A Summer on Appledore Island in the Gulf of Maine
This summer, ENVS-BIOL student Ariel Zhang (‘26) spent a summer on Appledore Island in the Gulf of Maine as part of the Shoals Undergraduate Research Group at the Shoals Marine Laboratory.
The work was funded by professor Alexis Mychajliw’s NSF research on furbearing mammals. Ariel scavenged bones and other bits of muskrats for 10 weeks to study how the island population may have diverged morphologically from mainland populations. She also taught a camera trapping workshop for a high school environmental science course and assisted in all kinds of research ranging from intertidal ecology to seal necropsies!