Not many Bowdoin students sleep in tents with their professors, swim with whale sharks in balmy 90 degree water or take all-expense-paid 10 day mid-semester trips to Baja, California. But for a select few (six out of a student population of 1,805) this dream is a reality.
Welcome to the Marine Science Semester.
Based at Bowdoin’s Coastal Studies Center on Harpswell Sound, the Marine Science Semester offers a radically different college learning experience. Instead of taking four simultaneous courses, students take sequential “modules” one at a time for a period of three and a half to four weeks each. When they study Biological Oceanography it’s all day, every day. Same with Benthic Ecology, Marine Molecular Ecology & Evolution and Writing about the Coastal Environment.
All this happens alongside intensive field trips and seminars. Even outside of the trip to Baja, hardly a day passes where students aren’t interacting with the environments around them.
Located on a green and rocky slice of Orr’s Island that juts out into Harpswell Sound, the Coastal Studies Center offers 118 acres of unspoiled land with easy access to the ocean. Indeed, it’s just a small slice of a Maine coast with a total length longer than Florida’s coastline. That’s why, in addition to a marine laboratory with both wet and dry lab space, a terrestrial lab, and a renovated farmhouse with computers, class-space, and a kitchen, the Center also has a pier and dock with fully equipped research vessels in addition to being the home of Bowdoin Sailing.
Bowdoin’s program is modeled after Boston University’s successful Marine Semester. This Marine Science Semester includes similarly immersive research-based courses as is standard at Colorado College.
Current student Andrew Villeneuve ’16 praised the program’s practicality.
“When you get out into the real world you’re not going to be asked to simultaneously analyze poetry and do chemical titration in a single day,” he said.
The project-based “marathon pace” of the semester, in effect, mirrors a lot of what adults do day in and day out for their jobs.
So, Monday through Thursday, students are at the Center from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.—though times vary with the modules and the coursework. Fridays, though flexible, often have scheduled portions such as small ship training and lab work.
Instead of working with musty unchanging textbooks, the course aims to deal with the now, the future, and the questions we don’t have all the answers to.
Director Dave Carlon said that students are constantly being exposed to the “cutting edge” of marine science because we just “don’t always know the answers” to a lot of questions.
That prospect of discovery captivates current student Aidan Coyle ’17.
Coyle vividly describes how even fundamental scientific concepts like plate tectonics and sea floor spreading were considered the domain of crackpots for most of the 20th century. And up until the 1970s, scientists thought the reason barnacles clung onto their particular slice of rock was because they just liked their “zone” best.
But when someone finally thought to sweep off the bottom half of a rock’s barnacles, the upper barnacles soon spread to the bottom half and the truth was revealed: the top barnacles weren’t there out of some preference but, rather, because they were the losers in an endless cycle of competition.
The Marine Science Semester aims to capture that the thrill of creating new knowledge, and each student designs and executes a final research project.
For his project, Coyle chose to examine the effects of a salinity shifts on the regulation of certain factors, called osmolytes, in phytoplankton.
Madeline Schuldt ’18 is zeroing in on the primary viral threat to Maine’s burgeoning oyster aquaculture industry—MSX. This is a disease that should probably have a question mark at its end, considering it’s officially called Multinucleated Sphere Unknown).
The epicenter of Maine oyster farming is on the Damariscotta River—a river and tidal estuary that empties out into the Atlantic halfway between between Boothbay Harbor and Pemaquid Point.
Mutilating an oyster’s frilly, lace-like gills, MSX—though harmless to humans—renders oysters essentially unsellable. (As Schuldt notes, they’re “just not pretty.”) So they impose a tremendous financial burden on small oyster farm owners.
Schuldt hopes that her research, which tries to answer questions like how many strains of MSX there are, how many sites of introduction there are, and how successful containment has been, can make a real impact on farmers.
Most of this research takes place in the wet lab, a state-of-the-art facility located next to the pier and Leighton Sailing Center.
Upon entering the wet lab, there’s a distinct olfactory shock—the air gets really fishy, really fast. Indeed, the entire building is filled with a maze of blue tubs full of an eclectic assortment of nautical creatures—crabs, oysters, squirts, and all the rest.
A tangle of tubes hangs suspended from the roof, emitting a low whirring sound as they transport water at a speed of 100 grams per minute 365 days a year.
On one side sits a curious clear contraption called a flume. Used in biomechanical studies, it replicates the effects of harsh ocean currents on organisms.
All of this equipment is absolutely essential. Today, Maine’s coast is under a trio of threats: climate change, diseases and invasive species—all challenges that demand just the sort of careful research that the Coastal Studies Center is uniquely able to provide.
Carlon hopes this good work will continue into the future, and that next year the Marine Science Semester will expand enrollment, attract more non-Bowdoin students through the Twelve College Program, and build some sort of living facilities for both the semester program and summer research.
Reflecting on his experience with the program, Aidan summed up the unique dynamic it creates.
“It’s casual, but there is a very intense love of what we’re doing…Everyone’s there because they want to be there.”