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Scientific studies do not always have to occur in a laboratory.
Sometimes the only way to gather data is to find a boat and a small robot and get a little wet.
Emily Knight and fisherman Cameron McLellan did just that when they examined the ecological effects of trawling on underwater ecosystems during a three-year study that began last summer.
Trawling is a method of catching fish that live on or near the sea floor using a boat to drag a net along the sea floor.
It has been used by fishermen for hundreds of years, and many on the Maine coast depend on it for their livelihood. However, scientists believe that trawling destroys ecosystems.
McLellan asked the Gulf of Maine Research Institute to begin the study.
“I wanted to challenge Les Watling’s theory that bottom trawling was equivalent to clear-cutting a forest,” said McLellan. She thought that there had not been enough research done for anyone to make that claim.
Watling, then a research scientist at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, asked Knight to do the research as her graduate research project.
Knight said the opportunity to work with McLellan made the study easier.
“In many ways, a fisherman has an incredible amount of local knowledge that a scientist doesn’t have,” Knight said.
“Science needs their local knowledge to design a process that is valid.”
The study took place largely within the western Gulf of Maine in an area that has been closed to trawling. One section was closed in 1998 and another section was added two years later.
McLellan and Knight compared both sections to ocean floor that had never been closed. This allowed them to measure how long it took for an ecosystem to recover from the effects of trawling.
Their studies showed that ecosystems were able to recover, and the longer the section had been closed, the more stable the ecosystem became.
However, Knight said, the study did not yield a timeline for exactly how long a full recovery would take because they had no area that had never been trawled to use as a control.
McLellan said the project faces some challenges.
“I believe it cannot be a one- year or two-year project,” he said, noting that they are dealing with an ever-changing environment and that there is not enough interest in funding and managing such studies.
He does not believe the results will have any effect on fishermen or on policies.
“I wonder if it goes into some sort of black box and never comes out.”
