{"id":155138,"date":"2023-06-27T15:26:28","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T19:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=155138"},"modified":"2023-06-29T17:47:54","modified_gmt":"2023-06-29T21:47:54","slug":"bates-college-students-learn-biology-skills-one-invasive-green-crab-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2023\/06\/27\/bates-college-students-learn-biology-skills-one-invasive-green-crab-at-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Bates students learn biology skills, one invasive crab at a time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The 14 Bates students poured out of vans, stretched briefly, and got to work handing out plastic buckets, clipboards, work gloves, PVC pipe, and other odds and ends. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They had trekked from Lewiston to Sandy Point Beach in Yarmouth, Maine, in early May, not for a day at the shore but to help with an ongoing project to monitor an invasive crab species that’s blamed for a massive decline in New England\u2019s soft-shell clam industry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most wearing soon-to-be-muddy boots, the students in the course \u201cBiological Skills: Invasive Green Crab Inventory and Monitoring,\u201d taught by Lecturer in Biology Jesse Minor \u201902, were met at the beach by Jessie Batchelder, a fisheries project manager at Manomet, a nonprofit conservation organization that\u2019s been monitoring the green crabs since 2018<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lecturer
Jessie Batchelder (center), a fisheries project manager at Manomet, gives an overview to the Bates crew, including Lecturer in Biology Jesse Minor \u201902 (left) after they arrive at Sandy Point Beach in Yarmouth on May 12. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Manomet’s data-collection work requires a lot of helping hands, which is partly why the Bates crew joined the work. Another reason is suggested by the phrase “Biological Skills” in the course title. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, the biology department has designed several new Short Term courses to \u201c<\/em>give students specific, marketable training that they could highlight in applications for internships or jobs,\u201d said Don Dearborn, a Bates professor of biology and associate dean of the faculty. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skills taught this year included everything from PCR (\u200b\u200ba technique to amplify specific sections of DNA) and 16S microbiome sequencing, which identifies microbes in the human body, to tree and shrub identification and how to design a behavioral experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lecturer
Minor joins Wil Dewey \u201924 of Ithaca, N.Y., and Mike Cruz \u201924 of Rollinsford, N.H., as they wade into the water to look for crabs. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For his skills course, Minor assigned a variety of roles and tasks to each student, from photographer to gear caretaker. He switched the roles around for each field trip to ensure that skills training was passed all around, and to give the students a chance “to think and reflect about the science they are doing and also their role within the group.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Minor\u2019s speciality is in field-centered pedagogy, which he first experienced at Bates, learning geology field techniques from Dyk Eusden \u201880 and other geology professors. As a senior, Minor completed an honors thesis that involved extensive fieldwork in the Presidential Range. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His course extends the work that Minor did at the University of Maine while teaching an honors course focused on green crabs. \u201cThey represent a Maine-based environmental problem that provides an accessible and interesting topic for a skills-based Short Term,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lecturer
While teaching at the University of Maine, Minor led students through green crab monitoring during an honors course. At Bates, he used the experience to give students skills they can highlight in internship applications. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

European green crabs are thought to have arrived on the East Coast in the 1800s, brought over in the ballast water of ships from Europe. In the past 50 years, the crab population along the New England coast has been steadily rising, coinciding with warming ocean waters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey’re voracious predators of shellfish,\u201d said Batchelder, and they are here to stay. \u201cThere’s been a lot of efforts to trap and remove populations, and people trap thousands of pounds of crabs and it doesn’t make a dent on the population.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With that in mind, current strategies focus on understanding the crab population, finding ways use the crabs \u2014 in food, as fishing bait, or as a flavoring in whiskey<\/a>, something a New Hampshire distillery is trying \u2014 and on understanding “how to manage the resources that are impacted by the green crab populations,” said Elizabeth Schueler, president of Manomet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lecturer
Katie Ney \u201925 of Baltimore photographs a crab that Dewey holds as Nkemngong looks on. They record the size and sex of the crab, as well as the number of claws it has and how lively it is. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The crab information collected in Yarmouth will be added to Manomet’s comprehensive and ever-growing data set<\/a>, one that will help researchers better understand the green crab population, including where the crabs find food, when they\u2019re most active, and what other environmental factors affect them. \u201cIt\u2019s great to have the data that the Bates students are collecting,\u201d said Batchelder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the students geared up, they hiked down to the beach, under the bridge, and over to the rocky shoreline. The tide was falling \u2014 an ideal time to start collecting the data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Katie Ney \u201925 of Baltimore carried a camera to visually document the work. Sandy Point was the most navigable location that they monitored. Hermit Island in Phippsburg, and Five Islands and Robinhood Cove in Georgetown were more rocky and muddy. \u201cThis is the nicest one so far,\u201d she said with a laugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lecturer
Ney (left) joins Katherine Buetens \u201924 of Orono, Maine, Lila Shamsi \u201926 of San Francisco, and Amanda Jenkins \u201926 of Summit, N.J., as they use poles and measuring tape in their site assessment. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A few students got to work measuring the intertidal zone, stretching a tape all the way from the receding waterline into the brush at a point where the beach meets the hill. Minor took a few students to the other end of the beach, and Ney\u2019s group began their data collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, they set out a quadrat, a one-meter frame made out of PVC pipes meant to isolate an area for collecting data. After setting it up along the shoreline, they began looking for crabs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe also use [the quadrats] in our site assessment,\u201d explained Lindley Friedman \u201926 of Park City, Utah. \u201cWe’ll lay it down and we’ll kind of be like, \u2018OK, what percentage of this area is mud, rock, or bedrock?\u2019 and we use it to collect that data.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lecturer
Cruz, Nkemngong, and Dewey consult a chart to determine the color and sex of a green crab. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The group probed the area, lifting up rocks and swaths of half-dried seaweed in their search for the crabs. They found plenty of periwinkle snails clinging to the rocks, but crabs were small and scarce. Green crabs can grow up to four inches in width and are identified by the five small spines on either side of their eyes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They carefully measured each tiny crab they found, dead or alive, with a caliper, marking down the size, the number of claws, and if it was a female, with a wide abdomen, or a male, with a more narrow abdomen. Even the liveliness of the live crabs was evaluated and recorded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Associate
In a Bonney Science Center lab, Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams (center) teaches students a lesson on DNA haplotyping, using crabs that the students collected. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After collecting field data on the green crabs, the students selected a few to take back to campus. In a Bonney Science Center lab, guided by Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams, they learned another skill: DNA haplotyping, which they used to trace the crustaceans’ historical geographic origins back to the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Short Term drew to a close at the end of May, the Bates students created research posters and presented their findings to Manomet and the Bates community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd that\u2019s one of the skills, too,\u201d said Minor. \u201cYou learn how to tell the story of your work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Short Term course led by Jesse Minor \u201902 teaches marketable skills while helping with ongoing research on invasive green crabs along the Maine coast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1422,"featured_media":155161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,32],"tags":[9814],"class_list":["post-155138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-maine-and-new-england","tag-larissa-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1422"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155138"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155806,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155138\/revisions\/155806"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}