PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • May 31, 2025
The wild blue mussel beds that once blanketed Maine’s dynamic intertidal zone are disappearing, driven out by warming water that not only hurts the mussels themselves but benefits one of its chief predators, the highly invasive and always hungry green crab. Scientists at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute want to know if the intertidal disappearing act is a sign the blue mussel population is in decline or in retreat, with its local beds gradually moving out of the easy-to-spot intertidal into the colder waters of the more far-flung subtidal zone.