ANNE HOBBY
STAFF WRITER
Who said you need to go to Florida to swim with the dolphins? The water in Maine might be too cold for the tourists but not for the indigenous white-sided dolphin. They are one of hundreds of marine species the Gulf of Maine Area Program, a field project of the International Census of Marine Life, is studying. The program, housed in the Muskie School of Public Service, is one of more than 17 subprograms in the census.
The goal of the program is to “Promote further exploration of the Gulf of Maine. It’s a very studied area, but parts of it have not received their due attention over the past few decades,” said Lewis Incze, USM’s senior bioscience researcher and chief scientist for the Gulf of Maine Area program.
After three years in existence, the program is up for renewal of its grant which would extend its funding for another two years. The program is supported by the Alfred Sloan Foundation based in New York, New York.
The program uses these grants to study the marine ecosystem that stretches from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Cape Cod in an attempt to understand the causes and consequences of the biodiversity there. The research conducted by the program is intended to provide methods to better manage the natural resources of the ocean.
The region studied by the program extends north into Canadian waters, and out to sea until the continental slope. The deeper water is what most of the program’s researchers are interested in.
While the program has many goals, it doesn’t have one specific mission, and the facets of the gulf that are studied depend on the interests of funding sources. Current popular subjects are coral and seamounts. The Gulf of Maine Area Program is using this opportunity to send research cruises to the continental slope and seamounts where researchers can study deep-water corals, fish, and crustaceans. Historically deep-water studies have not gotten as much attention as near-shore waters. Information gleaned from these deep-water excursions will help scientists understand the gulf ecosystem as a whole.
Currently program representatives are lobbying the
U.S. National Committee for federal funding for biodiversity research. As of yet, the U.S. government’s
science program does not
allocate any resources towards this field of study.
In order to better facilitate scientific collaboration the program has created a website that contains the research data generated by the program. The information is available for scientists and the public at http://gmbis. iris.usm.maine.edu.
Anne Hobby
can be contacted at
freepress@
usm.maine.edu