20 August 2024. Emma and Hannes went on a road trip through New England to again visit our good friends and colleagues at the National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) in Wells, ME, Jeremy Miller and Jason Goldstein. Our mission this time was to try - for the first time - to find and collect American sand lance (Ammodytes americanus), the congener species to the Northern sand lance (A. dubius), which our lab has been investigating for now more than 7 years.

While the Northern sand lance can be reliably found on Stellwagen Bank in the southern Gulf of Maine, the specific whereabouts and promising collection sites for A. americanus are new, uncharted territory for us. They are often referred to as the inshore sand lance species, but where exactly would be a good spot to collect them?

On this late August week, we followed a tip from Jeremy from the Wells NERR to look at the harbor, where he had seen large schools near the docks all through summer.

After a good amount of scouting and trial (and error!) we ultimately got lucky at dead low tide, where we were able to use the beach seine to catch more than a thousand  sand lance adults and eventually succeeded in transporting ~ 300 of them back to the Rankin Lab for further learning how to rear and keep them.

This was the first of a handful of upcoming trips, where we plan to catch sand lance closer and closer to the begin of their spawning season at the end of November.

We hope that the luck stays with us during the next trips.