Kristina Cammen

This week, UMaine News featured some of the great research happening in our lab, being led by Jamie Fogg, a senior in Marine Biology, a Maine Top Scholar, and a recipient of the Center for Undergraduate Research Fellowship.  Jamie’s research this year has focused on understanding why harp seals appear more resistant to disease than harbor seals, through an investigation of the genetic diversity at an immune system gene that is part of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC).  You can read more about Jamie’s research here:

https://umaine.edu/news/2026/04/why-are-some-seals-more-resistant-to-disease-a-umaine-student-investigates/

Please join us in congratulating and celebrating Drs. Christina McCosker and Julia Clem who both successfully defended their PhD dissertations this week!

Jamie Fogg, a Cammen Lab undergraduate research assistant and a Maine Top Scholar, was invited on to the Maine State Science podcast to chat about some of the research she has been working on at UMaine!  From whale watch research with Allied Whale (College of the Atlantic) during a summer internship, to using environmental DNA (eDNA) to study gray seals in Cape Cod with the Cammen Lab, Jamie has participated in a wide range of research during her undergraduate career thus far.

Most recently, she was awarded a prestigious NOAA Hollings Scholarship, and this summer, she will be working at the Woods Hole Laboratory of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service studying North Atlantic Right Whale passive acoustics.

Please join us in congratulating and celebrating Dr. Alice Hotopp on her successful PhD defense!!!

Jamie Fogg, a Maine Top Scholar and undergraduate research assistant in the Cammen Lab, was recently featured in the Maine Epscor newsletter. Check out the article which describes her research and how she got here.

Kristina, Julia, and Jamie sampling eDNA with collaborators from Center for Coastal Studies

Jamie has worked on multiple projects as part of the Maine-eDNA research program and developed and funded her own research with a grant from the University of Maine Center for Undergraduate Research.  This past year, Jamie conducted a study in collaboration with the Center for Coastal Studies,  and co-advised by PhD student Julia Sunnarborg, which expands our understanding of eDNA dynamics around seal haulout sites. Her poster presentation of this research at the UMaine Student Symposium won the award for best undergraduate poster in Natural Sciences.

As part of a K-12 STEAM education program in collaboration with 4-H, several members of the Cammen Lab recently visited the Belfast Free Library to share their knowledge and passion about marine mammals with a group of elementary and middle school-aged children. Their program, Flippers, Fins and Fur: Exploring Marine Mammals, engaged participants in matching photographs of whales, extracting DNA from strawberries, and finding prey (pasta) in seal scat (play dough).  These activities conveyed the diverse array of techniques that we use in our lab to learn about marine mammals, and we were excited to share them with aspiring Ocean Xplorers in a coastal Maine town!

Christina McCosker, Julia Sunnarborg, Sydney Ulland, and Ella Offerdahl (left to right)

Check out this research highlight on Dara Yiu’s research in the Gulf of Maine kelp forests using eDNA and SCUBA diving techniques.  Dara is a PhD candidate in our lab who is co-advised by Doug Rasher and based at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

Maine’s kelp forests and the impact of environmental change

Happy New Year! To start off your science in 2024, check out this new paper recently published by PhD candidate Alice Hotopp and our colleagues at UMaine and UNH who are part of an NSF-funded project, Genomic Ecology of Coastal Organisms. In this paper, Alice describes for the first time the bacterial and fungal communities that are found on feathers of sparrow species that are uniquely adapted to salt marsh habitats.  This research is an important first step in understanding the co-evolution of hosts and microbiomes in the salt marsh environment.

Hotopp AM^b, Olsen BJ, Ishaq SL, Frey SD, Kovach AI, Kinnison MT, Gigliotti FN, Roeder MR, Cammen KM (2024) Tidal marsh sparrow plumage microorganism communities. iScience. 27: 108668.

This past year, I had the opportunity to work with a great group of colleagues on a new book describing Maine’s rich natural heritage.  The book, Our Maine: Exploring Its Rich Natural Heritage, is a series of chapters, essays, and photographs that “paint a vivid portrait of Maine’s wild places and wild creatures, as well as of human impacts and the way the state’s heritage has changed.”  My contribution tracks the history and contemporary state of harbor seals in Maine.

To check out our book, you can purchase it online or at many local bookstores in Maine!

Jamie Fogg holding an eDNA sampler.

Jamie Fogg, a Maine Top Scholar and undergraduate student working in the Cammen Lab, was recently awarded a fellowship from the University of Maine’s Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR).  We are so excited to work with Jamie on her research project, “Beyond the shoreline: Investigating gray seal eDNA in coastal waters.” Co-advised by Kristina Cammen and Julia Sunnarborg, Jamie will use qPCR to analyze eDNA samples she collected with collaborators at the Center for Coastal Studies earlier this year off the coast of Cape Cod. Her research aims to better understand the dynamics of environmental DNA (eDNA) around gray seal haulouts.