Long-lived seabirds face the challenge of allocating resources between reproduction and survival. My project explores these tendencies in Leach's Storm Petrels. I measured body condition (weight/tarsus length) in 328 individuals and 168 breeding pairs, and found that better body condition increased the likelihood of successful hatching. Furthermore, I observed a positive correlation between pair bond length and hatch success in 916 bird pairs from the Kent Island historic dataset, indicating that longer-lasting pair bonds lead to higher reproductive success. These findings highlight the importance of individual quality and pair bond length in determining the breeding success of Leach's Storm Petrels.
Recent Summer Fellows
Undergraduate research: Kent Island fellows from Bowdoin live, study, and create on the island for two months over the summer.
Danny Lee
Class of: 2025
Fellowship Focus: Leach's Storm Petrels
Major(s): Biology
Luke Robinson
Class of: 2026
Fellowship Focus: Leach's Storm Petrels
Major(s): Biology
Luke spent the summer studying Leach’s storm-petrels at the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island, maintaining a long-term demography dataset. The independent component of his research was concerned with Leach’s storm-petrel burrow architecture. Although they can dig new burrows, each year on Kent Island, Leach’s storm-petrels choose from a pool of existing burrows. Luke was interested in understanding what factors may influence burrow architecture within the study-site over time. He sought to answer the following questions: (1) do Leach’s storm-petrels further excavate existing burrows? If so, to what extent? (2) what factors restrict the size of a burrow? (3) does research disturbance impact burrow architecture?
Caitlin Panicker
Class of: 2026
Fellowship Focus: Leach's Storm Petrels
Major(s): Biology and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies
For Caitlin's intertidal project on Kent Island, she studied the distribution of Lacuna vincta eggs in the intertidal. During low tide quadrats were used to sample 30m transect lines for different kinds of algae and Lacuna vincta eggs to determine whether or not the snails preferred certain types of algae. Caitlin sampled a diverse array of locations around the island where L. vincta was found using a 0.25 square meter quadrat, recording percent cover and number of snail eggs on each. Her research of L. vincta egg distribution in the environment on Kent Island was connected to the appearance of L. vincta on kelp farms in the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy where the snails may lay its eggs on cultivated kelp. Lacuna vincta egg masses laid on kelp are too difficult to scrape off efficiently and may lead to farmers pulling their crops from the water early, preventing a full yield in many cases. Caitlin found that the snails showed no preference for some groups of algae over others (primarily looking at brown vs. red to compare with kelp aquaculture) but observed that most eggs were laid on Laminaria digitata and Chondrus crispus.
Mitchell Zell
Class of: 2025
Fellowship Focus: Forest Regeneration and Health
Major(s): Biology
Mitchell spent the summer completing a full forest survey on Kent Island at the Bowdoin Scientific Station. This survey was conducted as a follow-up to the surveys conducted in both 2008 and 2019 of the full island and intends to shed light on the regeneration of the forest after the eradication of the snowshoe hares and to understand the current health and condition of the forest. He collected data from 371 previously sampled 10x10m forest plots across the northern 2/3 of the island. Mitchell collected data on the species and numbers of trees, saplings, and seedlings, along with data on dead trees, understory vegetation, and the presence of old man’s beard lichen. He also collected information on general features of the plot, such as dominant canopy and understory, ecosystem type, soil characteristics, dominant moss, and canopy and understory height.
Whitt Dodge
Class of: 2025
Fellowship Focus: Learning and Memory in Bees and Other Pollinators
Major(s): Biology & Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
This summer Whitt conducted pollinator research. He spent the first week or so exploring the island and learning to identify flowering plants and pollinating insects. After hours spent comparing specimens to iNaturalist and pouring over Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide and the Field Guide to the Flower Flies of Northeastern North America he was ready to begin collecting data for the network. Each day Whitt walked to various parts of the island and spent time catching insects visiting flowering plants. He recorded data about the time and location of these interactions. This data is the basis of the plant-pollinator network we are constructing. This data will allow us to analyze the structure of the plant-pollinator community on Kent Island and how it might change from year to year.
Helena Souffrant
Class of: 2025
Fellowship Focus: Tree Swallows
Major(s): Environmental Studies and Africana Studies
In Canada, aerial insectivorous birds have declined by roughly 59% since the 1970s, and by about 32% across North America due to climate change, habitat degradation, and insect decline. Among these declining birds are tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor). Since 1934, Kent Island has monitored the nesting activity of tree swallows in artificial nestboxes. Nest site fidelity and breeding dispersal have been found to greatly influence the nest success of tree swallows. By analyzing the long-term dataset, I examined whether sex influenced dispersal, and the effects of adult density and number of fledglings on adult dispersal distance between nestboxes. I found that female birds are more likely to disperse than males. I also concluded that neither density nor number of fledglings significantly affects dispersal distance.
Graham Lucas
Class of: 2026
Fellowship Focus: Rockweed Branching Patterns
Major(s): Biology and Mathematics
Graham investigated how the morphology of the intertidal rockweed Ascophyllum nodosum varies with the size and frequency of waves they encounter. Kent Island is an ideal place to investigate wave exposures because different sides of the island have vastly different wave exposures due to tidal patterns, protection from islands, and wind patterns. Thus, geographically adjacent samples of algae could be compared between wave exposures.
Tess Mooney
Class of: 2026
Fellowship Focus: Fog and Art
Major(s): EOS and English
This summer on Kent Island, Tess was the student artist in residence, and split her time between printmaking and work on a fog capturing project. In the studio, Tess made prints in several different styles, using a combination of previously-learned and new-to-me techniques. Her work includes two short books filled with black and white dry point etchings in PETG plastic. This etching process is most like drawing with a pen on paper, and allowed her to make detailed images of the observed entities. For the first time this summer, Tess experimented with reduction and wood cut printing to bring color and negative space into my images. Additionally, she silk-screen printed a six-piece edition of the herring gull survey crew walking nest-counting transects across the island. Instead of burning images into screens to print, and she chose to hand-cut stencils for each color.
Tess' subject matter aligned with the science project she was simultaneously conducting: capturing fog and measuring the fog pH to transition the historical fog chemistry data set into the modern era. To catch fog 3 screens were built out of three different metal screens and PVC frames. Placing the screens perpendicular to the wind direction, the fog droplets condensed, then dripped down into a collection trough, where they were collected and measured for pH. This project aimed to restart this Kent Island tradition that Bob Cunningham originally began in 1938, adding to the long-term study that spanned the Clean Air Act and implementation of pollution reduction policies.
Kendall Brainin
Class of: 2027
Fellowship Focus: Learning and Memory in Bees and Other Pollinators
Major(s): Biology and Chemistry
Kendall spent her summer at the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island researching pollinators and foraging preferences. Her work consisted of three main parts: contributing to a long-term plant-pollinator network from 2019, 2022, and 2023; taking floral reflectance measurements of the flowering plants on Kent Island; and testing associative learning in wild bees for my independent project.
Riley Simon
Class of: 2026
Fellowship Focus: Leach's Storm Petrels
Major(s): Biology
Riley spent her summer at the Bowdoin Scientific station on Kent Island maintaining the long-term Leach’s storm petrel demography data set. She also used the data set to complete her own research on the changes in occupied burrow distribution over time. This research was centered around understanding how population decline, and investigator disturbance affects burrowing choices. Leach’s storm petrels tend to burrow in clusters in developing colonies. This behavior could decrease predation, increase food finding, and increase reproductive success. However, once populations become large enough, the petrels cannot maintain the same clusters without overcrowding. This means that increasing population causes burrow distribution to become more random. The long-term data set tracking petrels in the Shire study site provided the unique opportunity to study this phenomenon in the reverse direction, as a colony is shrinking. The number of occupied burrows in the Shire decreased by more than 50% in the last 20 years. Riley used data from this span of time to answer the following questions: (1) Is the distribution of occupied burrows in the Shire becoming more random or more clustered as the number of nesting pairs decreases? (2) What does this change tell us about effects of population decline and investigator disturbance on colony structure?
Dylan Berr
Class of: 2026
Fellowship Focus: Nudibranchs
Major(s): Biology and Mathematics
At the Bowdoin Scientific Field Station on Kent Island, Dylan worked as an intertidal student studying nudibranchs. Nudibranchs are inconspicuous yet vibrant, shell-less marine gastropods that frequent the lower intertidal during the late spring and early summer. While physiology can change significantly across taxonomic clades, all nudibranch species possess chemosensory receptors on the tops of their heads called rhinophores. These structures host ganglions that detect secondary metabolites from prey species and other nudibranchs. Dylan first chose to study Coryphella verrucosa, which lives in competitive, low wave-exposed regions of densely packed, R-selected species. Their primary diet consists of various Cnidarians such as polyp stage hydrozoans that settle on rocks and algae from the plankton. Conversely, the second nudibranch he chose to study was Ancula gibbosa, a Bryozoan specialist that inhabits late successional, highly wave exposed, and kelp shaded tidepools in the lower intertidal. By working with these species, Dylan hoped to gain insight into the possible link between environmental pressures and how these organisms navigate their surroundings. This summer, he was interested in comparing the speed and accuracy at which these nudibranchs approached a prey stimulus and if they show clear prey preferences. With the information above, Dylan predicted that C. verrucosa would navigate towards a food stimulus more rapidly and accurately than A. gibbosa but will also show less preference due to the instability of select prey species in its competitive environment.
Cora Dow
Class of: 2024
Fellowship Focus: Artist in Residence
Major(s): History and Visual Arts
The goal of my project is to connect more people to the natural world around them. For
me, this happened through birding. When I began to recognize species by sight and sound, it felt
like a whole new world had opened up to me. Somehow, naming these organisms enabled me to
notice not only more birds, but so many other things as well. It feels like a gift or a superpower,
and it is certainly something that I want to share with other people.
I also started to care more about issues such as how climate changes affect bird
populations, and the number of dead birds I find next to windows around campus. Bird watching
has made me more conscious about the impact I and the people around me have on certain
species and ecosystems. This, too, is an awareness I want to share with others.
With my project, I want to open up a new world to other people – whether that be a new
organism, a different perspective of the world through art, a realization about the sheer amount of
life that exists around us, or a new way to connect to and notice the world around them.
Eva Ahn
Class of: 2026
Fellowship Focus: Pollinators
Major(s): Environmental Studies and Biology
Pollination facilitation is an indirect relationship between co-flowering species where one species benefits the reproduction of another plant species. Flower color is thought to play a role in facilitation, such as greater reproductive success from standing out in color among co-flowering species. I used the Kent Island plant-pollinator network data to measure the closest physical distance and color similarity between Ranunculus acris (tall buttercup) and other flowering species on the island to answer the questions: Do flowers that exist closer together in physical space exist closer together in spectral space? I found no significant relationship between these factors, but I found greater niche overlap between flowers very different in color compared to flowers similar in color, suggesting greater specialization in flowers with similar color displays.
Oscar Nigam
Class of: 2025
Fellowship Focus: Savannah Sparrows
Major(s): Biology
To incubate successfully, birds must balance time on the nest with time foraging. Eggs must remain sufficiently warm for embryonic development, meaning excessive time off the nest can decrease reproductive success. I sought to determine which environmental and biological variables affect nest temperature of incubating Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis). During summer 2023, I deployed temperature sensors in 28 nests on Kent Island, NB, CA to measure nest temperatures during incubation. Model results showed that precipitation, wind, local density, and female age affect nest temperatures. Female age was only important in inclement weather; yearling females displayed lower nest temperatures than older females during rainstorms. Understanding which factors affect incubation can help determine how reproductive success differs within a population given variable environmental conditions and individual characteristics.