Gulf of Maine Research Scientist: Claire Enterline

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have with me in the studio Claire Enterline, who is a research associate and project manager with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here in Maine. Great to have you here today.

Claire Enterline: Thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: So the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, I've been following along, and this is a longstanding institution that's made a lot of really wonderful changes. Tell me about your connection.

Claire Enterline: Sure. I've been in Maine since 2017, and I've worked as a fisheries research scientist for the state, as well as with the Maine Coastal Program, and always known of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. I really had a lot of respect for the work that they do. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute is an organization that develops and delivers solutions to global climate and ocean challenges, and they do that through science and community and engagement and education.

Lisa Belisle: And the facility in Portland is just lovely. It's such an appealing place to go, and I believe you host a fair, or the facility does host a fair number of school children and others who want to learn about the Gulf of Maine and the work that you're doing. I assume that was pretty intentional.

Claire Enterline: I'm sure that it was. I haven't been with the institute for that long, but certainly education is one of the core principles of the institute. I believe over 80% of the state's fifth and sixth grade students come into the space. There's a learning center, the Cohen Learning Center on the first floor, that's an interactive learning center. The students get to look at plankton that was collected that morning and do other things. And education, especially at that age, is so fundamental toward getting students to have an understanding and appreciation of science and how science works moving forward in their lives.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about your interest in biology, marine biology, why you decided research was the path you wanted to take.

Claire Enterline: I've always been an outdoor kid, I guess. I grew up in Ohio. I went to outdoor education camps, so I believe very strongly in the importance of getting kids out and understanding what it's like to both be outside and to engage in a way that peaks that scientific inquiry. I went to school at Boston University and studied environmental science and policy. My senior year, I studied abroad in Ecuador, and I also studied abroad in New Zealand. Both of those experiences gave me some really hands-on experience in geology. But when I was in Ecuador, I had the opportunity to work with my professor to go out into the rainforest and work on a project where he was looking at the impact of an oil extraction area on the fish communities. I got to get in the streams and get very wet and muddy every day. And I got hooked on biology and have stuck with it ever since.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about the overlap between research and policy.

Claire Enterline: Science doesn't happen in a vacuum, so all science, whether it's purely looking at processes, is going to be used in some way. I've always been very interested in the interaction of those two things. And certainly in the Gulf of Maine, where we have economies and communities that both depend on the ocean for their livelihoods and for our food systems and for cultural identity, it's very important to understand the connection between all those things. People often think of policy only in the realm of government policy, but in a lot of cases it's not. It's different ordinances that towns will put in and different ways that we interact with our environment.

Lisa Belisle: Obviously the Gulf of Maine Research Institute has a locality around it, but also there are things that are being done in the organization that are much more globally reaching. I guess that was an inelegant way of saying that, but I think you know what I'm getting at.

Claire Enterline: Yes, certainly. And that's one of the projects that I work on. The local and regional challenges that we're working on in the Gulf of Maine are felt in many other places in the world. The Gulf of Maine is warming three times faster than the global average. There are other places that are seeing a similar, faster warming rate, but the lessons that we're learning here as far as how the fisheries are going to be impacted have corollaries in other parts of the world. So the project that I'm working on is one that is a United Nations Decade of Ocean Science endorsed program. The United Nations has determined that 2020 to 2030 is the ocean decade where they will be facilitating interactions between scientists and policy makers and community members, all to provide actions and projects and programs to get more information about the ocean and more information about how climate change is impacting the ocean and our communities. So the program that the Gulf of Maine Research Institute is helping lead with the Environmental Defense Fund, it's called Fisheries Strategies for Changing Oceans and Resilient Ecosystems. And the goal of the program is to facilitate an international network of collaborators that can develop tools and resources for looking at and helping resilient fisheries, and also to provide an information exchange and a forum to further collaborations to help facilitate resilient fisheries.

Lisa Belisle: So many different things just came out of all the things you just said. Lots of really interesting things in my mind. As someone who's lived on the ocean in Yarmouth for my entire life and also boats out in the ocean, do you think people understand how large the Gulf of Maine actually is?

Claire Enterline: I've never asked someone, so I don't know. But the Gulf of Maine ecosystem is huge and it's very unique. If you go south of Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod, then it's a very different ecosystem. It's more shallow and flat further out into the ocean and dominated by a sandy bottom. The Gulf of Maine ecosystem is just highly variable. It goes all the way from around Cape Cod up to the Bay of Fundy and then out to Georges Bank. And within that, we have deep basins. We have areas of shallow rocky water that are in the middle of the Gulf of Maine, Cashes Ledge, and along the Maine coastline it supports a huge variability of habitats. So it's a really special place.

Lisa Belisle: I think that when I first learned that the Gulf of Maine, it's not just right here. I think of it as, oh, I'm out on the island in Casco Bay, here I am in the Gulf of Maine. When I first learned that it went down into Massachusetts and up into Canada, it really transcends this idea that it's a Gulf of Maine. It's really a much larger place. I think that that was something that surprised me, and yet it shouldn't. It's just this idea that there's these artificial boundaries around the states that we live in. I live in Maine, but Massachusetts is right there, and there's New Hampshire, and there's another country on the top of us. And sometimes I think it's easy to get a little bit overly localized as to where we consider we, quote unquote, live.

Claire Enterline: That's an important point. And the Gulf of Maine is impacted by things that are happening regionally and things that we don't even maybe think about normally. The Gulf Stream is a large ocean circulation pattern that comes up from Florida and delivers warm water northward, and it's pushed off of the Gulf of Maine a little bit by the Labrador Current that comes south from the poles and delivers that cold water that we always think of when we go out to the beach. And those things may seem so far away from us, but how climate change is impacting those two circulation patterns is profound, and the impacts that will have even very near shore here, with changes in temperature and salinity and just how our water circulates close to shore.

Lisa Belisle: Why is the Gulf of Maine warming at a significantly faster pace than other areas?

Claire Enterline: It's an area of active research. What people are finding right now is that the Gulf Stream that I talked about, that warm water that comes up from Florida and goes north to the poles and then comes down around the United Kingdom, that's expanding. So those warm waters are coming closer into Georges Bank, and so more of that might be coming into the Gulf of Maine as well. The Labrador Current that brings that cold nutrient rich water south from Canada seems to be weakening a bit. So those are two areas of active research, but there are published articles demonstrating that those two things are happening. And we certainly will, there's many scientists that are continuing to look at that.

Lisa Belisle: What is the impact that we're already feeling as a result of some of these changes that you've described, both locally, regionally, and globally?

Claire Enterline: People are feeling many impacts, and these can take the form of fish species changing where they're generally located in the ocean to be in that temperature that they would like to be. So we call that a species distribution change. Fish that may have always been 10 miles offshore in one certain location may be moving to a different place now. That's something that we see. Also, fish and all marine fauna are impacted. Their bodies and how they live are impacted when the temperature and the chemical properties in the ocean change around them. So think about how we change if it gets really hot, and that actually can impact their physiology and how they're able to be healthy and survive. So that's a change as well. We also see changes in chemical properties in the ocean. As more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, the ocean soaks up that carbon, and through a chemical process that carbon then attracts the calcium away from calcifying organisms. So things like lobsters and shellfish and oysters and all the things that we like to eat a lot in Maine and in the Gulf of Maine. So that's called ocean acidification, where the pH, the acidity of the ocean, the acidity is increasing, the pH decreasing. What that does is it draws calcium away from those organisms, and they're less able to fight off disease. Their shells may be thinner for clam harvests and things like that. So those are some of the impacts that we're seeing in our region.

Lisa Belisle: As you're talking, I'm thinking about the direct impact on humans, and obviously that's an anthropocentric way of looking at it. But I do know that, as a doctor and talking to patients, usually people are interested in how it directly impacts them. So you're describing things like, these are fish that we may eat, or lobster we may eat, or oysters that we may eat, but there's also people whose livelihoods depend upon bringing those things to our plates. And I'm assuming that with a change in ocean temperature, you're going to have changes in bacteria and infectivity that impact humans also directly. Are there other things that are here or are coming that people are going to see and really feel themselves as human beings?

Claire Enterline: Certainly. We're highly dependent on the oceans, as you said, for our food systems and our economies and our cultural identities. Human health is not my expert area, so I won't go into that, but certainly those impacts are a huge reason why the UN has aimed the ocean decade, and the program that we're working on aims to address those things. So we think of our economies and our food systems maybe sometimes in a little bit of a vacuum, but those are very interconnected. How the oceans ecologically are responding to climate change impacts how we're able to harvest species, and then our local economies, and then also our social and cultural identities. So those things do have a huge impact on mental health. If someone is not able to harvest the same way that they have been, make the same kind of money they're making, the added stress of uncertainty moving forward. And we have a social scientist within our research team who is actively working on understanding the impact of these climate change impacts to fisheries on people's perceptions and the way that they're able to function as they had been.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I do know that during the pandemic, people went to the oceans to seek some sort of solace because they were feeling such significant stress. So even at its most basic level, even if you're not somebody who is out on a boat bringing the catch of the day, it still is going to impact all of us emotionally, I would think.

Claire Enterline: Yeah, certainly. And there are impacts beyond fisheries. Our ability to cross the road to get to a place on the coast that may be starting to flood at high tide now that will be flooded later. Our ability to enjoy the oceans and have recreational harvests. Our ability to eat oysters that we want to, but we can't because there may be an outbreak of a virus that year or something like that. So even if we're not harvesters, we're all so impacted by the ocean and the changing ocean, both in just the communities that we live in and how they'll be changed, and then also those secondary things. A lot of people like to eat seafood. And a big part of the work that the Gulf of Maine Research Institute does is in working with different communities, restaurants, distribution centers, and also in schools to help introduce people to different kinds of seafood. We all get, I think, a little locked into certain kinds of seafood that we like to eat. And as the climate warms and as we may fish different species, or fish species just in different ways, it's important for us to try different kinds of seafood. So next time you see monkfish stew on the menu, order it, it's wonderful. And so some more of the work that GMRI does is to work with restaurants to understand how to make different kinds of fish and to store different kinds of fish so that we are ready to embrace new kinds of fisheries.

Lisa Belisle: I think what you're describing is really important, because if we're always looking at what is being taken away from us and what scares us and what makes us feel upset or angry, sometimes it's easy to just get overwhelmed and say, I can't do any of this. Like, I'm not going to bother recycling and composting because climate change is going to kill us all in the next hundred years anyway, so what's the point? And I think what you're describing, this ongoing engagement, and willing to actually say, okay, this is change and we are engaging in something that's bigger than we all feel capable of handling, but let's not give up on this yet.

Claire Enterline: Certainly. I think there's a reframing that needs to be done from climate vulnerability to climate resilience. And that takes many different forms, whether it be in how we look at building structures so that they're resilient to higher water levels, and how we look at what kinds of fish that we'll eat, and the resilience that we have and the amazing scientific models that we have to inform that resilience can work together in order to get us to a place where it's less scary and let's move forward.

Lisa Belisle: So that reframing you're describing, I think it is important for larger institutions like the Gulf of Maine Research Institute to get behind this, because it's easy to get sucked into this place of vulnerability. It's hard to make a conscious decision to move toward resilience and say, yes, I acknowledge that all the facts that are out there are true. And also, how do we get to that next place? And sometimes as individuals, we can make those choices to try to be more resilient, but to have larger groups saying, yes, this is really what we need to do, I think that's really important.

Claire Enterline: Yeah, I would say so too. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute has a very strong commitment to dealing with climate change as an existential crisis, but to move forward into a space where we can work to better understand areas of vulnerability, shoreside infrastructure, and then to create plans to move forward and be resilient to that. So working with Union Wharf, which GMRI now owns, to develop a plan to both understand when some of those events occur with storm surges and things, and then to proactively change some things around, raise water heaters up, things like that. And a lot of the work that we do with sustainable seafood, with that education of fifth and sixth graders to look at things in a different way, also through a ventures program that provides capital to small businesses as they're starting up and working to engage in the seafood economy in a way that is proactive and resilient. And then through both the research and the programs that we have to look at the ocean ecosystems, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute is using those different programs in an interdisciplinary way in order to move forward.

Lisa Belisle: So you're originally from Ohio, you moved to the East Coast. I'm thinking that the ecosystem probably is a little different back in Ohio. Did you bring any of your learnings from when you were wandering around in the woods, in the fields when you were growing up, to the East Coast?

Claire Enterline: Certainly. A forest ecosystem we think of as so different than the ocean, and it is in so many different ways, but when you walk through the forest, you get to see the three dimensional shapes of things. You get to see the birds flying through the trees. You get to see how the ferns are below the trees. You get to see what things look like in sunny patches versus in more shady patches, how the soil is different underneath a grove of pine versus in an oak grove. I worked for quite a few years doing sea floor mapping. And sea floor mapping is really the visualization of that three-dimensional structure that we don't always get to see. So they're totally different processes. It looks totally different, but the ocean environment is not flat. We see it on the water and it looks so flat, and we might put a fishing pole down and think of a fish on a flat mud bottom. We have plenty of flat mud in Maine down there, but there's also a lot of other things. So I think it brought to me an understanding of what it might look like walking down on the ocean, but doing it with sonar and in a different way.

Lisa Belisle: And it's also interesting to think about the fact that, it's obviously the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, but it's not that far away from the ocean, that you still have trees and moss and lichen and other critters that roam the earth and fly in the air that are also impacted by the ocean.

Claire Enterline: Oh, certainly. It's such an interconnected environment, and the shorebirds that we have are obviously highly dependent on the ocean. And also the things that we do on land really impact the ocean. We don't always think of that, but the water that goes into the ocean after it's been going on a street is very different and contains a lot of things that we don't really want in the oceans. So both our impact on the coastline is highly affecting in ways that we might not always think about.

Lisa Belisle: And there's an entire watershed, so people who enjoy a lake or a river or a stream, it's most likely connected back to the ocean anyway. So truly these people are upstream in many cases. And so just understanding what they're doing and how it's impacting everybody who's kind of the next step along the chain. And those are just the people. I don't think we can impact animals that much, but yes, everything is interconnected, as you've said. In talking about this sort of global connectivity, what lessons have you learned from others who are working on similar issues around the world?

Claire Enterline: Well, the FishSCORE program, and I say FishSCORE, that stands for Fisheries Strategies for Changing Oceans and Resilient Ecosystems, but that's a mouthful, so I say FishSCORE, is just being implemented. We're just in the process of developing on the ground partnerships and helping to make connections with ongoing projects that are happening around the world. So right now, we're just at the beginning stages. The researcher that I work with, Dr. Kathy Mills, has worked with a global group of scientists and practitioners and policy makers over the past few years to develop a climate resilient fisheries planning tool. And that tool is designed so that it's not a one size fits all, here's your climate problem, here's what your strategy is. It's designed to be a framework to be adapted anywhere for the very unique characteristics of a place. And it helps identify, it guides the people that would be using it through questions so that they can identify what are the impacts of climate on our fishery and our community system, what are the inherent resilience attributes that we have to that, and then how do we make a plan to move that forward? And so we're starting to implement that in a few places and hope to do so more over the decade. And through that work, we will then be looking at how those different frameworks play out in different places. Are there commonalities amongst resilience attributes and amongst the strategies that people decide to move forward with, and what are the differences? There will definitely be differences, and why do those differences happen? And helping to use those to say that a strategy for, say, changing permit application or permit allocations in a given place really has no place in another area that uses permits because of the way that that fishery is structured. So just at the beginning stages, and I'll be excited to talk to you in eight years and tell you what we learned.

Lisa Belisle: Good. I'll make sure that we keep you on our tickler file and we'll get you back in eight years to talk about it.

Claire Enterline: Okay.

Lisa Belisle: One of the reasons why we wanted to bring you on to talk with us about the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, even though we do a lot more with art and creativity, is not only the fact that the Gulf of Maine Research Institute is one of our neighbors in Portland as the Portland Art Gallery, and also I believe that GMRI actually had an event at the Portland Art Gallery, so there's a connection there, but also that our artists are actually very aware of the environment. We actually have people who paint outside, and we have people who spend a lot of time looking at landscapes and seascapes. And I think that that, for us, is a really necessary connection. I think it personalizes the impact of something like climate change, that if you're out there on a day-to-day basis watching how the seascape is changing, and then over time you're really noticing, oh, there's a really different erosion pattern now, I think that has a pretty significant personal impact that maybe not everybody recognizes.

Claire Enterline: Certainly. I have two oil paintings of tide pools on my walls at home. And there is definitely that connection. I think another piece that I'm picking up there is the importance of local long-term knowledge and understanding what the changes are and how they're happening. And every person sees that in their own way. And those observations are information, and those can be valid scientific pieces of information. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute has a very large citizen science component in supporting ways that people would like to engage. And those people are outside and they are seeing things, and sometimes people just don't know where to put that information. And so there are citizen science engagement opportunities for looking right now. We just started a new one to look at low tide mussel beds. And I believe that the next time going out and simply taking a photograph and saying, what do you observe, may be a great time to take a photograph that can be used later as fodder for a painting of a low tide tidal flat. And also looking at vernal pools, looking at smelt spawning. And so those observations that people make are incredibly valid and incredibly important. And keeping them in a notebook for yourself is wonderful. And there's also certainly ways to engage and provide that information to scientists that can use that to look at long-term and more widespread patterns.

Lisa Belisle: Claire, I have learned a lot today, and you've really piqued my interest as far as continuing to learn more. I'm sure things have evolved since the time that I was visiting the Gulf of Maine Research Institute myself as a youngster. Where can people learn more about GMRI?

Claire Enterline: Certainly. We have a great website that gives information on upcoming events. There'll be a series of seminars that will be given called the Sea State Symposiums. Those are evening presentations brought by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute featuring scientists both with GMRI and from the region. Those are a great way to learn about things. There's also community events, and the citizen science engagement is a great way to learn more as well.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with Claire Enterline of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. If you happen to be in Portland going to the Portland Art Gallery, the GMRI campus is right down the street, so you can investigate in person. If not, you can actually hop on over to their website after you've been to the Portland Art Gallery website, because there's a lot of commonalities. People who are curious about art can be curious about science as well. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine. Thank you for coming in today.

Claire Enterline: Thank you, Lisa.