“Are we going to be dissecting something?” a Great Salt Bay third-grader asked as he entered the classroom. When he got a whiff of the empty petri dish in front of him, he announced, seemingly pleased with his guess: “Yup, this smells dissected.” For the next 45 minutes, he and other students learned about oyster […]

Oxford University postdoctoral researcher Michelle Taylor discovered two coral species while working with University of Maine oceanographer Rhian Waller and marine science students Genevieve Wilson and Jennifer Field at the Darling Marine Center. “It is unusual to find new ones, and that is definitely exciting,” Taylor says. In England, Taylor will describe the corals’ characteristics […]

Despite an abundance of egg-bearing adult lobsters and record-breaking harvests, the number of young lobsters continues to fall in the Gulf of Maine. That’s the 2016 update from the American Lobster Settlement Index (ALSI), an international monitoring program founded in 1989 by University of Maine marine scientist Rick Wahle. The ALSI, a collaboration between fishermen […]

Skylar Bayer, a graduate student in the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences, successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole. Dr. Rick Wahle was her advisor. With a background in deep sea ecology, Bayer came to the DMC in 2011 to study the fertilization and reproductive ecology of commercially important fisheries species. Focusing on […]

By nature, Bob Steneck is an glass-half-full kind of guy. The University of Maine marine ecologist will join other hopeful scientists, environmentalists, civic leaders and media from around the world at the Smithsonian Earth Optimism Summit in Washington, D.C. on Earth Day weekend. He’ll be one of the approximately 250 speakers to share examples of […]

A hole in the ice is not just a sign of the traditional Maine ice fishermen. It’s also a passageway to a beautiful underwater world that requires confidence and a special set of skills to safely explore. A group of divers from the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center took the plunge, training as ice […]

Dr. Rick Wahle and graduate student Carl Huntsberger are testing a new technique for aging lobsters at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center in Walpole. Wahle pointed out that unlike fish, mollusks and trees, lobsters and other crustaceans molt, casting off their skeletons and discarding any outer signs of growth bands. That means a […]