Damariscotta River Archives

Innovative Fish Farms Aim to Feed the Planet, Save Jobs and Clean Up an Industry’s Dirty Reputation

April 20, 2022 — Carter Newell owns and operates one of the most productive mussel farms in the state of Maine. One frigid spring morning I joined him and his two-person crew on a short boat ride to the barge he calls Mumbles, a 60-by-24-foot vessel anchored that day in a quiet cove in the brackish Damariscotta River. Named for the Welsh seaside town where Newell once did research, Mumbles was tethered to a steel-framed raft hung with hundreds of 45-foot ropes, each thick with thousands of mussels in various stages of development.

I shivered in the piercing wind as a crew member stepped from Mumbles onto the shifting raft to identify mussel ropes ready for harvest. Newell remained on the barge to helm a 16-foot crane that hauled up the designated ropes, each heavy with a Christmas tree–shaped aggregation of roughly 3,000 mussels. An outsized brush then swept the bivalves off the ropes and into an enormous stainless steel bucket. Another machine funneled them into a heavy polyethylene bag the size of a baby elephant, from which they were poured onto a conveyor-belt apparatus to be scrubbed, sorted and bagged. Newell designed this ungainly Willy Wonka–esque apparatus over decades in a costly process of trial and error that faced—and ultimately overcame—several challenges, including protecting the mussels from turbulent seas and voracious eider ducks.

Read the full story at Scientific American

As climate change threatens Maine fisheries, it’s not all bad news for oysters

September 28, 2020 — Despite the threat climate change poses to longstanding Maine fisheries such as lobsters and softshell clams, and the harm it already has inflicted on northern shrimp and groundfish, there is one Maine fishery that has seen rapid growth in the past decade and is expected to continue expanding: oysters.

Eastern oysters are native to Maine, and have long been harvested as food along the coast, as evidenced by piles of ancient shell middens found along the banks of the tidal Damariscotta River. The river is where the current fishery was revived as an aquaculture enterprise in the 1980s, when growers seeded and harvested hundreds of thousands of pounds of both Eastern and European oysters each year.

Since then the industry has expanded along the Maine coast to Wells in York County and Steuben in Washington County to include nearly 100 commercial lease sites (more than two dozen of which are on the Damariscotta River) and millions of dollars in annual revenues. In 2019, oyster growers earned $7.6 million in gross revenues — more than three-and-a-half times what they took in in 2010 — making oysters one of the most valuable marine fisheries in the state.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Maine to get nearly $600,000 under ocean research program that escaped Trump budget cuts

June 25, 2018 — Dana Morse, an aquaculture researcher at Maine Sea Grant, checks on ear-hung scallops tied to an anchor chain on a mussel raft on the Damariscotta River in September. The Maine Sea Grant College Program has received a grant of nearly $600,000.

The Maine Sea Grant College Program will receive $574,691 from the federal government under a funding stream that President Trump proposed eliminating this year.

U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King of Maine made the announcement Friday about the award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that “will be used to advance sustainable use and environmental conservation efforts along Maine’s coast led by the University of Maine.”

“Thousands of Mainers in our state’s coastal communities rely on fishing, lobstering, and other ocean-related industries for their livelihoods,” the senators said in a statement. “The National Sea Grant program has helped these businesses thrive by funding critical research that helps us better understand, utilize, and protect one of our state’s natural resources, and we are heartened by its continued partnership with the University of Maine.”

In February, NOAA’s Sea Grant Program was among several federal programs targeted by Trump for cuts in his proposed budget. Broad bipartisan support saved the program, which received $65 million in this year’s final federal budget – $2 million more than its previous appropriation.

Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald at CentralMaine.com

Bill Mook: Pruitt ignoring science consensus could have dire consequences for Maine

March 13, 2017 — I spent Valentine’s Day making a whirlwind trip to Washington, D.C., on behalf of my company, Mook Sea Farm, an oyster farm on the Damariscotta River. For 32 years we’ve been raising oysters from egg to market size and selling seed oysters to other East Coast farms. I made the trip to oppose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s nomination to be the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

On the trip to Washington, I thought long and hard about what I might say that would make a difference, especially to Sen. Susan Collins, who at that time had not yet announced her position on the Pruitt nomination. It seemed unnecessary, given the widely publicized information about his record, to point out Pruitt’s lack of fitness for the position. So, I decided to focus on my own story.

I talked about almost being forced out of business in 1998 by illegal dumping of septic and chemical waste next to my hatchery, and the personal anguish and stress this caused for an entire year. Mook Sea Farm would likely not have survived had it not been for the Clean Water Act.

I also explained that a decade or so later, the impact of carbon emissions suddenly became very real – no longer an abstract, future problem. Carbon dioxide emissions, dissolving in the ocean and changing precipitation patterns in the Northeast, had slowly degraded the lifeblood of my company: the seawater we pump into the hatchery. Our shellfish larvae were having a tough time growing shells in seawater as it became increasingly acidic. Production became erratic, forcing us to adopt a suite of remedies that include buffering our seawater (think of taking Tums).

Read the full opinion piece at the Portland Press Herald