Next time you’re in Blue Hill, especially if you have kids with you, take a minute to check out the Maine Environmental Research Institute (MERI)’s inviting new gallery, aquarium, touch tank, co-store, lending library and cozy reading nook.

When marine scientist and toxicologist Susan Shaw founded MERI in 1990, she was involved in a major research project. She envisioned MERI as a means of organizing and funding research on marine pollution and its impact on seals and fish. But MERI grew and by 1992 it had developed an educational component.

“Moving to this building [in 2001] changed everything; here we brought the research and education together,” Shaw said, clearly pleased as she sat in the back of MERI’s light-filled gallery in its renovated 1856 Greek Revival house on Blue Hill’s Main Street. “So much is happening now. We’ve become so well known to the community. We’ve grown in education and research exponentially.” She said that in the last 10 months she’d hired five new staff people, four in research and one in education.

She explained the expansion by saying, “from the beginning, we’ve been doing high quality programs, and the community appreciates that.”

MERI’s art exhibitions evolved from its well-received monthly Ocean Environment Lecture Series. MERI displayed art for the first time at its 2005 Christmas party. “The minute we put the first show up,” she said, “we saw how beautiful the gallery was.” The party was hugely successful. Shaw said, “It brought in a whole new group of people.” Building on that success, she and her staff decided to continue the art and to match the theme of the art with the theme of each month’s lecture.

“The lectures are very focused on issues,” she explained. “They have to do with interactions between marine wildlife and people, like entanglements with whales, strandings of marine mammals, the climate, the health of the Gulf of Maine, pollution.”

Wilson’s woodcuts set off Steuben sculptor Raymond Carbone’s woodcarvings. In his “Razorbill at Sea,” Carbone allows his duck to emerge from the wood-carved sea. Of oiled black walnut, this beautifully carved sculpture is over two feet long, two feet wide, and only four and a half inches high.

“We’re planning these [exhibitions] as we go,” Shaw said. “It’s our first year, but we do have a beautiful show for April: photographs of tide pools and the Maine coast.” The photographers are Ilya Askinsazi and Cullen Schneider. Their art will complement Dr. David Townsend’s lecture on Red Tides in the Gulf of Maine.

In June, National Geographic photographer Bill Curtsinger will exhibit ocean photography.

This year’s Distinguished Speaker Lecture, on Aug. 10, will feature the pros and cons of eating fish, how often should we eat it and the question of eating farmed fish.

In the room behind the gallery space, workmen are enlarging the aquarium to twice its present size. Nonetheless, adults and children can see such colorful creatures as a blue lobster, an orange (uncooked) one, a pregnant crab with extruded orange eggs stuck on her underside and an absolutely adorable hermit crab that hides and lives in a waved whelk (snail) shell when not peeking out to see if it’s safe. Education director Martha Bell said, unnecessarily, that the hermit crab is a favorite.

Next to the touch tank, a large and not terribly attractive white lumpfish from Blue Hill Bay named Norman cruises around his aquarium. Bell said MERI has had Norman since he was fingernail size in the touch tank. At more than eight inches long and about five and a half inches high, he speaks to the care he’s received over the years. Norman, who eats squid, has become the mascot for the aquarium fundraising drive, 60 percent of which has been raised, enough to finish construction. q

For more information go to www.meriresearch.org or call (207) 374-2135.