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A few years ago, a researcher growing scallops in Penobscot Bay who was looking to engage students in her work asked Islesboro Central School for help picking baby scallops — called spat — off her project’s net bags.
On a cold, wet March day, students spent hours sorting spat, said Haley Currie-Nelson, a science teacher at the school. “They were like, ‘That was fun, can we do our own farm?’”
The students ended up doing just that. They’ve since taken the lead on everything from securing the necessary state permits to deciding where to place the bags where the scallops will grow.
The program is not just aimed at teaching students marine biology, but also gives them practical experience that could help them find a way to make a living from the water, even as climate change and rising costs threaten the traditional fishing industry that has sustained many of Maine’s island communities. As wild-caught fisheries face increasing environmental and regulatory challenges, aquaculture has become more popular in Maine and elsewhere as a potentially viable alternative.
On Wednesday, a group of students went out to check on their scallops. Last fall, they dropped mesh bags attached to rope at four sites off the island. The hope was that microscopic scallop larvae floating in the water column would drift into the bags and start to grow there.
The students chose spots with different conditions — rocky bottom, muddy bottom and huge tidal range, proximity to runoff from the mainland — to see how these variables might affect the number of juvenile scallops in each bag.
“The question is, where around the island are we going to collect the most?” Currie-Nelson said.
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These questions aren’t just an exercise. Scallop farming in Maine is much less developed than mussel, oyster and seaweed aquaculture. So the students’ findings may make important contributions to the field, Currie-Nelson said.
A boat, borrowed from a school board member, ferried the group past rocky ledges and arresting views of the suddenly green Camden Hills. Many of the students, chatting or scrolling on their phones, seemed to take it all in stride — even a passing porpoise and dozens of sunning seals.
At a spot near Pendleton Point, one student hooked a buoy marking their scallops, and another helped haul it in, pulling on rope that was slick and pungent with seaweed.
The bag was weighted down with a lobster trap, and the students got to work removing all of the other sea life that clung to the trap.
Suddenly, everyone was engaged. They gently peeled dozens of sea stars off the wire mesh and arranged them along one student’s legs.
They peppered Currie-Nelson and each other with questions as they caught quick-moving rock gunnels and tiny urchins, and inspected live sand dollars before tossing them gently back.
“Oh my god, it’s a pregnant Jonah crab,” said Louis Glotzl, a 10th-grader, holding up a palm-sized crab with a brown spongy mass of eggs on her abdomen.
When students get their hands dirty and have first-hand experiences in the real world, it kicks off their curiosity and their scientific thinking, Currie-Nelson said.
“All of a sudden in front of them, there’s a pregnant crab, there’s starfish that is still regenerating an arm,” she said. “All of a sudden they go from being very passive to having things in front of them that they’re asking questions about.”
“That really is where science and learning happens,” she said.
Currie-Nelson doesn’t have a background in aquaculture, so she is learning right alongside her students. “Which is really fun, because you don’t have all the answers all the time,” she said.
Many of the students who pushed to start the farm were already fishing and lobstering part time and in the summer, Currie-Nelson said, and were excited to explore aquaculture as a way to make a living on the water, even if the traditional fishing industry continues to contract.
Cultivating scallops could also be a way to have a supply of the shellfish — which fetch a premium — without having to drag the seafloor, which can damage ocean ecosystems.
“These island kids love being here and they’re trying to figure out, how do we keep doing the things that we love in a sustainable way,” she said.
After lunch, on a float near the ferry landing, four eighth-graders dumped out the contents of one of the mesh bags into two bins of seawater and started searching for pinky-nail-sized baby scallops.
These will go into mesh boxes and be lowered back down to the ocean floor. In the fall, the students will haul them up again and measure their growth and mortality rates.
Bent over bins, the students searched through dozens of translucent Gulf of Maine shrimp, golden mussels, miniscule clams and bright green blobby sea squirts and found 21 tiny scallops.
Running his hands through the water, eighth-grader Jeremy Brochu looked up at Currie-Nelson.
“I kind of want to be a marine biologist,” he said. “How does that work?”