Humans put many demands on the ocean — for fishing, shipping, raw materials, and more. Those demands can threaten marine life and the communities that depend on local fisheries. A new lab at UMass Dartmouth aims to help us share the ocean. CAI’s Jennette Barnes takes us there.
“Over here, we’ve got field supplies.”
Assistant Professor Melissa Cronin is showing me around the room. It has a work table, white boards on the walls, supply cabinets, and a refrigerator.
What we’re really in this room to see, though, are the manta tails.
She invites me to put on some gloves.
“It’s just really ... so you don't, like, shed skin cells,” she says. “And I'll just show you what we've got in here.”
She brings out a plastic tube, labeled with the name of a fishing boat. She uncaps the tube and gently pours a pile of white silica beads onto a piece of bubble wrap.
“And here’s the tail.”
Among the beads sits a dried piece of a manta ray tail. It looks like a short length of dark-gray wire.
Cronin, new to UMass Dartmouth in September, named her research unit the Shared Seas Lab. It’s all about balancing ocean interests to inform conservation and policy.
Commercial tuna boats catch manta and devil rays unintentionally, as what’s called bycatch, which threatens some ray populations.
To collect samples for research, scientists on board tuna boats snip a few inches of cartilage from the tips of the rays’ tails.
With the help of genetic analysis from an outside lab, Cronin is looking at whether ray populations are localized to one area or intermixing with others.
“It's a really important question for conservation, because you would manage them very differently if there's really small populations or they're all one giant global population,” she said.
Ray conservation, in light of the conflict with tuna, is one of three areas of focus for her lab, located at the School for Marine Science and Technology, in New Bedford.
Another focal point, with a project based in Chile, centers on the conflict between industrial and small-scale fishing.
And in New England, the lab is studying the displacement of lobster fishers from coastal land.
So far, Cronin’s research on the lobster fishery has taken place in Maine, but there are plenty of examples on Cape Cod and the Islands of lobster fishers struggling to stay connected to the sea.
Jeffrey Richardson lobsters out of Sandwich Marina. He fishes 700 to 800 traps, and he lives about a mile from the marina.
At 34 years old, Richardson said he is contemplating getting out of lobstering, largely because of the cost of living near the water. He said if his fiancé agrees, they may move to Arizona.
“The biggest thing that's probably gonna run me out of my house is the taxes,” he said.
He said he pays about $15,000 a year in property taxes on his house, and the cost keeps going up. “Nothing's going to stop it.”
Tegan Gale, a 19-year-old lobsterman who fishes out of Menemsha, said he sees commercial fishing access on Martha’s Vineyard becoming harder, as high-wealth buyers acquire more of the island's waterfront property.
“Once in a while, after a big storm, … some lobster pots will wash up on the beach,” he said. “And when I was younger, we were allowed to bring our four-wheelers, and our four-by-fours, and pick up our gear off the beach.”
But now, “we actually get in trouble for doing that,” because private owners don’t want fishermen driving on the beach, he said.
And then there was the time he had to move his lobster gear off the fishing dock.
“People don't like looking at it,” he said. “We've actually heard that when … We had to move our gear last year because some people went for a sunset drive, and they couldn't see the harbor due to our gear.”
Displacement of lobster fishers first came to Cronin’s attention in Maine, on Bailey Island in Casco Bay.
“I noticed every year there would be fewer lobstermen and more new vacation homes, and fewer families too,” she said. “People would be leaving the island because it's so expensive to live there.”
She’s leading a study of the migration of Maine lobster fishers, in collaboration with Joshua Stoll, an associate professor at the University of Maine.
“In fisheries, we often think about the fish migrating,” Stoll said. “But in this case, we were hearing about people migrating. And it wasn't necessarily that they were leaving the fishery, but they were leaving the coast.”
Moving out of a coastal town has consequences, he said. For example, someone who needs a mooring for a fishing boat might no longer have a say in how the town manages those moorings.
The research with UMass Dartmouth will examine where lobster fishers live in relation to where they access the water, and how that’s changed over time.
Sitting in her office, Cronin brings up a map of Harpswell, Maine, on her computer. Parts of the town are colored purple to indicate where fewer lobster fishing licenses have been issued than in the past.
“It just creates this environment where we have a coastal economy dependent on tourism, rather than on connection with the ocean, on food provisioning from the ocean,” she says. “And in my opinion, it really … decouples the community from the land.”
A coastal economy dependent on tourism: That definitely sounds familiar to people in southeastern Massachusetts, where Cronin teaches now.
Her interdisciplinary lab will blend ecology, biology, and social science to search for better ways to share the sea.
