November 29, 2012 — One minute, Noah Oppenheim was firing up his camera on the ocean floor just off Pemaquid Point in the midcoast of Maine. The next, he was the first human witness to an underwater crime in progress.
"I was blown away," Oppenheim, 25, said during a break this week at The American Lobster in a Changing Ecosystem, a four-day symposium of marine scientists at the Holiday Inn by the Bay in Portland. "I had no idea this was coming — absolutely no idea."
He's talking about lobsters eating their young.
At night, when nobody's looking.
Or so they thought.
We hear a lot these days about Maine's brain drain, that excruciating exodus of our best and brightest young people from their home state to, well, anywhere but Maine.
Then along comes a young scientist-in-training like Oppenheim and suddenly the future doesn't feel quite so bleak.
He grew up in Falmouth, graduated from Waynflete School in Portland in 2005 and spent seven years attending college and working on the West Coast. Now he's enrolled in a dual master's program — in marine biology and fisheries policy — at the University of Maine.
And on Wednesday, Oppenheim took a deep breath and delivered his first-ever presentation at a scientific conference. His topic: "Cannibals by night? Density-dependent feeding in the Gulf of Maine's lobster population."
(Think Tru-TV's "Top 20 Most Shocking" videos — only with claws.)
"It's my honor to be this much in the loop," Oppenheim said as more than 100 scientists from New England and Canada, including his own mentors from UMaine, milled about the conference organized by the university's Maine Sea Grant College Program.
"Noah fits my lab perfectly," said Rick Wahle, a professor in UMaine's School of Marine Sciences who is Oppenheim's adviser. "He's got a great heart and is very enthusiastic about his work."
Read the full story in the Portland Press Herald