Event Highlights Opportunities for Ocean Science Collaboration

Last month, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences welcomed dozens of employees from the Maine Department of Marine Resources for the first Bigelow-DMR Collaborative Symposium. The event provided space for scientists at both institutions to share recent discoveries, ongoing projects, and research interests, and brainstorm possibilities for collaboration. Hopefully the first of many to come, the symposium represented the culmination of months of planning — and decades of partnership — with the goal of strengthening the collective impact of both organizations on marine research and innovation.

“Over the past decade, both Bigelow and DMR have grown dramatically in their scientific capacity. And over the same time period, the Gulf of Maine has rapidly changed,” said Senior Research Scientist Doug Rasher, one of the symposium co-organizers. “So, it’s both an exciting and important moment for us to strengthen existing collaborations, and start new partnerships, to tackle the problems facing our region.”

One of the major aims of the symposium was to foster and deepen personal connections. That said, Bigelow Laboratory’s relationship with DMR goes back to the institute’s earliest days when the lab sat adjacent to DMR’s facilities in West Boothbay Harbor.

One of the first collaborative projects between the two institutions began in the 1970s with a study to better understand the causes and consequences of toxic algae on shellfish. That monitoring program continues to this day. In 2014, that partnership, and Bigelow Laboratory' s analytical capacity, enabled Maine to become the first state to receive FDA approval to deploy a new, advanced testing method to detect algal toxins in shellfish. More recently, the team at Bigelow Laboratory’s Tandy Center for Ocean Forecasting have worked with DMR to take that program to the next level by turning monitoring data into a forecast to predict shellfish closures.

Researchers at Bigelow Laboratory have partnered with the agency for various other one-off projects. Rasher, for example, combined results from DMR’s long-running sea urchin survey with his team’s diving surveys to understand how <a href="https://www.bigelow.org/news/articles/2024-09-12.html target="_blank">Maine’s kelp forests have changed in the last 20 years. Fellow Senior Research Scientist Maya Groner, another co-organizer of the event, also partnered with DMR to run a large-scale experiment in their facilities studying the impacts of warming seawater on epizootic shell disease in lobsters.

The goal of the symposium was to build off those successes to find opportunities for broader exchange.

“There are a lot of great, joint projects underway, but the prospect of larger and more comprehensive collaboration at an institutional level is really exciting,” said Reyn Yoshioka, a postdoctoral scientist who helped run the event. “I heard from multiple participants how great it was to learn more about what their colleagues are doing and think about how those partnerships can grow beyond individual research groups.”

“We aimed to provide an overview of what is going on and can be done at each institution to advance the collaborative nature of our work for marine science and coastal Maine,” added Melissa Rocker, another postdoctoral scientist who helped run the event. “We’re all looking forward to continuing these conversations.”

The symposium included breakout sessions to allow participants to dive into areas of particular interest, with conversations spanning everything from using molecular tools to optimize aquaculture operations to identifying drivers of ecosystem change in a rapidly warming Gulf of Maine.

One of the big topics of the day was data sharing. Participants highlighted the incredible amount and diversity of monitoring data that are collected by both organizations, but also the challenge of knowing how to access and integrate different datasets. Creating better pathways for data sharing, participants agreed, would help researchers better leverage the vast amounts of information available.

“In the past decade, the ocean has gone from being somewhat poorly sampled to providing a deluge of data,” said fellow co-organizer Nick Record, a senior research scientist and director of the Tandy Center. “By connecting our foundational science with DMR’s support of public resources, these collaborations will help trace a pathway directly from scientific discovery to public good.”

The ultimate goal, he added, are new tools and forecasts that can answer all kinds of scientific questions and serve the needs of the public and marine industries.

The event closed with a discussion of the day’s key takeaways, during which there was a resounding call to keep the conversation going. Participants suggested several ways to foster these new relationships and translate them into tangible projects, including more networking opportunities and future symposiums.

“We optimistically called this the ‘first’ Bigelow-DMR symposium, and we’re pleased to see how much enthusiasm there is for holding this event again and others like it,” Groner said at the end of the day. “There’s clearly a lot of complementary interests and skillsets in this room and a great history of collaboration that we’re all invested in continuing and building on.”

Photos: Senior Research Scientist Doug Rasher delivers opening remarks (top), Senior Research Scientist Maya Groner addresses the audience (middle), and participants engage with one another during a break-out session (bottom).