12 November 2026. Here we go again. Another year and another day in November heading out to the fabled Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in search of one of our labs favorite fish, the northern sand lance. The day started early, Hannes and Emma were on the road to Scituate, MA, by 3 AM to depart on the R/V Auk at first day light. A team of scientists and volunteers from the Sanctuary join us, many of them veterans from previous similar sand lance trips. Field work during that time of the year is notoriously tricky, strong winds had already nixed departures earlier that week, and already captains Amy Miloski and Dave Slocum warned us of today's rapidly closing time window. A brewing Noreaster would likely make us turn around by noon, leaving precious little time to accomplish our goal for today: catching ~ 200 live sand lance for transport to our Rankin Seawater Lab at UConn.
The Northern sand lance (Ammodytes dubius) collected on 12 November 2026 on Stellwagen Bank are now at UConn's Rankin Seawater Laboratory.
But it turns out, today we didn't need to worry, as the gods of the sea were smiling and the stars aligned. When we reached the southwest corner of the bank, a few humpback whales and northern gannets were already milling around - a promising sign! We carefully lifted the fine-meshed box trawl in the water and opted for a short, 5 minute trawl at first, testing the water so to speak, while people on board began placing chattering bets on the amount of fish we would get. Aware of previous, arduous efforts, a couple dozen would be a great start.
But the first trawl caught 160 fish, all in good, pre-spawning condition. A second tow caught almost as many, thereby filling up our transport coolers in no time, while we slowly grappled with our unexpected luck. When we later reviewed underwater footage from a GoPro attached to the trawl, we indeed saw massive amounts of sand lance everywhere on the rippled sandy floor of the bank, an unprecedented sight!
GoPro (Hero 4) footage from the first trawl on 12 November 2026, showing staggering amounts of sand lance emerging from the sea floor in front of the box trawl. At times, you can also see large schools swimming the near the bottom in the distance.
The transport to UConn went well, and the fish are now getting acclimated to their new laboratory home (a 1000 gal tank), where we hope the will ripen up and be of use both for our NSF-funded project on sand lance CO2 sensitivity and the new MassCEC-funded project on potential effects of electromagnetic fields on sand lance development and behavior. All in all, a great and successful start into our sand lance work of 2026/27!