In the Shellfish and Restoration Project, students work with clam harvesters and town officials to collect data used in making decisions about managing the fishery. What follows are the most recent posts. Use the “Tag Cloud” or search function at the bottom of the page to find additional posts.
Shellfish Lab – Getting Started
Work on the shellfish lab is finally starting! This is a picture of the lab entrance. We want you to know that renovation plans include replacing the pallet with stairs! On January 27, three of us got together inside the lab-to-be to make a list of materials to begin turning what was a clam buying station into a shellfish lab. I took pictures so you could come on inside, take a look, and join us in envisioning what the lab can be.
Gouldsboro’s Shellfish Resilience Lab
Gouldsboro has begun work on its Shellfish Resilience Laboratory and will have it operational by this spring. Located in Bunkers Harbor, the Resilience Lab is not only a key element in Gouldsboro’s program to restore clam flats to productivity and sustainability, but will also collect data and develop know-how that other Maine communities can use to manage municipal shellfish operations as Maine’s climate changes.
Clams to Data to Questions
What did we find? That was the question that Sumner Memorial High School Students began to answer as they analyzed the samples that they helped collect from John Small Cove in late October, 2017. This post is a little bit about clams and a lot more about supporting productive inquiry in the classroom. It revisits work students did three years ago, but that work, both in the classroom and on the clam flats, is still relevant today.
Giving DMR a Hand in John Small Cove
Schoodic Institute uses the word “authentic” to describe student scientific investigations that addresses real community problems and questions. It is also authentic because students learn by working with professional scientists and, along the way, learn that science goes on outside as well as inside, requires hard work, and sometimes involves getting dirty and, as this picture shows, can require some agility.
Setting Up and Deploying the Plastic Plant Pot Experiment
This post provides detailed instructions about how to set out the plastic plant pot experiments that are at the heart of work that students do in CSI-Maine. It provides a list of materials and tells you what to do with them. If any of this is confusing or seems to leave something, please tell us […]
2018 Gouldsboro Study – Part 1 – The Experiments
During 2018 the Gouldsboro shellfish committee and the CSI-Maine project set out “experimental units” — our “plant pot” experiments — in two coves that were once productive but had become so overrun by crabs that they were considered to be “dead mud.” In the spring of 2019, a team of students in the Pathways program at Sumner Memorial High School analyzed the data so that they could be presented to the shellfish committee and others on March 20. In this post we describe the design of the experiments and the coves where they were set out. A subsequent post describes what the students found.
The Shellfish Project Over the School Year
The way that CSI-Maine fits into the school year strongly influenced by the clam lifecycle. Clams grow over the summer, which means that teachers and students set out their experiments in the spring and collect data in the fall. This is a nice fit to the school year in many ways. It provides an opportunity […]
The Green Crab Lifecycle
The European green crab (Carcinus maenas) arrived in the New York and New Jersey ports in the early 1800s, spread to Casco Bay by the 1890s, and continued to spread northward to Downeast Maine and the Bay of Fundy over the twentieth century (Fulton et al., 2013). It is a voracious predator, but until recently […]
The Clam Lifecycle
There are many reasons that it will be useful for students to have an understanding of the softshell clam (Mya arenaria) life cycle as they work as part of CSI-Maine. It will help them understand when clams are most vulnerable to predators, how long it takes for a clam to reach legal size, why there […]
CTTM in the classroom Field Work Gouldsboro Green crabs Inquiry Lifecycle Methods Population Predation Public Water Systems Sampling Shellfish Lab Student Work Tuva Water Quality Standards