Text Box: Joe Facendola

Text Box: MS student

Text Box: Growing up in central Massachusetts allowed me to spend most of my free time attempting to catch fish in a diverse range of habitats, from dunking worms in a brook trout stream, watching my tip-ups on a frozen pond, or soaking some clams in the surf.  In 2002, I graduated from Unity College in Maine with a B.S. in fisheries biology and ecology.  A hands-on education coupled with the remarkable professors of the fisheries department at Unity, left myself and fellow “Renegade” students well prepared to tackle a job as a fisheries technician.  After a summer of minor debauchery on Cape Cod supported by my employment in a lab removing the hemolymph of horseshoe crabs, I decided that the white coat and hairnet wearing life of a lab bound crab bleeder was not for me.  My call for a more field oriented job was soon answered by the National Park Service.

Text Box: I headed out west to Yellowstone National Park to work for three seasons as a Bio-Tech, where my duties often included “killin’ fish and savin’ lives”.  While striving to conserve the native cutthroat trout population of Yellowstone I was afforded the opportunity to meet some great people and witness some breathtaking scenery, however I was unable to resist the draw of the ocean, and soon found myself headed back to the coast.  Returning to Massachusetts, I was then employed by the MA Division of Marine Fisheries as a “DMF foot soldier”.  As a tech for this agency, I received much varied and valuable experience, from monitoring and ageing anadromous fish, port sampling, tagging striped bass, to recreational fisheries surveys, and acting as chief scientist on industry based surveys for Gulf of Maine cod.

Text Box: In January 2007 I joined Dr. Scharf’s fisheries ecology team, and have begun to focus my research on predation by juvenile and sub-adult red drum on juvenile blue crabs in the New River estuary.  Using actively set gill nets to capture drum, I plan to estimate daily ration and seasonal and ontogenetic variation in the contribution of blue crab to their diet.  Red drum have been shown to be an important predator of juvenile blue crabs in several systems where they co-occur.  The recovering status of the red drum population within North Carolina makes quantitative examination of the contribution of blue crab to their diet a crucial step toward an enhanced understanding of the potential role of red drum in regulating blue crab populations.