Until April 26, when a piece of aquaculture netting was cut to celebrate the opening of dry lab and office space on the second floor, researchers like Dr. Paul Rawson, who has been working to develop and test genetically improved oyster lines that will be useful to the Maine oyster industry and other New England states, had to store sensitive equipment elsewhere. “The new space is wonderful,” he says. “For years, I’ve had to keep some equipment in other places-other buildings at Darling or up in Orono because I was afraid of sea water damage.”
At the Darling Marine Center, there are two buildings that supply continuous flowing seawater. The Flowing Sea Water Lab was built not long after Ira Darling donated his summer place in 1965 to the University of Maine, stipulating that it should be turned into a marine laboratory. This eventually became the field station of the university’s School of Marine Science. Close by, the second building, called the Marine Culture Lab, was built in 2001 with funding from the National Science Foundation. At the time, people involved in planning the building decided to leave the second story unfinished so they could build as large a facility as possible with the money available.
In 2009, Chris Davis, director of Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center (MAIC) since 2004, obtained a $213,900 grant from the Maine Technology Asset Fund to enhance the aquaculture facilities and promote innovative aquaculture business ventures at the Center. Finally, it was possible to utilize the upstairs space in the Marine Culture Lab, which had looked like someone’s messy attic stuffed with boxes and containers, tubes and pipes of all sizes and shapes, strange equipment that only a person involved in aquaculture would recognize. Now, only one large space is used for storage; the rest has been turned into efficient dry labs and offices. The storage area will also eventually become lab/office space.
The renovation is a special boon to Mick Devin, who has had to make do with damp, partitioned office space in the Marine Culture Lab next to the bubbling tanks. As hatchery manager, he grows all the algae and gives support to a great variety of research projects conducted by UMaine professors, grad and undergraduate students, scientists from other universities and institutions, and classroom activities conducted by marine science professors. He believes it will be a great help for researchers to have office space closer to the lab and an incentive for additional projects. Two of Devin’s current projects involve support for Rawson’s work with oysters, which will include developing new strains from oysters that have survived the outbreak of MSX disease that was discovered last August in the Damariscotta River and Chris Maloney’s work in assessing the characteristics of and possible uses for different forms of algae.
Maloney is one of the Center’s Aquaculture Business Incubator tenants housed in the Flowing Sea Water Lab building. Business Incubator tenants are working on pilot projects for businesses that will be located in Maine and thus will contribute to the Maine economy. One extremely successful former tenant, Micro Technologies, is now located in Richmond, Maine. At the Darling Center, Davis explains, incubator tenants have access to infrastructure they could never invest in on their own-the flowing seawater labs, continuous algal culture facility, larval culture systems, quarantine broodstock facility, juvenile growout systems, the use of high tech expensive equipment and access to the expertise of the university.
Hatchery owner Bill Mook is another Business Incubator tenant. He needed the space to experiment with ways to store juvenile oysters during the winter months. If this were possible, hatcheries could be run for a longer period, and would have a larger supply on hand to satisfy demands for juvenile oysters in May.
Davis is establishing an MAIC field office in the new space, where it will be more conveniently located to support MAIC research projects such as an ongoing study of the environmental impacts on oyster farming. Funded by a grant from the Northeast Regional Aquaculture Center, researchers are calculating what conditions, such as water currents and temperature, produce optimal conditions for growth. Findings will be available in a computer software package.
Muriel Hendrix is a freelance writer living in Bath.