Every fall I bring my College of the Atlantic marine biology class to Otter Point to observe the dramatic intertidal on an exposed shoreline. Starting in 2013, after doing some work with William Procter’s 1930s surveys of marine invertebrates in Frenchman’s Bay, I became interested in how we might be able to use historical data to look at changes in marine intertidal communities, and I also started looking at a set of papers from the 1920s describing intertidal algae at Otter Point. With a drawing of the area, including one very large tide pool, and an x on a map, a field
Over the next five years, students from my fall marine biology class censused the area during the term. They gained experience in identifying species, determining geographic ranges from the literature, calculating relative abundance, and making photographic comparisons with pictures published in the original papers. One of the students from the 2015 marine biology class, Heather Sieger ’19, picked up the work as her senior project, and over 2018-19 focused on sampling at other times of the year, adding spring and summer samples to our fall work. Heather gained more confidence in her identification skills as she worked with two COA alumnae, Kipp Quinby ’06 from Sedgwick (where she works in her family’s business, Ocean Resources) and Jordan Chalfant ’12 (who is currently working on a book of Maine marine algae with the Maine Natural History Observatory). Once Heather completed her sampling, she visited Dr. Art Mathieson at the University of New Hampshire, who was a great help in clearing up some confusing species.
