, coralline and crusteose algae (the pink stuff).
Mary Kelley '11 and Duncan Leech '11 show off some of the larger kelp species.
Tyler Spooner '12 and Duncan Leech '11 look for critters, note all the species of algae and sea grasses in the background. This site was packed with a diversity of marine life.
The claw of the green crab, Carcinus maenas.
The site of the tide pool lab at Wonderland as the students write in their journals after a long day of data collection.
The largest of the tide pools we sampled.
Ian Hall '12 writing in his journal and no doubt thinking fond thoughts of the great meal that was awaiting us back at the Mount Desert Island Biological Lab.
Brittany Palasik '12 and Alyssa Forget '12 writing in their journals.
A starfish collected from the intertidal rocks behind the MDI Biological Lab.
The student pose in front of 'star rock' a natural formation in the cliffs surrounding the MDI Biological Lab. Note the horizontal bands of kelp and barnacles, the object of our data collection on this day.
Tyler Spooner '12 and Gretchen Harz '12 count barnacles (ah, science is not always glamorous!) in the rocky intertidal zone.
Course TA Robert Storck '13 and students Duncan Leech '11, Derek Tetzner '13 and Brendyn Meisinger '13 geared up in their kayaking life preservers and 'skirts.' The guide wouldn't let us call them 'kilts' though it sounded much more manly to us.
Everyone prepares to get into their kayaks for a tour of historic Bar Harbor and the Porcupine Islands from the water.
A nature cruise around Frenchman's Bay on the MV Acadian. The tour guides on this cruise are incredibly knowledgeable about the geology, oceanography, ecology, wildlife, culture and history of the area and we all learned a lot.
Seals come to the waters around Bar Harbor in May every year to pup and wean their young.
A baby seal and its protective mother.
Mary Kelley '11 and Ian Hall '12 enjoy the wildlife.
We also saw porpoises on the cruise.
The schooner Woodwind out of Bar Harbor against the backdrop of a classic Maine coastline.
One of several bald eagles we saw during the cruise.