On August 24th and 25th, Colleen Haskell, Kyle Pepperman, and the DEI crew welcomed two Brunswick High School teachers to learn about how to infuse marine science into their science curriculum. Rick Wilson, director of service learning, and Andrew McCullough, marine science teacher, participated in DEI’s first Coastal Academy. In two short days, the pair learned about numerous hands-on projects that can easily be incorporated into the marine science classroom at Brunswick High School. These projects included laboratory studies such as raising phytoplankton, culturing bivalves such as clams and mussels, and growing lobsters as well as field-related projects such as planting and protecting cultured soft-shell clam seed and deploying clam recruitment boxes to study how productive certain intertidal areas are when predators are excluded. Follow this link to a newspaper article in the Mid-Coast Forecaster describing the two days at DEI and what the two teachers are doing back at Brunswick High School.

Caption: Kyle Pepperman, left, and Colleen Haskell of the Downeast Institute, and Brunswick High School science teacher Andrew McCullough check on a 14-by-14-foot net that protects seed clams from green crabs at Molly Cove, near DEI. (Photo by The Forecaster).