Lab News

Julia Sunnarborg (PhD candidate), Jamie Fogg (Maine Top Scholar undergraduate student), and Kristina Cammen traveled to Cape Cod earlier this week to sample gray seal eDNA in collaboration with the Center for Coastal Studies. This collaboration, which has been ongoing for several years, is testing innovative new environmental DNA (eNDA) tools for non-invasive sampling of marine mammals. On this trip, we tried pushing the envelope to see how far from a haul-out we can detect gray seal eDNA and whether eDNA concentrations vary across the depth profile.  Thank you to Christy Hudak, Lisa Sette, and Liz Bradfield for a beautiful day on the water with lots of seals (and even some whales)!

This research is conducted under the Northeast Fisheries Science Center NOAA Research Permit 21719.

Cammen Lab PhD student, Alice Hotopp, recently published an essay on her personal experience with ecological grief in Spire, The Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability.  Earlier this semester, she led our lab group in a discussion of this topic, and its relevance to our research on protected and endangered species.  Check out her beautiful words and thoughtful perspectives here: https://umaine.edu/spire/2023/04/21/hotopp/ 

Cammen Lab PhD student, Christina McCosker, was featured in this month’s UMaine ARCSIM newsletter.  ARCSIM is the Advanced Research Computing, Security & Information Management CORE service at the University of Maine.  This service center helps connect our lab group with the powerful computing resources and staff expertise that we need to conduct our genomic data analysis.  To learn more about this, check out the article on Christina’s research: https://umaine.edu/arcsim/2023/04/24/leveraging-data-to-understand-gray-seal-health/