The Wrack
The Wrack is the Wells Reserve blog, our collective logbook on the web.
MIMIC Report for 2018
Posted by
| December 4, 2018
| Filed under: Program Activities
Maine's contributions to the Marine Invader Monitoring and Information Collaborative just keep growing!
Highlights of Monitoring in 2018
People
Our faithful MIMIC volunteers put in another great year of monitoring this year. We just could not accomplish so much without all the time our incredible citizen scientists put into these important surveys.
Places
This summer marked a decade of monitoring at some of our longest running sites. We monitored at 14 locations from Kittery to Casco Bay this year. Over the winter I'll be looking at data from some of these sites to see if we can say anything about changes in abundance or species composition over the last decade.
Things
Did you know each MIMIC volunteer carries a handy ID guide into the field? Each page depicts one of 16 established or 7 potential invaders, with identification tips and natural history information. The whole series can be downloaded from the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management website.
Reading List
To show that all this work is not for naught, I'm providing a few links to recent articles—including one that features our very own MIMIC volunteer, Dr. Markus Frederich of the University of New England.
- In the Boston Globe, David Abel on kelp: Vital to the region’s waters, kelp suffers as the Gulf of Maine warms
- In the New York Times, Melissa Gomez on green crabs: ‘Highly Aggressive’ Green Crabs From Canada Menace Maine’s Coast
- In the Bangor Daily News, Bill Trotter on tunicates: A creature that looks like ‘pancake batter’ is thriving in the warming Gulf of Maine