As mentioned in the previous post, we’ve been joined this year by Samantha McGarrigle, a senior at Unity College in Unity, ME. Samantha is a native of Hampden, ME. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Marine Biology and plans to continue on to study marine community ecology in graduate school after graduating from Unity next spring.
Samantha McGarrigle, intern extraordinaire
Sam’s main role with us this summer is to help document and investigate offshore floating macroalgal mat communities. In previous surveys, we noted that some birds seemed to be associated with such “seaweed” mats floating far offshore, and that the mats seemed to harbor little micro-communities of nearshore fish and invertebrates. Steve Kress and Paula Shannon of the National Audubon Society’s Project Puffin contacted us about seeing puffins return to colonies with rockweed, so we all wondered if these mats might provide easily detectable foraging opportunities for birds looking for small fish. This summer we hope to get a better sense of the distribution and abundance of these mats, in addition to sampling their associated communities that we have only glimpsed in previous work.
One of many floating macroalgal mats that we observed on downeast transects last summer.
Sam will be surveying for algal mats from the bow, alongside the bird observer (Aly or Andrew), so that we can document the location and approximate size of each mat we encounter on transect. She will be collecting meiofaunal (tiny animals) samples from up to 20 mats that she will be analyzing in conjunction with Dr. Emma Perry of Unity College. Dr. Robin Seeley (Cornell, Shoals Marine Laboratory) may be joining us for a day during the later part of the survey to help further the investigation.
To date, however, we have yet to observe a single algal mat on transect in 2016! If memory serves, though, we observed them mostly (if not entirely) in the downeast transects in previous surveys. As we are fond of saying, though, “zeroes are data, too!” – knowing where the mats are NOT may be just as important as knowing where they ARE. After all, there are no puffins in this part of the Gulf of Maine either – coincidence? (Probably.)
Until next time!
The Gulf of Maine Coastal Ecosystem Survey 