Summer Interns Help Illuminate Impact of Disease on Marine Life

Senior Research Scientist Maya Groner is an epidemiologist for the ocean. Her research team combines field surveys, experiments, and mathematical models to understand how pathogens affect marine species in a changing ocean. They’ve studied the dynamics of parasites in herring, wasting disease in seagrass, and bacterial infections in clams.

Since joining Bigelow Laboratory in 2021, Groner has turned her attention to the rapidly warming Gulf of Maine. This summer, her group hosted three interns for an intensive 10 weeks to build momentum around that work, uncovering the health and climate impacts of shell diseases affecting some of New England’s favorite crustaceans.

“We had a lot of research to do this summer and needed more hands on deck,” Groner said. “This summer’s interns provided critical support to our work, and we were able to give them a unique opportunity to explore their strengths and interests. It really worked out well all around.”

Building Understanding

Much of the heavy lifting this summer centered on a large project, years in the making, studying epizootic shell disease. ESD has devastated the lobster population in southern New England, and the team hopes to model how warming in the Gulf of Maine might make the stock here more vulnerable.

Ashleigh Stepnowski, a rising junior at Colby College, worked with Postdoctoral Scientist Melissa Rocker to establish an experiment directly testing the effects of temperature on the spread of ESD. They worked with partners to collect lobsters from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine to observe the progression of the disease and its impacts on protein content in the blood, which indicates when lobsters are ready to molt. Groner jokes that the budding veterinarian can now add “lobster phlebotomist” to her resume, and Stepnowski will continue to help out with animal handling and sampling as the project progresses.

“We knew we would need extra hands around the lab to set up this experiment,” Rocker said. “So, getting Ashleigh in there with all of her animal husbandry experience was ideal.”

Annika Bell, a rising senior at Bowdoin College, also worked on the ESD project under the supervision of Groner studying how the disease impacts the energy reserves of lobsters.

“It’s really important for animals to have good energy reserves so they can survive periods of resource shortages,” Groner said. “Fighting a disease and mounting an immune response on top of that might be too energetically demanding.”

They compared different measures of short- and long-term energy storage, such as glucose levels and lipids, with weight, disease stage, and immune function.

So far, the team has only looked at Maine lobsters, but Bell will expand the testing to other stocks in the fall through an independent honors project. That will enable them to look at the energy the diseased lobsters have stored going into the winter, which is essential for their survival.

Meanwhile, Bigelow Laboratory’s Rodney L. White Fellowship allowed Postdoctoral Scientist Reyn Yoshioka to bring in a third intern of his own, separate from the lobster work. Nyla Thompson, a rising sophomore at Hampton University, spent the summer focused on black spot syndrome in Jonah crab.

“There’s just not a lot of information out there so our questions at this stage were pretty fundamental: What is this condition? What’s it doing to the crab?” Thompson said. “We’re building out entirely new knowledge.”

Though still preliminary, Thompson and Yoshioka have produced some of the only data out there on the relationship between these black lesions and the health of crabs, using samples collected by the Maine Department of Marine Resources. Thompson plans to expand the list of health indicators she’s measuring at Hampton this fall, which will help them understand what impact the lesions could have on this emerging fishery and the similarities between black spot and other shell diseases.

“The Jonah crab work ended up serving as a good pilot project to refine our methods and develop new ones that we can use on any crustaceans we might work on in the future,” Yoshioka said.

Collaborative Spirit

Beyond the science, having three students on the team served as a valuable learning opportunity, especially for Rocker and Yoshioka, both of whom got their first in-depth experience as the primary advisor for an undergraduate.

“It’s been an engaging experience that’s given me a lot of insight into my teaching style and also how I work with my own mentors,” Yoshioka said. “It definitely solidified my goals for teaching in my long-term career plans.”

For the students, meanwhile, these highly rigorous internships enabled them to participate in cutting-edge research while gaining broad exposure to life at a research institute, such as coding workshops, field expeditions on the R/V Bowditch, social events, and a regular roundtable to develop presentation skills and discuss research as a cohort.

“The seminars in particular were really cool because you got to see all the different research going on at Bigelow,” Bell said. “It was interesting to see how the SRSs, postdocs, and lab techs all work together because the setup is so different from what I’ve seen before.”

But one of the biggest advantages of their particular positions, the three students said, is that they had each other. Even as each focused on their own project, they were able to work together to collect and process samples and participate in regular lab group meetings and ice cream outings.

“Science isn’t an individual task, and the teamwork in and out of the lab was a really big part of this experience for all of us,” Rocker said. “And the interns had the benefit of getting to learn from each other, which can be even more helpful than being taught a subject directly.”

That collaborative spirit was partly a necessity given the amount of hands-on work the group had, but it also reflects something more intentional about how Groner leads the group.

“We have a living document of lab guidelines, and it really stresses that we do our work collaboratively, not competitively,” Groner added. “We help each other and work to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable to ask questions and make mistakes.”

The relationships forged this summer and the science they’ve enabled will continue long into the future. The students hope to present their findings at the Western Society of Naturalists conference in Oregon in November, and their mentors say that all clearly have bright careers in science ahead of them.

“I think the three of us are just so grateful to have been in this lab this summer,” Stepnowski said. “We couldn’t ask for a better experience or better mentors or a better opportunity to do such great work with fantastic people.”

Photo 1: Jonah crab in holding at Bigelow Laboratory after being collected near Vinalhaven by the Maine Department of Marine Resources (Reyn Yoshioka).

Photo 2: Annika Bell handling a lobster to study how an emerging shell disease affects energy storage.

Photo 3: Ashleigh Stepnowski collaborates with partners at Dominion Energy Millstone Power Station to collect lobsters for their study on epizootic shell disease.

Photo 4: Nyla Thompson holding a Jonah Crab about to be processed for black spot shell disease measurements and biological sampling (Maya Groner).

Photo 5: The Quantitative Disease Ecology Modeling Lab after the intern poster presentation at the end of the summer (Evan Henerberry).