Over the past year, there’s been much discussion around revisiting lobster hatcheries as a way to reverse the decade-long downturn in Maine’s lobster landings. Now, as the population declines, interest in hatcheries is resurfacing. In the words of baseball’s Yogi Berra, “It’s deja vu all over again.” However, decades of research suggest that while hatcheries serve valuable roles in education…

A high-profile debate has broken out over the proposed re-zoning of more than half of a 23-acre parcel of industrial land on Portland’s western waterfront where the popular Hearts of…

The Maine Department of Transportation and the Maine State Ferry Service commissioned the M/V Captain Almer Dinsmore on Thursday, Nov. 6. The ceremony at ferry service headquarters in Rockland marked the vessel's…

Early in my career, I trained as a cultural anthropologist, wanting to understand the norms, values, and behaviors that shape us across time and geography. For a variety of reasons,…

You may have seen Island Institute's efforts to protect funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through a campaign we’re calling “NOAA ’bout it! Speak up about it!” As…

In the face of shifting federal policy priorities and funding, Maine is finding that federal agencies have become less reliable partners in the effort to track the effects of climate…

Maine lobstermen welcomed the news that federal regulators have preliminarily updated their estimates of North Atlantic right whale deaths and injuries from fixed gear fisheries and found them to be…

“The more [water that] comes into it, the better it works, because it will become heavier and heavier.”

This piece originally ran in UMaine News.   A steep drop in baby lobsters provided an early warning of the sharp decline in adult lobsters along the Midcoast, a new…

In September, the coastline off Brunswick and Harpswell transformed into a scene out of a horror film. First, water around local mudflats turned unusually brown. State and local officials then…