Dale Leavitt
Roger Williams University
Associate professor; marine biology
SURF program mentor

Dale Leavitt sums up his research focus — he is, he says, “mostly a shellfish guy.”

The apt description, concise and straightforward, tells not only where Leavitt’s expertise lies, but also explains his presence in three distinctly different collaborative research grants.

One Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC) grant sought to develop new tools and mechanisms to combat aquaculture disease. Another created sculptural forms for an urban coastal restoration site. The most recent award employs numerical modeling to better understand coastal turbulence and its impact on the marine ecosystem.

And, as a mentor in RI EPSCoR’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program, Leavitt trains undergraduate students to work on shellfish stock assessment and management.

Together, the research grants and the SURF projects all fall within Leavitt’s wheelhouse, he says: “This is where my interests lie. I would be doing similar work anyway with my own research. EPSCoR, SURF, STAC — they all fall along the same lines.”

And yet, Leavitt notes, the EPSCoR grant has opened up important opportunities through the collaborative research of the STAC grants and work with SURF students, while yielding valuable data to better manage the state’s fisheries.

Through the 2015 STAC grant to develop coastal waterway modeling, Leavitt says the team will gain a better understanding of flow dynamics, which can guide placement for spawning sanctuaries.

“With clams and oysters, the first two to three weeks of their life history is spent swimming in the water column,” says Leavitt, adding that the shellfish don’t really swim so much as get carried by currents. “We want the maximum amount of larval retention. The models will help us maximize what Mother Nature does in terms of spawning stock or where quahogs are or aren’t.”

Bear in mind, oysters are highly sensitive to the conditions in which they grow, according to Leavitt. Much like wine produced from grapes grown in different locations, shellfish take on the characteristics of their surroundings and their taste depends on such subtleties as where and when they are harvested.

For their role in the project, Leavitt and RWU colleague Associate Professor David Taylor take the real data already in hand and compare it to predicted data generated by the numerical models, assessing how closely aligned the data sets are and testing the accuracy of the models.

A 2013 STAC grant to design and development of sculptural forms for coastal restoration tapped Leavitt’s expertise in oyster biology; he helped evaluate forms best suited for oyster recruitment and conducive to the settling of oyster spat or larvae. Now with permits in hand, the plan calls for placing the structures at Providence’s India Point for the natural spatfall this spring.

A significant local impact of RI EPSCoR also runs through the SURF program, both in terms of training undergraduates and the type of projects mentors like Leavitt can tackle. Two 2015 fellows, one from RWU and one URI, worked with Leavitt on quahog burial issues related to shellfish management that have been a source of contention — a viable way to conduct quahog stock assessment and the ability of quahogs planted in the wild to dig in and avoid predators.

The questions are important, says Leavitt, but too localized to garner national funding: “There is a huge gap between what we need to know and what the feds are willing to fund. EPSCoR fills that gap perfectly, and allowed us to do something locally relevant, but maybe not on the national scale.”

And, he says, the concerns being addressed impact more than shellfish farmers. Anyone who likes to eat quahogs and oysters should take interest in the proper management policies. If mismanaged, the fishery will crash.

On the stock assessment matter, the RI Department of Environmental Management (DEM) drew heavy criticism from fishermen, who argued that the use of a hydraulic dredge did not give an accurate representation of the quahog stock, and thereby set unfair policy since the fishermen only use bull rakes. The SURF project evaluated rake techniques in helping to develop a viable way to do stock assessment.

The burial project monitored how quickly quahogs dig in and found they took about 80 seconds during the heat of the summer, a rapid time that still needs to be compared to what takes place during the winter season.

The educational benefits for the undergraduates are a given, Leavitt adds: “That’s why we’re here. SURF certainly helps put a seed in their mind about the direction in which they want to go.”

Story and photo by Amy Dunkle | RI NSF EPSCoR