The Wrack

It’s that time of year… fall is in the air and (if you’re a brook trout) love is in the air too! October and November is prime spawning time for Eastern Brook Trout. They’ve been fattening up all summer on aquatic insects. Now the mature females have bellies full of eggs and are looking for a spots with cold, clear water and loose, clean gravel where they can make their nests, called redds.

Researchers in the Coastal Ecology Center recently received a call from the Harbor Master at Wells Harbor asking if someone would come down and look at a "strange" fish that came up in one of the local lobsterman's trap. Upon arrival at the harbor we were greeted by this "visitor" to our waters. It is a …

The Shoreys Brook dam came out in November 2011, and since then the brook has been steadily carving its way through the sediment that has collected for over a century in the impoundment. Vegetation is starting to take hold in places, but it will be a few years before it begins to look like anything but a large mud pit. As old sediment flushes away, older substrates begin to emerge along the stream bottom, showing signs of what the brook once looked like. Gravel, cobble stones, and even boulders can now be seen littering the stream, which is a positive sign for the restoration team. Rainbow smelt are looking for just this type of stream bottom to lay their eggs on in the early spring.

In the summer of 2009, Marissa Hammond came to us as a wide-eyed UNE freshman with little experience in research science. She has since blossomed into a NOAA scholarship award winner who has been accepted into a highly respected graduate program in fisheries management and policy. Here is what she had to say about how the Wells Reserve played a part in that journey…

I am currently a senior at the University of New England, where I’m pursuing a degree in Marine Biology and Environmental Studies. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to intern at the Wells Reserve studying larval and juvenile fish in the Webhannet Estuary.

For years now, we've been handing out Seafood Watch pocket guides so people can make more careful decisions about what fish and shellfish to buy or avoid. The Monterey Bay Aquarium publishes regional guides, so the information is tailored to residents of the northeast, for example.

Now the aquarium has made ocean-friendly seafood recommendations even more convenient for smartphone users with its Seafood Watch app for iPhone or Android. At our house, the printed "pocket guide" often lived under a magnet on the refrigerator or got pierced by a thumbtack on the bulletin board, rarely making the trip to market. Now we will have the critical data in hand, as our mobile devices don't get left behind.

Here are a few portraits shared by Jeremy Miller from the 2008 ichthyoplankton surveys.

I am on board the EPA Ocean Survey Vessel BOLD, with the opportunity to do ichthyoplankton (larval fish) monitoring at sea to supplement the nearly weekly ichthyoplankton tows my fellow intern Amanda has been doing this summer at Wells Harbor.  We are interested in comparing the types of larval fish that are present a little way out to sea with those present in the harbor. Darcie Ritch, another summer intern who is working on her master’s degree at Antioch New England, is hoping to use the larval fish data I’m helping to collect on this trip in her masters project. Here is one of the first creatures we caught, a tiny lobster.

The EPA’s OSV BOLD is dedicated to environmental research at sea.  This specific trip goes from Boston to Casco Bay and back, and is focused on collecting water samples to help establish nutrient limits (the maximum quantities of nitrates and phosphates in the water that will still allow healthy animal and plant life and clean water for fishing, kayaking, and other uses) for coastal waters.

To learn more about the OSV BOLD, and to see more photos and some videos of research at sea, check out http://epa.gov/boldkids/!

Last Tuesday, June 7, the Reserve's education team made a morning low tide visit to Laudholm Beach as part of new staff training. They were treated to a most amazing sighting of a bright red, approximately 15 inch long Sea Raven! David Word, a Wells Reserve visitor from Kentucky, was nearby and had his camera. Below are two images of the fish that David so generously emailed today. …

About the Project

The Maine Road-Stream Crossing Survey determines where poor design or degraded condition of road culverts hampers the ability of fish to access upstream or downstream habitat. This information helps project partners to set priorities for restoring critical fish habitat sites.

For this project, Wells Reserve workers visited all road-stream culverts along the Kennebunk River, from its mouth on the border of Kennebunk and Kennebunkport to its far reaches in Lyman.

About the Project

In 2008, a group of citizens and conservation groups met to discuss the possibility of returning native migratory fish runs to the Mousam and Kennebunk Rivers. Out of these discussions a plan was formulated to gather information about the historic and current condition of these fish and to begin to spread the word to the local communities. In 2009, Maine Rivers hosted a conference where river stakeholders came together to discuss the rivers and share knowledge. At the same time, the Wells Reserve began monitoring the current status of migratory fish in the rivers.