Features:
Seabirds and the struggle against marine debris in the Gulf of Maine // FWS
About an hour off the coast of Maine lie some of the state’s most unique environments: tiny sea islands that are often little more than piles of rocks with shrubs growing in the middle. They’re largely uninhabited, save for colonies of nesting seabirds. Yet even these remote patches of wild are not immune to the pervasive hand of human influence. Even before we reach shore, I see it: hundreds of lobster traps, buoys, and ropes melded into mountains three or four feet high. “That’s not even half of it. The other side is so much worse. This looks good compared to the rest,” Michael Langlois, fish and wildlife biologist at Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge (MCINWR), tells me as I climb out of the motorboat into the small dingy that we’ll take to shore on Hart Island. |
Who gives a dam about river herring? Removing dams has returned 3 million migratory fish to the Penobscot River; here’s why that matters // FWS
What does it matter, really, that thousands of miles of river flowing through the middle of Maine have been the subject of years of restoration work? What is behind the fact that the Penobscot is open, unobstructed and free for fish to swim up, past the sites of former dams? The work spans 20 years, coordinated by an interlocking list of partners so long, so sprawling that I won’t even attempt to name them all here.* Since the 1990s, they’ve removed, restored, remediated and relicensed so many dams that I have spent literal hours working my way up the Maine river on a map, plotting, point by point, the sites of each project (of the 20+ dams in the watershed, 2 have been removed, at least 15 upgraded and restored, and 6 are in the process of evaluation, planning, and construction). It’s confusing and intricate and winding. But the outcome is clear: 3 million river herring have returned to this once closed-off watershed. |
Study Stories:
Study with Service author shows how spotted lanternfly spreads: Trains and cars are driving the spread of the invasive pest // FWS
For what it’s worth, Zach Ladin seems like the type of guy for whom a folk festival would spark a scientific epiphany. The supervisory wildlife biologist for the Northeast Region’s Migratory Bird Program has long hair and almost a surfer-dude drawl. A copy of “Dune” sat on the bookshelf behind him, as we chatted about Artificial Intelligence for 10 minutes before getting to our intended topic — a study he led along with colleagues at the U. S. Forest Service, Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and the University of Delaware after witnessing festival-goers disperse to their cars from a packed festival shuttle. It’s a pretty big festival, he explained; people come from all over. As he sat on the shuttle watching a spotted lanternfly crawl across a woman’s backpack, he realized these insects are probably getting into our cars and getting a free ride to spread across the East Coast. That’s basically the thesis of the study that published in “Scientific Reports” this January. Using a simple-but-powerful computer model that tracks the actions of individuals, Ladin and his team found that human dispersal — by way of cars, trucks, trains, etc. — is likely driving the spread of the spotted lanternfly throughout the eastern U.S. |