 Jeremy Miller, who we're really pleased to have joining us today, he is a research associate at the Wellesville National Professor and Research Reserve, and he's been in that position since 2004. He's got a B.S. from the University of England in his environmental science and a minor in marine biology. Jeremy's main focus on the reserve is to coordinate the system-like monitoring program that focuses on long-term monitoring of water quality nutrient and weather data, and he also oversees larval fish monitoring. Today he's going to be talking about the marine invader monitoring and information collaborative. It's a pretty cool thing. It's a network of trained volunteer scientists, state and shuttle workers, monitoring invasive species' presence and spread that involve the main. Having recently gone from training with Jeremy, I have to say it's pretty amazing. I mean, having lived here and worked on the ocean for a number of years, to get out and start surveying and realizing there's so many different invasive species, you're like, wow, this is pretty amazing. Typically you carry on and you will notice these things but when you start looking at them, you notice that they're not only invasive species, they're common, they're becoming abundant. So I'm going to turn it over to Jeremy. Thank you, folks. Thank you for having me today. It's my pleasure to be out here. So, yeah, I've been here since 2014. So, as John said, I've worked here as a reserve and we're part of a system of reserves funded by NOAA. I know that's going to be a little dangerous or it's going to be spotting out around here, but I can assure you that I do not have a government here to work specifically focused on ashuary. So, areas in our country where herpers meet the sea or herpers meet the great lakes, so they actually have fresh water. This is our site down in Bells. So, I've been to a log home farm down in Bells. Man, awesome. Look at that. I'm about to say it. If you haven't been, go check it out. Perfect place for you guys to speak at a conservation. Great group of folks along with us got together and saved this beautiful saltwater farm back in the 80s from development. NOAA came in and said, okay, we can sell things from the researchers here. We just need to match that federal funding here in New York. That's how the trust was formed. Most of our best-known researchers throughout the country are supported by either a university or a state agency. We couldn't find that in Maine, so we will lie down to volunteers and community folks to form that trust. And we matched that federal grant every year to keep this on operation, right? So, volunteers are a huge part of what we do and we really appreciate all the efforts that go on moving you folks here in the room because protecting land in Maine is very important, especially Southern Coastal Maine where our population is obviously moving and growing every year. So, I work out in the Maine Coastal Ecology Center there at the reserve and we're focused on fisheries and habitat monitoring. So, coastal monitoring is kind of our key. And NOAA is, I chose the National Office for the Advancement of Acronyms, but that's not the case there. They do a lot of monitoring, of course, here at the National Weather Service. The Hurricane Center is all under NOAA. We also host a ton of intern students, undergraduates every summer who come to research and help us fulfill our mission as well. We try to do hypotheses during research. You know, science then informs, helps our communities by not understanding the habitats that they're living in and working in every day. So, again, our big major reserve, we have an education department, kids camps, researchers also has Harvard's Coastal Training Program. So, this program specifically works with municipalities and managers and towns to convey the science that us and our other federal agencies are doing to the people who need to understand that science is used to inform coastal management. We also have a stewardship department, so I hear a lot of work about invasive species out on the islands, managing those species. That's all stewardship, right? So, as we protect the land and as we put places aside, we also want to maintain those properties and make sure that they're all accessible to the same outfit. And of course, we have a research department which I'm involved with. Go ahead. So, as John mentioned, I want something called a system-wide monitoring program, which is that place at all 30 reserve around the country. We're collecting the same things the same way using the same instrumentation at all 30 systems of all reserve around the country. The main part of it is a biotic monitoring. So, keeping our finger on also the water quality and weather, nutrients and our estuaries. All those things that kind of drive the production and help support what we think of as our resources and those natural systems. So, the fisheries and the plants and the water quality and all that stuff. But we also do some biological monitoring. And that's where the invasive species piece kind of falls. And I'm lucky enough not to have to just look at even a turbidity in pH 8 all day in water temperature. We go out in the field and actually look at marine invasive species. So, I want to set the stage here a little bit. I know a lot of you are well aware of this, but our colleagues and partners at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute have been doing a wonderful job at tracking what we'll call temperature anomalies or marine heat waves that have been occurring in the Gulf of Maine. And these graphs go a little bit to show you what's happening here. The Gulf of Maine is actually one of the fastest warming bodies in the world. It's forming at an alarming rate. In 2012, we had this temperature anomaly. We had huge spikes in surface water roots in the Gulf of Maine. And people were really shocked. And that's illustrated a bunch of what we're calling illustrated by this graph here. This is a long-term temperature graph using sea surface temperatures from Root Bay Harbor that fell back to the late 1800s or the 1900s. And you can see that. Yes, although, temperatures go up and down. We had full winters and we had full winters. And the general trend especially the general trend over the last few decades is a very alarming fast rate of water temperature rise in the Gulf of Maine. We go ahead and click again. This is the temperature, the 12th temperature anomaly. What you're seeing here is degrees above or below our historical average Gulf of Maine water temperatures is what this graph is seeing to break it down a little bit. So you see we go close to 1990 a few decades back, right? We have all of these temperatures where sometimes we have anomalous school seasons in the Gulf of Maine. Sometimes we're almost high. To say that a degree of temperature is a big difference in the Gulf of Maine. I know a lot of times people think almost only one degree is only two degrees. But when we're looking at averages that means that we had a lot of points that were way above our usual average. What I want to shoot to see here, if you click one more time Michael, is that since 2007 we've really had no anomalous schooling periods in the Gulf of Maine. Everything's been above that historical line. The stuff that really freaks us out is the last couple of years of 2021 and 2022 were some of the warmest seasons, warmest on record in the Gulf of Maine. We're approaching those 2012 temperature anomalies that shattered the historical records. So why does this all matter? So it's not just the summer stuff. I'm sorry about the data ahead in this slide here folks. I'll get through these in just a second. But it's not just the summer temperatures. The fall temperature is also starting to take a long time to come down, right? And we're seeing this in the Clinton blooms that happen in the Gulf of Maine. So we have a spring bloom and a fall bloom that kind of fuels the life of the Gulf of Maine. And we're seeing that a lot of times that fall bloom is being moved or being repositioned. That's something called phenology. When we see a natural event start changing when it happens, and something that's been happening well over the years for many hundreds of years, that's a fucking enchanted. It's an amazing but also terrifying time to do scientists in the Gulf of Maine. Because things seem to be changing on a very rapid scale on fast for them to never see an historical data. This is going to cover well by NASA. Go ahead John, or Michael, one more please. And as well it's in scientific literature. This is a very new literature in actuaries. So where we are, we'll look out here to have some of the most extreme effects. It's more shallow. There's more human disturbance there. And this is something that happens in a lot of species. In Maine we have a pretty good terrestrial, you folks are going to work on the islands with terrestrial species of plants that are being moved over. We have the Lake Montfort program which has been doing awesome jobs in our lakes and our rivers in Maine. But in the state of Maine, which has more coastline, and in the other country, it's up to last about that. So all of our mix and crannies and gears and harbors, all of that coastline, I can think about maybe five, six people in the state of Maine were actually paid to deal with marine invasive species. So number one, it's kind of an unrefunded issue that we're dealing with. And number two, it's a difficult habitat to work in because it's a very big open area and we're dealing with ocean currents and the lake that's sitting to move around. So let's get you into marine invasive species a little bit. Number one, what makes something invasive? So we kind of use three rules in the marine. Number one, they have to be asked from the historical right. So they haven't been there. That's non-native and not the fossil right. Number two, they have to have come here to some kind of human factor, human influence. Something that we do to move them around. So just like plants and all of a sudden you look at them in a quiet world, they're generally brought here by some kind of human activity. And number three, they have some kind of negative impacts on the places that they're invaded. And those are generally species or the economy around fisheries of the sort. So in North America, we have 300 marine invertebrate invasive species in 100 species of invasive fish. And they also made along with 85 recorded invasive species right now. And that number is growing pretty much every year. So what are the factors of these sins? The biggest factors are shipping, right? So we have ships traveling around the world. Everyone knows about the green grass, right? They've been here for a long time. Kind of a poster child of marine invasive species. I see a lot of that now. So those came over to ships. Those came over to the Baptist water ships. So when ships take up water in their home ports, they also suck out larvae and since sometimes you can chew in those species, right? They used to come right over across the ocean in our waters and dump that out into our harvests, right? So that's how we think a lot of our early invaders showed up here in the shipping division. We now have Baptist Exchange Water Act, which makes ships stop offshore, cycle their water with clean ocean water and release that when they get into their harvests. So we do have some management things in place in the marine side of the world where we're trying to get at at least preventing the invasions from happening. And these are also some tough species to work with. So we have some allergies. We have some crustaceans like crabs, which are pretty easy to eat. But how many people in here know what a tuning is? God, you see that? Hold on. These are animals that are not people aren't used to seeing or dealing with, right? They're not in your face every day. So tracking them and understanding their conflicts of life history is not one of the biggest challenges we face with field-to-be species. But let me ask you, how many people here have a doffer near their house that they visit all the time? How many people have ever pulled something up or pulled their boat up in the air and have orange globs on their stuff just growing, right? Most of that stuff is in the face of them. I'm going to talk to you about some of those species on your tail. And I'm supposed to be here and they're really taking off as it all continues to work. So what does Minnick, so John mentioned that he's been trained on this program called Maroon Invader Monitoring and Information Collaboration. So we call it Minnick. Minnick is a group of trained volunteers, scientists, state university workers, staff that monitor maroon-based species along the entire Wimbledon coast. We actually have teams all the way down to Rhode Island and all the way up to Maine. And we monitor three-maker habitats, docks, tide pools, and rocky intertypes. That's what we find most of our marine faces. And the goals of the program are a few. So one of them is early detection. So the best way that we can manage the base of species is when we find them early, right, before they take off, and really get a sense of what they're doing. We're waiting for them to bring right up on the matter, how we can start using it. Educating. Educating people. Educating the community members, the folks who live and work in these environments about what they're seeing and also providing data. Both for the publisher and partnership is our other federally funded extroverted program in Maine. Making your head out here is one of the programs in place as well. So here you've got Hal Robinson, so Coastal Zone Management, so the big focus is the man. But you're talking all from Maine, right? This is interesting because we're monitoring outside the Gulf of Maine too. A lot of the species that I've had for seven, eight years in Minnick have started down here and weren't coming into the Gulf yet. So remember this morning in Cape Cod is a very important kind of biogeographical feature, right? That's what keeps the Gulf in the cold. You know, South of Cape Cod, we're assuming in June, right? North of Cape Cod, that's much. So that's what we're interested in, and it's kind of being used more in the hospital of these invaders as they move from some more southern, warmer water South of Cape Cod into the Gulf of Maine. You can start staying here. Where are they showing up? And are they persisting, right? So go ahead. This is a little look at the size of here in Maine. So as you can see, Castle Bay got some nice coverage in 2014. Castle Bay Shory partnership, a little community for that money, and they wanted to better engage their island communities with stewardship functions, right? And I said, well, we're looking for a nice species. We're trying to get these businesses and some sites going. This is kind of a zoom down on Castle Bay proper. We'll sell them all to Castle Bay but we're on site 10. So yeah, should be down in Long Island here. We have two sites, one at Fowler's Beach, and we're right here at the Ferry Gap. We're also on Greenland and Island, Pete's Island, and we have some new sites too, and it's for the Point Marina and along the Southern Maine Community College Coast. A couple of new sites have been on monitor since 2008, so we're actually starting to build a pretty nice time series of what's been there and we're also going to show them up. So this is kind of, again, citizen scientists collaborating with scientists, information on where we're going to get these species that we can then use to inform our stress on how the heck you go about doing this kind of stuff. We have data sheets that they got plugged up. We also have our native common species, so people aren't mixing things up, which is important as well. We have a lot of food monitoring as well. So let's get this cool stuff, some fun stuff. So what are we actually looking for? What do these species look like? What animals do they represent? So we have crustaceans, right? So we have the big players, crabs, we have green crabs. When I started Mimic, green crab was the old crab we were on in 2004, 2008. 2011 or 2012, they said, hey, down in Brown Island, we're starting to see these striped shore crabs. They're from Asia, the Asian shore crab. They said, start keeping an eye out for us. I said, hey, I'll keep an eye out. Over the first day, I found something like 2010 or 2011 or something else. I was like, oh, look what I found. They're all set. Every one of our sites. So that's the species that I've seen. Just in a short little bit of time until they move into a system, you can come and have it with another invaders. There's a lot of research right now looking at how green crabs and Asian shore crabs are going to compete for the same space, but both invaders are just not going to be interested. Well, we also have some other near crustaceans. So we have the pods, right? Isopods, the amphipods, and copepods. So we actually have some of the base of the amphipods as well as an invasive shrimp called the European washer that we're looking for. How do they do that? I'm just a second kid. We also have tunicants. So I asked, who of the tunicants are? No. The tunicants are filter-fitting animals. They can be solitary or they can be colonial, right? And each animal just has a very basic body form. They have a tunic or a covering over their body, but they also have a majestic system where they filter more of the fruit, right? You can see some of the pictures of what this stuff looks like. You've probably seen some of the stuff growing on the C-sports those are tunicants, right? Let's go to Briazoa. Briazoa is another group of colonial animals that filter their feet. They like to be crossed on things. So if you ever pick up a piece of kelp and you found maybe one of the most circular rings of white kind of raspy stuff that's never been heard about in Asia. That's a scientific name. That's what we're going to do in the left of your corner called the Lacy-Cross Nebron. It's a cover of our kelp sometimes. Elgias is fine. You can see all of them. Elgias are tough to ID. You have a lot of different types of algae, but we're also going to be invasive algae because it's a coastal name. One of the most common is this coating. If you've ever found this thick, green, fleshy stuff growing, you have a low tide line. They used to call it oyster beef because when it first came in, it did a number on our oyster beef. So it was trying to make anything that seemed to have to have to say the word. So what are we seeing here in Casco Bay? So that's a little intro of some of the species we're looking at. So here's a great intro for you guys. This is the impact of kelp in Casco Bay. So kelp is farmed in Casco Bay, right? So now we're starting to get the impact of often-tultured business people's bad pockets. Here's a picture for the beach island in May 2018. This is a piece of kelp in the water. The white stuff you see growing on is actually native species of liches. A lot of them are dry as long as kelp. So that belongs there. It's not a big deal. Grows in the sun and it falls off. Grows in the spring falls off by the sun. The picture on the right is that same kelp, not the same exact blade, but a piece of kelp full of off that knot from August 2018. So now we're water temperatures way up and you can barely see the kelp. Almost everything you see on that kelp is invasive, right? It doesn't belong here. So one of the things that we're facing, if you go ahead and help us slide this one, another picture of kelp from Judy Island. One more. This is from Sprint Point over in Southport when it hits all the ship near the marina. There's kelp on the other end of the river now. That's kelp blade. Everything you see growing on there, all of this stuff is colonial duty. All of these are encrusted, dry as well, and none of it belongs. So we've basically limited to a winter harvest for kelp. They can't tell all the cultures. They're not selling a lot of kelp in the summer. They can't harvest this. They can't sell this. They can't marinate this. One more. Just bash it out of that kelp. We're also seeing this stuff coming up on lots of drinks, right? One more. Here's where education comes in. I had a great moment right here on Long Island. I'll tell the story really quick. I was down there. We were monitoring for bases. I had a big hunk of this stuff pulled up and a lot of it comes in and these long straps off of both thrown down. He goes, hey, I got that. It all reminds me of straps. It grows every summer. I hate it all the while. What the heck is it? I said, oh, here's my chicken tracks. I'll start talking. I said, these things are called tunicates. They're invasive. They're not supposed to be here. So do you mind if I ask how you deal with this? Well, I bring them up on the dock and I cover wash them before I put them back out. So is it spread by fragmentation? So if you break off the little pieces and grow them in the water, it's going to settle. It's going to grow a new thing. The first thing it's going to do is power wash again. These straps in the water are going to clean the lens. It's going to release the oven. So we're just going to get this stuff off. So we said, oh man, that's the last thing I want to do. How do I deal with this? So I got that. I'll talk to them. He switches out his straps and brings them back to his house anyways. I said, don't spray that stuff off. I know this is a tough answer. If you just bring it back to your house, it'll sit your back in the office for a few days. All that stuff will desiccate, fall right off. And then we're not just throwing it all around the harbor, right? So that was a really powerful point for me to look at. For me to keep one eye on those who are living and seeing it every day on their tracks. One hundred and one visit, but there's no real information out there from our state or review federal agencies on how these guys are supposed to deal with the stuff or what they are or how they're impacting the beneficiaries. Here's an acre off of Cheney. That's full off of what we need in the summertime. Again, all those little tune-kits down there, those are all invasive species. So you know, nothing like that. So what about the guy who has to be able to stop and clean the lens? He'll often put it back in the water. That's no fun. So it's just impacting our coastal communities very well in my home. So right here in Long Island, on Fowler's Beach, we've got that beautiful tide pool, right? So that big tide pool that opens up in the summer. I haven't been lucky enough to be introduced to that a few years ago. That's one of my favorite sites. So we have a team that goes there once a month and checks for invasive species. This is what we're refining in 2020 on some of the rocks in your kind of fields, right? All of these interracial species that we're covering a good majority of the tide pool area right there. They're also covered with mussels and other native shellfish species that are trying to grow in there. So again, just really thick coverage and we're really interested in why and how these things where they're going to show up and why they do so well in one area and not so well in another. That's what we're trying to get to in some of our research. And I talked a little bit about some new species we're finding. So again, in 2008, no European rocks have been in the entire state of Maine. Couldn't find one if they all had one in my head. 2013 in County Monk, I had kind of a port. I had a volunteer come up to me and say, what the heck is this shrimp? I'm looking at it. It's got these bright blue claws. It's hyper-striping down the back. I don't know, my God, I think that's one of those you're being rocked from. You go one more slide. These are now the most prevalent crustacean in our tide pools in Maine. If you go to a tide pool and look and you see those shrimp shooting all around and every time you pick up a rock or something, the pool in base, they were never even lost six or seven years ago. And that well-starred little strap out of a piece of modern equipment, there were thousands in the bottom of my trap. Just thousands. So, you know, talking to John about pond food program, generally we need to collect data for a very long time to pick up on change because it takes a long time for these biological changes to happen sometimes. And the scary thing is we're seeing this stuff show up and not really just alive in Maine, but to really let them take off in kind of about five, six, seven, eight years. Kind of a lot of things run fast for it. Diffle-Sola is another type of tunicette that I've never seen in the Gulf of Maine until three years ago. And now it just seems to be everywhere. It's completely down in the tunicette now at our dock site that's come in the last two or three years and ever trying to understand if and how this is going to displace either other invasive species than what kind of impact it's having on the public and on the things that it follows or collects on, right? And we also have new species. You know, just a year ago that we're wondering why the heck it's up here because the closest north it's been found is Maryland. And we have potentially two species growing in South Portland, probably where a lot of those come into other areas. Not so shocked yet, but the things I've ever seen in the environment here. So, we've worked all with David and I know a lot of you are going to say, well, what's the soul of all this, right? Like, what can we do? How is this data being used? One of the ways of being used again is by our partners, that's the best record in the state of the baby report every year, right? They look at everything from water quality to biology to land use. They do a nice spotlight on invasive species. Although we've gotten six or seven good years of data from our gas-o-anus, we felt like we could work a little bit. So, on the next slide, Michael, we're able to work out some trends, where we're seeing the most invasive species, what kind of invasive species are making up most of the subventure kits are leading to crustaceans close behind. We've got crabs and shrimp and all those things. But that's not the whole story. So, this is my doctor's slide. I had to throw this in here, because I'm also working with my hybrid communities on another page of a whole different story. So, we have one crab, two crab, three crab, blue crab. So, we offer green crabs, right? We also know about blue crabs from the Middle Antec. Well, in 2020, we started capturing blue crabs in the Gulf of Maine, or salt marshes in the Wells. I've worked in the Wells since 2003 as an intern, and we've bred tons of nuts, baited tons of pods, and we've never seen blue crabs in those marshes, ever, ever, ever. But also in 2020, we start trapping a lot of them, right? So, is this a ranger's banter, or is this an invasive species? That's a whole different conversation because it doesn't meet those group criteria. So, I don't think it was brought here by boats or anything. This is a ranger's banter. This is a species that's normally found in South Cape Cod, making their way up to the Casco Bay, the Gulf of Maine. They've been here before as adults, but the disturbing part of the process is we started finding them larvae. So, I also grew a lot of official action, and as part of that, we made crustacean larvae as well. We have blue crab larvae come all the way back to 2014, which means that they've probably been here a lot longer. This is a shot I took on my microscope from the Reserve. This specimen was collected in the summer of 2014. The big indicator here is two huge spines that come off the back. If you're over to a blue crab, I got these big spines off their carapace, or their bodies, I'd love to decide. Once I saw that I knew me that something that wasn't global or things, we looked up, and sure enough, we had a blue crab larvae showing up in our things. Here are some of the adults in the marshes down in the wells. These things are for voracious predators. They are super, super aggressive. I've never had any crab that acts like this before. I just want your fingers in popsicle up. They, in their native habitat, they are what we call apex septic predators. They live on the bottom, and they are top dog. They eat anything that moves, including their own young. Lobsters are the same thing here. Lobsters are pretty nasty. They'll eat their own, and leave each other. They'll eat anything they have for you to survive. What are these things going to do when they start getting some of the lobster? We don't know when the lobster are having a hard enough to go at it right now. If we start having a biological range of spines, that goes another apex septic predator right next to our fishery, our most important fisher in the state, that really ensures a biological standpoint. We've got a 2022 Casanovae community grant, and I would like to recognize the two people in the room here. Not only the blue mimic, but they're also opening up one of the blue crabs. Patty and Sam Wainwright from Peace Island help out with the mimic program. We have a blue crab tracking, and Michael Johnson as well is helping us out with our sites here for blue crab hunting. Thank you folks for doing that, because this is a lot of work. There wasn't a lot of money for this. It was money to buy equipment, money to cover my fairy feasts, to hop around the islands all summer for me, but also to help get us understanding where the adults are, where the larvae is, and also using a method called EDNA. So EDNA allows us to grab water, run it through a DNA, so we can go up in forensics, see what was there over the last five, four hours. It's a very basic explanation, but it's a potentially very powerful tool. If you think of the amount of time in the Antarctic to go out and actually physically look for species, if we could just go out and collect water samples and understand what was there over the last 24 hours, that would be a huge tool in tracking these things. So we're working with UMain, the reserve, as well as the Castaway X-ray partnership that we've been tracking, and sampling every week since June on this project. We've engaged some of the school children in this as well. So we had Marcy Tram, if anyone knows Marcy came down with the school kids, helped us get the traps out, and they're going to help in the fall. We're going to do a little EDNA sampling as well, since we don't know if we're even more of our EDNA samples here. So you basically just pull up water, you push it through this little filter, all the water through this filter, you're going to bat that filter, freeze it, and we're going to run that filter for DNA analysis, see what was in that water. The adult traps, right, looking at the adults, we gave our guys tongs. These things are really nasty. My asthma tears go out the handle of crabs, which should at least not have them coming back all day. So this is so improperly animal-oriented. We're also looking for that larvae, right, with baby, baby, just hatched from eggs. Because if we see the larvae, we know that the adults are around and reproducing. And that's what these blue things are on the side of the traps. They collect that larvae, it's in the water, we've got rinse them out with a bucket, get them into a little jar of alcohol on our front end of UMain, you can call us and we'll do it up. So here are our larvae that work. You might see some familiar faces in there. This is Steven, Ben and Steve Johnson from Shabee who helped us out quite a bit in this monitoring, as well as our folks at Peaks. And again, just folks getting this equipment out in the way of the sun, we're going to have a lot of fun. It's also going to get coming out. We really need to work with them. So I want to go over a quick case study for you guys if you want to stop talking and take any questions you guys have about this stuff. Well, Green Crab's the name, right? So Green Crab's kind of the most child-friendly species. This is a graph I worked up back of our thing, so it was one day of tracking that we did in three different systems, looking at the movement of Green Crab for our entire state. Well, this is loaded for some reason, we're not sure why. Adam Scott had a good amount of yarn, we did the same amount of traps, same amount of training, didn't have a ton of crabs, but it's a nice slide. But this is a new looking antibiotic, so this is a picture from 1953 out of the Get Switching Massachusetts, 58 pushable Green Crab's trap in three days at that switch. They've been trying to monitor or take care of these species for a while. What's really interesting about this is in 1953 I'm not going to do this to you, but we went back to that heat temperature and I won't grasp. Guess what happened in 1953? We had a marine heat wave. It was a huge marine heat wave in 1953. Guess what we stumbled across this about three weeks ago? A paper from 1953, the first sighting of Green Crab's trap. And we went, you all, like we're not the first ones to find these things, but here's the deal. After that temperature anomaly, they were never seen again in large numbers until just very recently, this 2012 temperature anomaly moving forward. I think what happens after that in 1953 and now moving back to normal, all of them had cooling periods, had warming periods, got things in check. Over the last 30 years, they have not been cooled off. Next slide. They also tried to monitor things. So my thing was that pesticides, they even fish barriers, so they used to soak fish in pesticides and string them up in the hopes that the Green Crab would eat them and die. I don't know much about chemicals and how they would sustain the environment. This would not be something that came out of Green Crab regulated right now. But they did do barriers. So I don't know if I can even assert that some of the work they're doing is report about excluding green crabs from plant plants and try to keep them out. This was the night here that we were trying to operate back in 1953. So a part of the scene is the size of the picture. But all these little holes in the month flat here are where crabs are searching and hunting for clams and feeding. If you can see this a little bit better, there are none of those pothricks inside of that. I think that's pretty impressive. And I actually partnered with one of the guys. He's Dr. Brian Beale. He's from Beale, Spain. No figure. He runs one of the largest plant hatchers in the state actually provides most of the clams for all the towns that do any kind of seeding and things like that. So Brian and I are watching this offer as one of them. We also have tons of green crabs. And we put these six inch flower pots in the ground, right? And we filled them with 12 hatchery clams. The cool thing about hatchery clams is that you can trap them. You can tell them from wild clams because when they enter the natural environment, they form a new growth rate. It actually goes like a little thumbnail on their back. It's the best way to tell a baby. You can tell a hatchery clam from wild to good kind of an animal. That'll be important in a second. So we did a bunch of different treatments on these. Some we covered top and bottom. Some we covered open herbivation. We put them out for six months to go out of my home. So this is how we then collected those pots out from the start from all back, dumped them into sieves, and rinsed them down to see what we had for clams for feeding, right? This was a pot that was left wide open. No exclusive herbivation. We should have had a single plant. Not a single plant. This was a pot that was closed on the top and the bottom from herbivation. I say the bottom, that's important because we have milky and ribbon worms in the main. Those are a natural product of our own plant. We have to take any kind of plants. We want to know if we want any ribbon worms in our plant, too. We had 467 wild clams settle in this pot and grow out to a hard soil side of the ground. And as you can see, here are hatchery clams. You can see the one with those black marks on the back. So we can pick out multiple hatchery clams. If we want to survive, we've also got 467 wild root clams in the absence of creation. So that was a pretty good indication that the green crabs were the ones that would have a huge number of these species. And what does that mean? This is a quick graph of 2020 commercial main landings by species, right? So what's the big blue one? First of course, but somewhere hidden in these little slivers is soft-shelled clam. Right here, 3%. So people might think about 3% is the huge part of our fishery, right? But if you do the math on about 3%, it's a 516,796,611. It's a ton of money. It's a big economic profit of the state. Here's a good part of our fishery. That number has been a decrease in stability since the 50th. One more quick thing about green crabs. They like to destruct habitat for some reason. So they've been burrowing for a marshes. Down at Wells, we're seeing a lot of marsh slumpings from this active. And we think that they're trying to get away from the cold winters. That's how they survive by giving them the mark. But they're also giving them the number of ideal grass. Again, kind of hard to see, but this is a picture of Wacoit Bay in 2001, Moreland Cascope Bay. Lush Hillgrass, pretty much covered in the entire bay. Now remember, this is post-2007 when we were still having some anomalous school periods in the Gulf of Maine. We're still capturing what we would consider a normal Gulf of Maine fluctuation. Come 2013, the Big East School of Green Crab could have not find any ideal grass in that entire bay. So Hillary Nichols did this study, which she actually excluded, again, green crabs from certain areas in those bays and sure about where she did those exclusion, those grasses were grown great. So what's next? So I hear a lot about invasive species management. People are pulling plants and blocking off ponds. They're doing natural management steps. Again, this is a little hard in the marine world. So this is one of the toughest questions that we face. But we are working with local fishermen, so we're working with a man down in Wells. Everett Leach, who has been tracking crabs. He has a couple of restaurants. One in Port Smith, one in Portland that are buying from them right now. They're making stocks out of the crabs. But generally these things are too small, take a lot of meat out of the green crab. So we're trying to figure out how we can utilize these things. One more slide. The big market for green crabs are native to soft shell. So everyone loves a soft shell crab, maybe on a sandwich or something. Where they're from, the Mediterranean, the soft shell green crab industry is a huge thing. But it relies on fishermen doing it for generations and can tell when a crab is going to bolt. They take those crabs, they put them aside, they hold them in a tank until they bolt. Then they take those freshly bolted crabs and they sell them for premium money. So one of the big research projects we have going on at the Reserve right now is starting on a slide on it. So a research coordinator who is a crustacean person is drawing blood from crabs. We're trying to see if you can pick up on a protein level change to pick up on when they're holding. Because if we can trap crabs, hold them and sell them right after they bolt, we can really do business out of these things and once we start finishing for something immediately, we'll be prepared for that in a few years' time. So a good way to start managing the green crab problem is to start putting them in our bellies. I've actually had soft shell green crab fried. I've also had green crab stock. Both are delicious. They stand right on top of other crab species. So that's a little bit about what Minix is all about. I know there's a lot of information to take in, but at the same time, you know, we're on islands, right? And we deal a lot with the basic species. I was on the website, I saw a great resource that's educated to show resources on the basic species, but I know there's nothing there for green, right? And we're on islands. So our trustee awareness, of course, is very important about what we're on islands, we're worried about our coast too. And I would love to work with you folks if you want to have a little bit on radio and species on the website moving forward, we can work up a little session on that. But also to know if anyone's here is interested in monitoring, I'm looking to add islands to the Minix program, so if you're a rock and high island that's not represented, or you saw that map, you said, hey, I have a dock down there that's still a gap or that, you know, a cool site that you can monitor. So, you know, in a country we'd be happy to be trained. Ask John, it's not that bad, right? Once you get trained, you start looking, it's like, whoa, look at all this stuff popping out at me. And, you know, you're all naturally leaving, right? I consider us all naturalists. We're outside, we care about our environment, we care about what we're looking and observing, that makes you a naturalist, that makes you a perfect fit for this program. We have here Joseph and everything like that. And, yeah, thank you so much for your time. Here's your mind-based species. This is amazing. They're 10 and 7 and they're doing their best to, you know, leave their way on the world, too, and find their strongholds. I appreciate your time, folks. Thank you very much. People are getting to know us a lot, yeah. I was going to say, you've never seen it before. And if you're mostly focusing on the basic species and caches on the bottom, that's right. I think I'm on there walking is what it is and why it's happening. My great hope is that this trend stops soon and starts coming down the other way. It's 30 years and it's not enough. So, I think the biggest thing to be worried about is that morning, Gulf of Maine, and how it's affecting our native species and what we see in the morning. Wait a minute. You even asked if everyone could watch me? Well, not that everyone could watch me. The worst question on the basic species first can be asked, which one? So, the periodical is not enough. So, they have been hearing to the science of something called naturalization, where something has done somewhere so long that it's naturalized. It's become a part of the community and you don't necessarily consider it invasive anymore because the time scale we're talking about is either past or even close to the past human time scale, getting into the geological time scale. But that's a great question. So, there's a giant debate about whether periodicals are invasive species or if they're native species. They're not native. Why do we want to show them that? You find them shunned? Which means they were here for possibly thousands of years and that's why, again, we consider those naturalized species that are part of our native foreign fauna now. It's a great area. I can answer questions like that. But I don't have a definitive answer for it. No, that's okay. That's a great question. Yes, sir. Are you finding any predators or are these invasive? That's a great question. Help keep them in check, right? That's a great question. Part of the reason why these tunicants and these ear-fowling grown things are doing so well here is because they have no predators. In their native ranges, they have snails that graze on them. They're very acidic. A great little life lesson here. The West Coast was trying to deal with an invasive a city where they run snails that would graze them, right? They started doing a great job of shooting productions in the community but also under a bunch of dead shorebirds all over the list. And they had a huge shorebird die-off that turned out that the snails they brought over were carrying a lump that was being transferred to the birds in the 70s and 80s. A lot of their seabirds there. So there is biological control. Something that's happening in Forest Pass. I just saw a cool story on the news the other day where they're bringing these kind of little wasps to battle fruit flies that are hitting on the very tops of our reservoir crops really bad. That can be a dangerous territory now to continue around with biological control and be pretty scary stuff. That's a great question. That's why invasors generally do well in an area because they're opportunistic and that's something you can determine around the world. Yeah? On the blue graph maybe just not enough yet to determine this, but you mentioned that it showed up in 1953 that was also a warm year. Is there any committee measurement of lost or harvest going up or down? Like in 1953 was there a change? That's a great question. I don't know whether it was lost or not. There's not enough blue crabs here so it didn't impact the fishery yet. The fact that we're seeing any kind of numbers not just showing up in the Gulf of Maine but reproducing is what freaks us out. So again maybe that's spotted in the Gulf of Maine sporadically over the last many, many decades. You'll hear it recount some of them and pull them up or something like that. It didn't look like it would be real simplistic but in the laboratory that's a good question. So that's a great question. So one of the verses we looked at is there are any scientific studies that look at the overlap of blue crab and lobster? It's never happened before because the blue crabs are so far south and you remember the noob lobster fishery is going to Long Island. So those species never cross paths. By the time they moved north the blue crabs moved north to Southern Massachusetts. The lobsters were more or less part of your world. So there's no great field experiments and I don't know of any good physiological experiments looking at lobsters and crabs. I'm sorry, crabs. Yeah, it's a great question. Hopefully that's going to be in the science soon. We literally feel like this discovery of three years' worth of adults in our marshes mixed with six years of Marvel data really is the first compound scientific evidence that it also made more than just a hassle once off. This is real, to be honest with you, for any of the stuff. Exciting and horrifying kind of research. It's the whole thing because as I've been in this career for 20 years it's not a super long career certainly not on a geological time scale stuff but to see habitat changing to see species, form of species not only show up, but take off and proliferate. Yeah, pretty crazy stuff. Chucky. Hey. Another very important piece of research is going on when we share anything. That's a great question, yeah. So we, personally, I know there are basic species researchers that have said something about working out in the international. The problem is that every system is so different, right? So just like the Gulf of Maine versus the Gulf of Mexico versus the Arctic they all have very different biological drive. I don't understand reasons why walking might seem good here or good there. So there's not always a good lesson to be learned from another place. Yeah, so it's crazy. On the west coast, green crabs are just showing up. So green crabs are a new thing on the west coast. All of my reserves on the west coast that I work with, all my colleagues that's what I'm sending them. Green crab larvae from our collection because they want to see what the larvae looks like and they're also doing plankton sampling and that's where these larvae live and we're not going to plank them. This is a whole plank. We're sending them right now specimens from our collection so that they're ready as this invasion explodes and expands. They have the resources they need. So yes, they're very much learning from us what we've been dealing with for 100 years with green crabs. They're starting to look ahead. Uh-oh, these things are coming and starting our plant populations or our vital populations. There's a little bit of that going on. Yeah, I think our national teams have some regulations for rules. That's a good question. So I was wondering about the potential why economic impacts to different fisheries and they have another example of us moving slow to get in front of that curve. We're not spending a lot of money trying to capture what's going on and take actions to I think we'll see who there's going to be in the future. So you focused in 30 years ago what was aquaculture? You just heard about some guys growing some fishing events. That was all of them. We see oyster farms, we see seabed farms, we see fish farms. I think once aquaculture starts to become the industry standard for producing sustainable seafood for the world because I don't think we'll be able to fish our oceans because nothing new is seen as a stable. So once it starts, again, in the industry enough where they're urged to go see the money start coming to it. I just don't think it's had that kind of impact yet in our country where people want to look at the money into the effort. So as I said in the state of Maine we have very few people working on this effort certainly. There's folks like myself who are painting this whole time and we do it on the side with small seed money from to produce that data and the folks who are the state are the ones who are running to me from my data all the time because it's I'm not trying to backpack but it's the best marine industries we have in the state because no one has a funding program to help them stop. So yeah funding research didn't people concern about this and it's happened from just a few years back we had at our age I've had green friends and how we can manage this problem with that spurred a whole new department that you may be looking at so small steps yeah that's a good one it's the number one factor that we see we're one of the very few countries that has a Dallas Water Change Act and it's only 10 years old and again if you want to change your water you gotta play by the rules here because I don't know it's changing a lot of works changing it with a lot to wear yeah so when you get out of the open ocean the water you've taken into your ships is from estuaries or ports where a lot of things are growing the open ocean and we're like 200 miles offshore is actually a pretty biologically undiworked area there's not a lot of stuff in the water out there there's a lot of our species that are in the coastal that are in the continental ships so once you're out of the open ocean you can suck up open ocean water and add very few critters to that so what you're doing is you're taking this water from diverse estuaries crabs and shrimp and fish and all these things and you're exchanging with water from the open ocean with very few things living in that top for itself so yeah that's why it works you're sucking up kind of open ocean water that coastal water yeah to no notion they won't survive yeah they won't survive yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so we're not in normal life actually so the european oysters came into the damaskotta river in the southeast and they were on and off the culture so they were purposefully at human they were all here who dropped it so we're going to grow any of these things and then of course they get out of that river and they're all off the coast of Maine that's a good example of a like how are these guys playing role are they really being detrimental to our environment they can't water after all right and are they co-existent with our native species or are we finding less of our native species and more of the invasive and if that's the case and one out competes the other do we care I don't know I'm not a super shellfish biologist so we get to those specific species questions and sometimes we defer to the experts and say well what's the selfish expert to everyone so the libel culture say do you care for any european oyster versus our native species is there more meat in one than the other the clean water I'm not sure about that but that's a good question there's one example I gave you is those little tiny amphibotens that show you they're called the skeleton shrimp they really come out if you pull stuff out you can see them kind of on the ropes and that's why I thought it was kind of creepy and nasty I can't give you a good reason why we should be definitely scared of skeleton shrimp so when he asked me about some food skeleton shrimp was not he was like well I didn't make this place our native species because I can't find our native skeleton shrimp anymore but again I go no they're raising on the epifama and the falcon theme and one replace the other I can't give you a good alarm on why that matters so the oyster is a really interesting question it's definitely popular in our base in codes and I don't know really how that's affected our native species as far as competition for space game or if they don't really care which kind of oyster they're eating some of those species are very similar yeah they don't? so I'm not a oyster not even one of those because I don't understand their biology I'm just playing with that I'm kidding I know they're a big thing they're even a bearer to hear I had to go on to a beer festival all things they had and I apparently had enough for baby prey and I went over and threw one back and I worked in the estuary so much when I can tell you it wasn't off-coated to me it wasn't fishy and nasty but it tasted like the marshmallows to me very briny and fresh and very briny wrong match but it didn't hit me trying to sell myself I don't know if you can understand but the one thing I would just take about these things are blooded to the environment you have all these unintended consequences all the words are right but instead it's just too low that's the danger of trying to manage biologists biologists sometimes so the point I want to bring home to you guys tonight so we wrap up and take a home here is that the marine invasive species are a real second name they're having impacts on our economy on our recreation and on our fisheries but they're not paying too much attention to this other area I think part of that is because of some of the species that I showed you, it's kind of a focused area everyone can understand it's a little better for two because I think and they're also a lot tougher to manage but we're getting to the point where they're at least understanding where they are, how they're spreading how their populations are changing can at least put us on the right path to do the best we can to the management and trying to again if we can't stop the effects of these things we can at least understand them see them coming and not be caught off and anyone see them, they didn't know right, we can at least prepare ourselves for the inevitable so if you have an opportunity to go around your coast now with me, we'll see some of this stuff and you'll be like, oh yeah, that's something you're talking about and if you're interested in helping please go hold on and again I think this is a form of stewardship for your islands it's certainly getting your coast pretty hard and John does make the monitoring for the islanders every year he does, yeah, so if you wanted to take the first step it's just a touch face with John if you get along with them for a monitoring event you can fill out the waters and again, if you're from a different island or you don't have someone to contact please go hold them in we appreciate all the help we get from our volunteers it's what makes this stuff work because we don't have the staff we don't have the state department we don't have the federal police to do the second monitoring so more eyes on your island