Q: [0:00] And we’d like to start with just how do you like to introduce yourself?

 

A: [0:04] I typically go by Essie.  My full name is Esther, which is a great name to use at the bank, but yeah, Essie is my name.

 

Q: [0:12] Great, and what year were you born?

 

A: [0:14] I was born in 1999.

 

Q: [0:16] And can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?

 

A: [0:19] Yeah, I grew up in mid-coast Maine.  I grew up in Bremen, Maine, which is sort of down the peninsula from Damariscotta.  There’s a lot of fishermen who live there, so I grew up on the school bus with a bunch of fishermen’s kids which was really quite fun.  There was a lot of spitballs and stuff like that.  But yeah, growing up in Maine was a dream.  I was a little bit of a feral child by some standards, always barefoot.  But yeah, I loved it.  I was always interested in bugs and critters and that sort.  And Maine was a good place to find those.

 

Q: [0:54] Absolutely.  And can you tell me a little bit about your parents where they’re from, maybe what they did when you were growing up?

 

A: [0:58] Yeah, my parents, neither of them is from Maine.  My mom partially grew up in Maine, but she mostly grew up – she was a faculty kid on the campus of Hackley School, which is in upstate New York.  And my dad grew up in the South.  And they both –my mom was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 10, and then she became a children’s librarian.  And now she’s a writer, and she works at the high school that I went to, Lincoln Academy, which contrary to its name, is technically a public school.  And my dad has always worked in economics.  He’s a data analyst for data that informs tax policy that’s angled that helping lower income Mainers.  So yeah, he works for the Maine Center for Economic Policy.

 

Q: [1:47] Great.  And what brought them to Maine, do you know?

 

A: [1:49] My mom’s parents moved here after they stopped working at Hackley.  And my– so my parents originally moved to Mississippi when they first got married, because my dad wanted to give back to the community where he grew up.  And my mom is, you know, sort of from the Northeast, and that didn’t really fly for her.  And so my dad was looking for a similar, like, small community that he could really work closely with.  And there was a job that was open in Maine, and also my mom’s parents are here.  And everything sort of all worked out, and we ended up moving to Damariscotta when I was like three, so I wasn’t born in Maine, but I like to claim it as my own whenever possible.

 

Q: [2:31] Great.  And do you have any siblings?

 

A: [2:32] I do.  I have a younger brother.  His name is JoJo.  He also loves Maine.  He’s worked in marine construction, and he’s a big whitewater kayaker so all the rivers here are great for him.  He’s a musician, and he’s in school right now.

 

Q: [2:49] Great.  Do you have any other siblings?

 

A: [2:51] Just the one.  Yep.

 

Q: [2:53] And do you have any history of fishing or working on the water in your family?

 

A: [2:57] Not in my family, no.  I’m the first.

 

Q: [2:59] Great.  And this could include – just to a double check, grandparents, cousins, relatives, family friends.

 

A: [3:08] Nope.  Just me.

 

Q: [3:10] And can you describe for me a little bit your educational background?

 

A: [3:14] Yeah.  So I went to public schools in Maine through my senior year of high school, and then I went to Bates College for four years.  I have a degree in geology with concentrations in chemistry and creative writing.  Yeah.

 

Q: [3:30] Nice.  And are you married?

 

A: [3:32] I’m not married.  No.

 

Q: [3:35] Do you have any children?

 

A: [3:36] I do not have any children.

 

Q: [3:38] Great.  I’m going to sort of transition. I’m curious if you could take me from your experience at Bates to the modern day, sort of with like timeline with question in mind – how would you describe your current role in the fishing or aquaculture industry in Maine?

 

A: [3:55] Yeah.  So when I was a freshman at Bates, I was applying for summer internships looking at doing marine research.  And I ended up sort of by happenstance in the Brady Lab at the University of Maine, which is based at the Darling Marine Center doing a project on oyster aquaculture and I just fell in love.  I was working at the Bremen Lobster Pound and in that space, I was interacting with fishermen and scientists and aquaculturists and marine policy people like the DMR folks and it was just this amazing, like I loved going through a day and being able to talk to all sorts of kind of people who were all working towards this goal of working on the water and incorporating that into their daily lives. And since then, I’ve been doing aquaculture – mostly research.  So I spent a couple years at the Darling Marine Center as an undergrad, both in the summers.  And then I took a year off during COVID and I was there during COVID.  And then after I graduated, I got a job out at Hurricane Island and that was really great because there was an experimental sea farm right there.  I got to really experience like working on the water in that capacity and keeping the sea farm up to like nearly commercial standard because we wanted our research to be as close to commercial fisheries as possible, but also being out in the bay, interacting with again, fishermen and farmers and the like. I also had the opportunity to work on a kelp farm through like connections at the Darling Marine Center.  And so I did that for four years, I think.  And that was with Peter Fischer and Seth Barker on like – I think it was the original.  I don’t think their farm was the original, but it’s on the original like LPA plot in Clark’s Cove in the Damariscotta River.  So that was kind of a cool piece of history and there they’re like some of the OGs of kelp farming and being with them on the water was still one of my best experiences to date. So after Hurricane Island I’ve transitioned to being in more of the commercial scene on the scallop farming side of things.  And so I’m now working for Andrew Peters at Vertical Bay doing commercial scallop farming and it’s this really interesting point in the scallop farming world from my point of view where it’s still a really new industry and so not a ton of people kind of understand what it’s all about and even we every day are like what are we doing?  I don’t really know.  But we’re figuring it out and we’re starting to actually really sell to commercial restaurants and getting that piece of things working so that the farm is actually making money and functioning and we’re getting our systems down and it’s very exciting.  So  yeah.

 

Q: [6:46] So how many total years now have you been working like with and on the water?

 

A: [6:53] Since 2018.

 

Q: [6:55] Wow.  And what like hooked you – what made you want to do it?

 

A: [7:00] I mean so many things.  I’ve always loved the ocean since I was a kid.  I remember I used to go down – my grandparents live in Brooklin Maine and they have this piece of property that sneaks down to this cove and I used to sneak down to the cove – I was probably eight.  I was really young.  I would steal matches and I would sneak down to the cove and I’d collect little blue mussels and make a fire and eat the blue mussels and that was like my rebellious little eight year old activity.  So I always sort of had that in me.  But actually feeling like I was being involved in the solution of a lot of this stuff. I think like one thing that aquaculture holds for me is so much of the research that I was a part of before getting into aquaculture was like climate change, doomsday predictions, all of that stuff.  And it was – it felt important but it also felt really difficult.  And I think the thing that I love most about aquaculture is that it feels really solutions driven.  We’re reacting in real time to what’s happening on our coast and saying well actually, you know, there are other ways to do this and ways that are regenerative and all of that.  So I think I think that’s like the big idea of what hooked me.  But I also love the day to day just being on boats.  It’s – I love boats.

 

Q: [8:30] What do you love about boats?

 

A: [8:31] I love the problem solving aspect.  Every day is a little bit different.  You never know when the tide and the wind are – what they’re doing.  And I love tying knots. It’s like a really small thing but I really enjoy it.  I actually really like getting muddy.  There’s always a – like since I was a kid there’s always been this joke like Essie’s the muddiest kid on the playground and that that continues to be true at Vertical Bay.  But – yeah.

 

Q: [8:54] And can you tell me a little bit about the work you do at Vertical Bay?

 

A: [8:58] Yeah.  I’m just like a regular old deckhand.  And it’s great.  We get – I wake up at 4:00 every morning, I make my blueberry smoothie and then I walk actually down to the water, which is really lovely.  It’s like the most peaceful part of my day. I say hi to Sheila the skunk.  And we get on the boat at like 4:50 and take off for Cape Rosier, which is where our aquaculture site is.  Usually there’s work to be done on the boat on the way out whether it’s cleaning up gear from the day or taking little twine out of the lines that we use or what be it.  And then we’re day to day everything’s different.  And that’s part of what I love about it. Some days we’re harvesting, some days we’re cleaning, some days we’re ear hanging.  That’s a really cool thing that we’re figuring out how to do at Vertical Bay is growing scallops on lines rather than in nets and it’s just it’s really dynamic and it – the sense of place that I feel when I’m doing this kind of work is pretty incredible.

 

Q: [10:03]  So can you tell me a little bit more about like how you grow the scallops?

 

A: [10:09] Yeah.  So at Vertical Bay we’re doing something that’s called ear hanging. And so we take we collect scallops spat, so this is a whole process in and of itself. In the oyster aquaculture industry there’s a hatchery so you can grow baby oysters in basically a lab setting but scallops are really finicky.  I like to tell kids that they’re the divas of the bivalve world.  And so they have a 40 day planktonic stage before they start to put on shell, which means that they’re really hard to keep alive in that hatchery setting.  And so aquaculturists have figured out is that you can actually collect wild spat.  And so we set out what are called these spat bags that have a like a fine mesh bag with a harder like substrate inside and what happens is the larval scallops they swim in when they’re still small enough to fit through that mesh and they land on the substrate and they say, oh this is like a rocky bottom I can start to live here and they put down their byssal threads and they start to put on shell.  And then by the time we collect those bags they’re what you’d recognize as a scallop.  They’re very small, they’re very cute but they’re there in these bags and it’s pretty incredible. I’ve had the experience a couple times with like putting these bags out in the fall and then you collect the in the spring and there’s like a thousand baby scallops in there  – it’s like kind of out of nowhere.  So we collect those bags in the spring.  I was not a part of that process this year at Vertical Bay but hopefully will be next year.  And we put those into what are called pearl nets, which are sort of pyramid shaped nets that stack on top of one another.  And we let those grow for a couple months and we keep cleaning those nets and thinning the scallops for about a year and then after a year we’ll pull all of the scallops out of the pearl nets and actually drill a hole in they – they’ve got a little notch on the back of their shell, and we’ll drill a hole in that and ear hang them.  So we have these lines that have little plastic barbs that kind of look like a fish hook, and you slide that through the hole and then the fish hook, the little barb part prevents the scallop from falling off.  And we’ll grow them on those lines for another year before we harvest them.

 

Q: [12:22] So is that three years total?

 

A: [12:24] It’s about two and a half.  Yeah.  Yeah, pretty cool.

 

Q: [12:29] Yeah, so you said that’s different than growing them in nets I think?

 

A: [12:33] Yeah, so I don’t know.  I mean the cool thing about the scallop industry in Maine and in the US is that it’s really new here.  We’re just sort of figuring it out.  They’ve kind of got it dialed in Japan.  And so there’s been a lot of information exchange which has been really cool to sort of see from afar.  At some point I’d love to go to Japan and actually see it in person.  So mostly what I’ve seen done on research farms, which are very different from commercial farms is folks grow scallops in what are called lantern nets.  So those are like round nets that sort of look like scallop apartment buildings.  And there’s – there’s stacks of 10 and they sort of sit right on top of one another.  The nice thing about lantern nets is that there’s not as much work on the front end but they’re a lot harder to clean, they get really heavy. The scallops get really biofouled.  And so what we’re seeing with the ear hanging is a lot easier to clean the scallops, it’s a lot easier to harvest them.  So if you’re willing to do that work on the front end and also you have the infrastructure because you need the drill and you need the special lines with the barbs and all that stuff.  It actually ends up being more efficient on the tail end of the process.  Yeah.

 

Q: [13:52] Can you tell me a little bit about your work at Hurricane Island and what that looked like?

 

A: [13:56] Yeah.  I was a research assistant and then a research technician at Hurricane, which are basically the same thing.  I was just helping out with a lot of the research that happened there.  We did some scallop dive surveys where we were looking at places that had been closed for dragging – with the natural dragging process where there’s closures every three years in places.  And then we did like a larval study of setting spat bags and counting all the spat in there to understand the larval supply in the state.  And then I actually – my second year there wrote a grant to do some stable isotope research because my background in academics is in stable isotope geochemistry and so I wanted to look and see if there was a geochemical difference between wild and farmed scallops.  And so I wrote this – I helped write this grant.  We got the grant and then we were doing this research and looking at the difference and hopefully that’ll get published sometime, but with other jobs going on this stuff just starts to slow down.  But we do have some really cool data and it’ll be interesting to hopefully get that out into the world at some point.

 

Q: [15:11] Yeah, I’m curious, can you talk about how like that experience sort of brought you into this one or like how feel skills from that translate?

 

A: [15:18] Yeah, I think that one thing that’s really true of a lot of different sectors of life is like – especially in research, it’s really easy to get disconnected from the thing that you’re researching, and especially in aquaculture where – and fisheries in general where there’s sort of like a distrust of scientists because of regulations and all of that stuff.  There’s a there’s a disconnect that has the potential to form between scientists and growers.  And I – one of my favorite parts of this research has always been actually being on the farm and doing the thing, and tying the knots and getting muddy and so I wanted to – I both love doing that and I also wanted to be really intentional with choosing to work on a commercial farm before deciding to go into research full time, or in addition to going into research full time. So I’m using this as an experience to remain grounded and I’m also finding that I really love it.  I am so excited to go to work on Monday morning – it’s just it’s such a wonderful thing.  I don’t know.  I love being on the water and doing a task and problem solving and all the things.  And it feels like I’m kind of in the right place at the right time with the scallop farming movement that’s happening where people are starting to actually figure out how to do this thing and I’m right there doing it too.  So it’s pretty cool.

 

Q: [17:02] Great.  Yeah.  And then just a few like questions for our – like do you own any licenses or hold any licenses.

 

A: [17:09] I don’t hold any licenses.

 

Q: [17:11] And do you have any experience beyond directly fishing or harvesting.  I’m going to list a few and you just let me know if you have experience in these areas.  In bookkeeping, bait or gear preparation.

 

A: [17:22] In gear preparation, yeah.  Yeah.  I mean a lot of – so we have to make all of our own spat lines, which is a big effort in the fall and also we have to put together those pearl nets that we were talking about and we also have to actually make the dropper lines that are ear hung, so I’ve done all of that.  A lot of time in barns.

 

Q: [17:44] And what about  – and again you’ve mentioned this some, but like any experience you haven’t touched on in research and development, in the hatcheries?  Maybe even anything like that?

 

A: [17:53] I haven’t ever worked in a hatchery.  I don’t know if this counts, but I helped on Hurricane Island that we did some aquaculture workshops, so getting people like just out on the water and seeing what aquaculture was about.  So I helped out with that.  There was also some education with school kids out on Hurricane Island, which was cool to be a part of.

 

Q: [18:13] Yeah.  Can you talk a little bit more about those experiences?

 

A: [18:16] Yeah.  I was I was not the lead on either of those things.  Madison Maier was leading the aquaculture workshops out on Hurricane Island and she’s really a powerhouse and has been doing this for a while.   So she had this idea to bring members of the community in – both who have done aquaculture before and maybe who don’t have as much experience, just to come out and see our experimental sea farm, which is kind of a bite size of like a commercial aquaculture operation.  We’ve got some oysters, a line of mussels, mostly scallops and then kelp from time to time. And so it’s a cool way to like – in a day you can see a lot of different strategies for  doing these things and so she would bring out speakers and people see our farm and do these workshops and maybe learn how to tie knots and maybe learn how to build spat bags.  And so I would help with some of those lessons and taking people out on the boats.  And then Hurricane also does educational programs through the summer and half of that is school programs.  So schools pay and then they bring a class of kids out.  And then we also – and both of those are mostly angled at middle school and high school kids.  And it’s so fun to see how kids interact with the water.  Like showing a kid a whole scallop for the first time when they’ve only seen the meat in the grocery store.  And having it clap at them and sneeze in their faces always is   it’s always – it’s a rush, and that’s who I’ve told that scallops are divas before and they always get a kick out of that which is fun.

 

Q: [19:53] Awesome.  Yeah, thank you.  And do you have any experience in post harvest processing, marketing, trade?

 

A: [20:00] Well at Vertical Bay, there’s only three of us who work full time so we all get to do everything.  Just today I shipped a bunch of scallops off to New York, so that’s part of it and then at the kelp farm that I worked at we did a little bit of that but that was really just dabbling with everything.  Nothing on a large scale.

 

Q: [20:22] And what about anything with like food prep, consumer interface, anything like that?

 

A: [20:26] Not really.

 

Q: [20:27] And then anything beyond what you mentioned already but like advocacy, education, community based organization?

 

A: [20:34] Not with aquaculture.  Yeah.

 

Q: [20:38] Great.  And you already touched that this is like kind of a hard question to answer.

 

A: [20:41] Yeah.

 

Q: [20:42] But like if you could somehow create like your average day, like what are all of the things you might be doing or might be expected to do?

 

A: [20:51] Yeah.  Yeah, I mean, I guess I’ll just walk you through what we normally do.  So we get down to the boat at about 4:50 and we leave Belfast Harbor – and usually there’s things to do on the boat on the way out.  Our farm site is off of Cape Rosier by Pond Island.  And from the surface, it just looks like a couple of buoys, you wouldn’t guess all the scallops that are underneath and so we head over there and grapple the long line and pull it up.  And on any given day we’ll be working with the smallest scallops, the spat.  Tomorrow will be putting spat into pearl nets and dropping those onto the farm, or we’ll be harvesting so we’ll be pulling the adult scallops on the dropper lines off of the farm and grading those and then cleaning them, pressure washing them and shucking them – and then shucking them as we come back into the harbor.  Yeah, that’s part of what makes it so fun is every day is different.  And so we work 12 hours, and some days we work five.  And you kind of never know, so I always pack a big lunch just in case. Yeah, I don’t know if that answers your question.

 

Q: [22:04] Absolutely it does.  And I’m curious how you feel – do you feel like your background or identity shapes your work in the fishing or aquaculture sector in any way?

 

A: [22:13] Yeah, I mean it is interesting to have come in from the research side of things because I think that there is a little bit of mistrust with researchers.  I did – one of my proudest moments last summer when I was working as a research tech at Hurricane Island was I went and I helped out with Marsden Brewer, who’s another scallop farmer off of Stonington.  And we were trying to really get the work done as fast as possible.  And it was like measuring weights of things so it wasn’t like the hardest core science ever.  And but we were just moving scallops around and he looks at me at one point and he goes, you’re a better farmer than you are a researcher.  I was like, yes, this is the highest compliment from someone like Marsden. But it is also really interesting being a woman in aquaculture.  And I think one thing that’s different about aquaculture than fisheries is because it’s a new industry, there isn’t necessarily that historical male dominated side of things or that idea that maybe women don’t belong there quite as much.  And I think that was one thing that was really cool about kelp farming is kelp farming is women are taking over.  It’s amazing.  I mean the kelp farm that I worked at it was mostly women working there and that was such a fun environment to be a part of. On the scallop farm one thing that I’m experiencing is everybody thinks that I’m Andrew’s wife.  They come up to introduce themselves and they say, oh, you must be the wife your son is so cute.  Like, no, I actually just work here.  So that’s been an interesting, it’s just like a funny thing that we laugh about.  But yeah, nobody really expects me to be on the farm.  We come into the dock usually around 2:00 pm, which is like height of ice cream cone time in Belfast so everybody’s down on the water with their ice cream cone.  I get a lot of like, oh, we didn’t expect a woman to come off of that boat.  Or like, oh, you actually work there?  So I definitely get those comments.

 

Q: [24:17] Great.  And how does your work on the water interacted with any family or caregiver responsibilities you might have if you have any?

 

A: [24:24] I don’t at this point.  Thankfully, my grandparents are getting to the point where that’s going to be a concern soon – so we’ll see how that shapes.  My grandmother actually came out on the farm last week and helped do some ear hanging.  So that was funny.  She’s just standing there putting the scallops on the line.  So no, not at this point.

 

Q: [24:46] What was that like to have your grandma out with you?

 

A: [24:48] It was really fun.  She’s a potter.  She actually made that mug that you’re drinking out of.  And she spent some time in Japan learning Japanese pottery techniques.  And in Japan, when they’re doing this ear hanging, it’s like a big community effort.  And so Andrew was saying that it’s a lot of like, grandmothers who come and help with the ear hanging. And so my grandmother was – she was very excited to know that she was connected to that all the way on the other side of the earth, but yeah, she’s always learning and it’s cool to see how excited she’s been about aquaculture.  She didn’t know anything about it before I started.  And now she’s all about it.

 

Q: [25:32] That’s awesome.  I’m going to sort of transition into questions about environmental change.  Can you tell me just any changes in the marine environment that you’ve noticed in your time researching and working on the water?

 

A: [25:43] Yeah, I mean, that’s an interesting question because I’ve worked on the water for a couple of years, but it’s been mostly in different locations around the state.  And so it’s hard for me to say like, necessarily what’s new in the last couple of years versus what’s just a different environment.  We had those big storms this winter and I was working at an oyster farm at that point.  And the other folks who were working at the oyster farm were out of town the day that the first big storm hit.  And I got this frantic call from one of the lobstermen who was like, your gear’s all over the place, it’s not anchored at all.  And so I went down and I like, I got in a little skiff and sort of re-anchored everything. But yeah, I mean, it was, you know, it’s tough to – like one of these storms could take out a year’s worth of product for someone if you’re not careful.  And it’s hard to know how to be careful with these irregular weather patterns is the other side of things. Yeah, I mean, I feel like there’s more sea squirts.  Like that’s one thing that I’ve noticed.  The kelp farm I was there for a number of years and so I got to sort of see some of that change and one thing that was interesting about that is that like some years I noticed like the kelp snails.  Some years like the kelp snails would come in really soon and like early in the season and some years they’d hold off and it was, you couldn’t really predict it, which was sort of a funny thing about that.  But I don’t know, there was always different amounts of kelp snails.

 

Q: [27:27] Yeah.  And I’m curious like with the storms, like what effects did you see from that?  Were you able to get like get everything sunk and it was fine or did you have like a big effect from that?

 

A: [27:37] So that oyster farm that I was working at is the Bremen Lobster Pound.  And so it’s got like a structure to it. It’s actually inside the bounds of one of those impoundments and there were definite impacts from that storm on that. Some of the walls, excuse me, came down and we lost some gear.  And definitely some of the docks were impacted.  I mean that the water came up so high it was incredible to see some of the electric blue in the like upweller system that they have there, so yeah, I mean there were definite impacts, but less so than some of the other places. You know, I grew up on the on the Damariscotta peninsula and some of what was happening in Pemaquid and Round Pond was really heartbreaking to see all those old fishing shacks just like disappear into the sea.  It’s pretty intense.

 

Q: [28:36] And what about Vertical Bay?  Were they affected by the storm?  Did they have any issues?

 

A: [28:40] I was not at Vertical Bay at the time, I mean luckily, you know, one of the things that’s different about scallop aquaculture than oyster aquacultures is the gear isn’t floating ever, it’s pretty well sunk.  And so I haven’t actually talked to them about that particular storm to see if they were impacted.  But I would imagine that that gear is a little bit hardier than oyster gear when it comes to those types of storms but plenty of other things will come and mess up our lines.  I mean, currents are really tough on the line.  Sometimes they sway and sort of tangled together.  And we just hope that – it doesn’t stay that way for too long.

 

Q: [29:17] Are there any like environmental changes that people you work for who have like been there longer are really noticing with the scallops?

 

A: [29:23] I think biofouling is changing.  That’s one thing that’s always going to be an issue in aquaculture is like if you’re setting gear for so long plenty of other things will grow on it.  Those invasive sea squirts are really a problem.  They make the gear really heavy and hard to work with and we’re seeing a lot of those, particularly on like our long lines that don’t necessarily get cleaned as often as some of the nets. They just cling on and make it really heavy.  And that’s not so good for the gear because it can drag and those lines can tangle and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, it’ll be interesting.  I think one of the things that’s cool about aquaculture as opposed to wild fisheries is that you’re intentionally choosing to grow a species in an area.  Right?  Like I would never choose to grow oysters at our Vertical Bay site because it’s, you know, it’s out in the bay, the water’s a little colder.  Like that’s not the environment that oysters like and vice versa.  I would never grow scallops in the Bremen Lobster Pound.  And so we’re getting to kind of make some of these choices to adapt to some of the changes that we’re seeing and also to the given environments that we have.  And I think that that’s one really great thing about aquaculture moving forward is that we can kind say OK here’s what we got what are we going to do with that?

 

Q: [30:47] Yeah.  Can you talk a little bit about like other adaptations you might be making, maybe in response to the biofouling or just other things you all are seeing?

 

A: [30:55] Well, the ear hanging is kind of a response to biofouling.  It’s a lot easier to clean the ear hung scallops than the scallops in nets and so the sooner we can get them on those lines, the better, the faster they’ll grow and the easier they’ll be to deal with. Some of the other changes we’re making – yeah, I mean, it’s interesting to think about that because the scallop industry, the scallop farming industry in particular is so new in Maine that I feel like we’re adapting in real time as these things are happening.  And also like figuring out how to do it in the first place and so it’s parsing those things out is interesting to try and do.  But yeah, definitely the ear hanging is a response.  I mean, I remember working at Hurricane and at the Darling Marine Center trying to haul a lantern net onto a boat and it takes like three people to bring it up over the side.  I mean, some of those things weigh 200 pounds and the ear hung lines are definitely a lot easier to deal with.

 

Q: [32:00] Yeah, and with like, with thinking about like designing it towards adaptation or like designing it towards the future, what other things are you guys doing or do you think you’ll do as you look towards the future?

 

A: [32:12] Yeah, I mean, one thing that’s really interesting to me and a this is like my scientist brain always kind of working in the background is that the idea of polyculture.  So like growing multiple species together, both for like any time you can have more species in an area is good.  Monoculture has been really tough for some of the agriculture that we’ve seen and so trying to avoid some of those same downfalls in the ocean is a goal of mine for sure.  But you can also use polyculture to like have species work together and so you know one idea that’s been tossed around is having urchins be in the nets with the scallops because they wont eat the scallops but they’ll eat some of that biofouling. And you know, there’s other things like that that have been tossed around.  I think as much as we can, like one of one of my favorite fun facts is that lumpfish are the second most farmed fish in Norway.  Have you ever seen a lumpfish?  They’re adorable, and it’s because they eat the sea lice in the salmon pens and you can also harvest them and use their roe as a sturgeon caviar substitute.  And so there’s a lot of ways to be dynamic about these problems and having solutions but also if we were to grow urchins in the nets, like we could also sell the urchin roe and that’s another revenue source.  And so there’s – I think the more we can be thinking about those types of solutions the better I think.

 

Q: [33:50] And what do you think makes it possible to make those kind of changes and think about those solutions?

 

A: [33:55] Yeah, I mean it’s being on a commercial farm is really interesting because there’s  that profit incentive, right?  I mean Vertical Bay is still not making money at this point because all of the gear is so expensive and we’re trying to create a market for farmed scallops because people don’t even know that that’s a thing.  So there’s a lot of those hurdles to jump as a commercial farmer.  And so I think that that’s where the research partnership comes in and is really important because in research there’s grants and scientists don’t need to harvest a certain amount of scallops a day to make a living.  And so that’s where I think good research and good farming and good policy can all sort of inform each other and why relationship building is so important within all of this because you need people to be those bridges.  Yeah.

 

Q: [34:52] Yeah, absolutely.  And I’m curious like are there other things you think that Vertical Bay or just like farmers in general are really going to draw on as they look towards the future?  Maybe those are like specific trainings, organizations anything like that?

 

A: [35:07] Well, the University of Maine has been a really great asset and I think has done a really good job of like working with farmers.  I know Struan Coleman who’s also works at Vertical Bay was a masters student at the University of Maine and originally got started because he had some experimental gear on the Vertical Bay farm site and he was using it as a site for his thesis.  And so those sort of relationship building and bridges that are being drawn.  Can you say the question again?  I lost the thread.

 

Q: [35:42] Just thinking about like adaptation and the ability to make it I’m curious this is the longer list.  Are there any resources, relationships, knowledge, training or organizations that you think are going to be really important to draw or that you already have and will into the future.

 

A: [36:02] Well, Vertical Bay got their start with grant money.  They got their first long line with grant money and I think that having those resources and knowing how to access those resources also is really important because there’s plenty of people who are trying to do this work you don’t necessarily know that those resources are available.  And a lot of that is happening by word of mouth.  I know that Sea Grant is doing a great job with partnering with farmers and also working with some of those grants and making connections that way.  I don’t know if this is necessarily answer your question.

 

Q: [36:43] Yeah, no, that was great, and then sort of a transition – what is your biggest concern about the marine environment for the future of Maine’s fisheries and aquaculture?

 

A: [36:52] That’s a tough question.  I mean, there’s so much that’s changing here in the Gulf of Maine, right?  I mean, we’re kind of a canary.  Waters are warming so fast and it’s hard.  You know, I mentioned earlier like one of the great things about aquaculture is that we get to choose what to grow and where to grow it but also, are we going to be able to keep up with that warming and you know with ocean acidification like some of these bivalves can’t put on shell.  And so hoping that this is going to continue to be an option in the future, but there’s only so much we can do at the end of the day if the oceans are changing as rapidly as they are currently.  And I think that that’s another reason why I really love aquacultures is because there’s so much mitigation that’s happening within it.  Bivalves they’re cleaning the water and the kelp is pulling some of that carbon out in local environments.  So there’s a lot of good work that’s being done, but also in the back of my mind I’m always sort of thinking about those charts where the water just exponentially keeps warming and it’s scary and it’s hard to know at this point like if we’re doing enough and how we can do more.

 

Q: [38:17] Yeah, and if you could like tell a policy maker or someone in charge, like what do you think is the big priority looking towards the future with those concerns in mind?

 

A: [38:26] I mean apart from our world is a system, right?  All these things are intertwined and our oceans are warming because of some of these huge companies that are putting off so much carbon into the atmosphere and then the ocean acts as this big sink and it just pulls all of that carbon in.  And so I think just like focusing on some of those things, carbon – why can’t I think of the word?  Not offsets, but like carbon emissions into the atmosphere – there it is.  Trying to, trying to limit that as much as possible, but also trying to figure out how to reverse what we’ve already done. It’s both reactive policy but also proactive policy in terms of getting folks to jump on the solution and I think that that’s like – that’s one thing that’s always getting me down in the science world is like there’s so much stuff telling us that we can’t do it and that it’s past return.  And I don’t think that’s true.  I don’t want to think that’s true.  And so I think that there needs to be a lot of focus on that proactive policy and thinking ahead and thinking how to sort of turn back on what we have already done.

 

Q: [39:54] Yeah, absolutely.  And have you participated in any like climate resilience training, adaptation training, anything like that?

 

A: [40:03] No official trainings, no.

 

Q: [40:06] And what do you think might be useful for people as like with these concerns in mind to like build resilience?

 

A: [40:12] In coastal economies specifically, I mean, I think the, you know, some of the like outreach that I’ve been a part of like the aquaculture workshops and just getting folks engaged and knowing that this is happening – not only to be a part of the growing side, but also to be a part of the eating side, right?  Like this is a really sustainable form of protein that we’ve figured out how to grow and so using scallops or oysters or mussels to replace, you know, red meat or some of those other things that we know are causing emissions is huge.  You don’t have to go out and buy a long line to be a part of this, right?  Like you can just change what you’re eating.  But I think that people don’t necessarily know that that’s an option and there’s a lot of sort of stigma around seafood also, like lobsters are so expensive and so are scallops.  I mean, but the more we figure out how to do this and the more people are doing it, the more affordable it’s going to be and the more people are going engage with eating it. So, I think there’s just, there’s a lot to be done with like education and outreach through media and all of that stuff, which I think is slowly building.  Everybody’s really excited about – everybody who I talk to who kind of knows what I’m doing is so excited about scallop farming and it’s awesome.  And I’m also really excited about scallop farming and I think that that comes through when I tell these stories and so I hope that I can keep telling these stories and keep letting people know that this is happening.

 

Q: [41:59] Yeah, absolutely.  And is there anything maybe like non-environmental that’s really impacting your work that you want to tell us about?

 

A: [42:06] Non-environmental that’s impacting my work.

 

Q: [42:11] And that can be like maybe even like positive change, like what you were just saying about like getting people really excited about protein or just protein from the sea.  Just stuff like that.

 

A: [42:19] Yeah, yeah I’m trying to think.  I mean – it’s been, I’ve always grown up in communities and I think that the amazing thing about communities is that is if you can get a group of people behind something then that can actually cause real change.  And so being part of a small town and having my mom have a Facebook presence, like all these things like are letting people into this world of aquaculture through me and my friends and my co-workers and everybody who’s doing this.  And so I think I’m just really grateful to have a community in this group of folks who I grew up, but also in Maine is one big small town, kind of.  If anywhere is going to get the word out about aquaculture it’s going to be Maine. So I think that that’s made me really excited about living here and makes me excited about continuing to do this work here and engage with communities.  It’s always really fun.  I mentioned my grandmother came out on the boat to do that ear hanging.  We have these days where we invite people to come and help us and we pay them and they get to spend a day on the boat with us doing ear hanging and it makes my heart swell to see like everybody who shows up and just like we’re playing music and playing games and everybody’s just pinning scallops onto a line.  It’s just this like amazing group of people always.

 

Q: [44:04] Yeah, and sort of like spitballing with that energy, what is your really hopeful vision for the future of Maine’s fisheries and aquaculture?

 

A: [44:14] You know, I think honestly my biggest hope like putting aside numbers and those sort of projections is just generally communication and trust.  I think that one thing that is tricky about fisheries is that there’s a lot of mistrust of scientist and policy makers around regulations and I think that’s fair.  Honestly, like there’s been a lot of regulations put on particularly the lobster industry to try and keep it sustainable and I think that we’ve actually done a really good job of doing that.  But at the same time, there hasn’t been enough relationship building to go alongside that and build that trust and I think that fishermen also are a little – in my experience – a little skeptical of aquaculture. A lot of folks are really excited about it, but occasionally you bump up against folks who are a little bit skeptical and so just like if we can keep relationships built and smooth between fishermen and farmers and scientists and policy makers, I think we can do a lot and there’s already been really interesting efforts in the kelp farming world to have like this partner farming model where Atlantic sea farms is getting lobstermen in particular to grow kelp over the winter, which is their off season.  And they sell the fishermen the seed at the beginning of the season and then they guarantee buyback of the kelp at the end of the season and so we’re sort of exploring the idea of doing that in the scallop industry as well.  And so I think that there’s a lot of potential for those relationships to be built, but I think that that’s going to be something that’s really important moving forward.  It’s just like this trust within the coast because we’re all just trying to make a living and keep the ocean providing for us.

 

Q: [46:24] And have you noticed any changes in women’s participation, presence or status on the water since you’ve been working?

 

A: [46:32] Yes and no.  I mean, my first job out on the water, I was in a group of all men and out at Hurricane I was in a group of all women and that was amazing.  And I always get really excited when I see another woman on a boat.  Yeah, I mean, it –just varies, you know, in parts of the state I think there are farms that are mostly women and there are farms that aren’t so much that way.  And again, I think that there’s – in within aquaculture with it being a new industry, there’s a lot of room.  There is a lot more room for women than traditionally male dominated spaces and so that that has been something that’s really wonderful to see.  But it is – I think it’s even with that I think that it’s really difficult for non men to enter this industry because there is an expectation of physical labor and often women aren’t hired for those jobs in the first place and so they don’t have that on the resume to say like, no, really, I can do this. And so, you know, I’m lucky to have a background in this and I feel like my coworkers really take me seriously and that’s such a gift because I definitely haven’t always experienced that both on the water and off.  But it’s just something that we’re going to have to continue working on and one of the really wonderful things that I’m seeing is I think women on the water really foster other women on the water.  There’s a lot of like  –I see women sort of dragging each other into like an oyster farm.  Like all of a sudden there’s six women working there (inaudible) be it and teaching those skills and showing, no really, it can be done.  So that’s been really wonderful to see also.

 

Q: [48:35] Great.  Thank you.  And then is there a –

 

A: [48:40] Oh, we’re at the end.  Let’s see.  I just think that it’s – we’re at a really pivotal moment here in the Gulf of Maine and I think that there’s a lot of work to be done in so many of these spaces, right?  Like inclusion on the waterfront and working towards a sustainable solutions in the future and I think that they’re not unlinked, right?  Like a lot of these things can go hand in hand and just working towards that and fostering women on the waterfront and trying to create a sustainable future in protein is like something that I’m really jazzed about and looking forward to sharing with folks.  Just – that’s like a thesis statement about the interview I guess.

 

Q: [49:39] Yeah.  And do you have any questions before we –?

 

Q: [49:43] Yeah, I was curious if you had any observations of green crabs.

 

A: [49:47] Yeah.  Yeah, I mean, I think this was one thing that I actually meant to mention. So thank you.  You know, I told that story about like going down to my grandparents cove and harvesting mussels as a kid.  One thing that I’ve always grown up hearing is like, there’s no more mussels.  The mussels are gone.  And so that’s been a really interesting thing to observe with climate change, because I think that the way that climate change looks isn’t necessarily the way that people think it looks.  It’s not only that the water is becoming more acidic or that it’s warming, it’s also that like it’s encouraging these invasive species to grow here. So there’s, you know, there’s all the green crabs, there’s all the sea squirts.  Everyone’s always talking about like the great white sharks are coming here, but that’s because the seals have come.  So there’s all these things are linked, but it doesn’t necessarily – if you’re not looking closely, the puzzle pieces don’t necessarily fit together.  But yeah, we see green crabs on all the farms that I’ve been on.  They’re not so much a problem with scallops that I’ve seen.  They will eat the babies, but the nets that we have keep them out for the most part. And we just try and keep our gear up off the ground.  Otherwise, there’s an army waiting to sort of claw up and eat all of our scallops.  So – yeah.

 

Q: [51:15] Great.  I will turn this off.

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