46 Scientific American, May 2022

C

arter Newell owNs aNd operates oNe of the most productive

mussel farms in the state of Maine. One frigid spring morning

I joined him and his two-person crew on a short boat ride to the

barge he calls Mumbles, a 60-by-24-foot vessel anchored that day in

a quiet cove in the brackish Damariscotta River. Named for the Welsh

seaside town where Newell once did research, Mumbles was teth-

ered to a steel-framed raft hung with hundreds of 45-foot ropes, each

thick with thousands of mussels in various stages of development.

Ellen Ruppel Shell wrote about Alzheimer’s disease and air pollution

in our May 2020 issue. She is author of four books, including Cheap:

The High Cost of Discount Culture (2009) and The Job: Work and Its

Future in a Time of Radical Change (2018). She is currently working on

Slippery Beast, a book about the eels of Maine.

I shivered in the piercing wind as a crew member

stepped from Mumbles onto the shifting raft to identify

mussel ropes ready for harvest. Newell remained on the

barge to helm a 16-foot crane that hauled up the desig-

nated ropes, each heavy with a Christmas tree–shaped

aggregation of roughly 3,000 mussels. An outsized

brush then swept the bivalves off the ropes and into an

enormous stainless steel bucket. Another machine fun-

neled them into a heavy polyethylene bag the size of a

baby elephant, from which they were poured onto a con-

veyor-belt apparatus to be scrubbed, sorted and bagged.

Newell designed this ungainly Willy Wonka–esque

apparatus over decades in a costly process of trial and

error that faced—and ultimately overcame—several

challenges, including protecting the mussels from tur-

bulent seas and voracious eider ducks.

As he oversaw the morning harvest, Newell, who has

a Ph.D. in marine biology, talked some science—the

dynamics of phytoplankton, why nitrate chemical con-

centrations increase in the winter, how chlorophyll lev-

els for the entire coast of Maine can be mapped with just

three satellite images. Mostly, though, he talked about

mussels: their life cycle, their geographic distribution,

how to prepare them (don’t spare the garlic) and—crit-

ically—how best to farm them without going broke. “Fish

farming is no way to make a quick buck,” he told me.

The truth is that soon fish farming may be the only

way for Maine’s struggling seafood workers to make any

bucks at all. Thanks to overfishing, parasites and rising