Mystic Seaport Museum or Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea in Mystic, Connecticut is the largest maritime museum in the United States. It is notable for its collection of sailing ships and boats and for the re-creation of the crafts and fabric of an entire 19th-century seafaring village. It consists of more than 60 historic buildings, most of them rare commercial structures moved to the 19-acre (0.077 km2) site and meticulously restored.
The global spread of nonindigenous species is recognized as a potent driver of change in the sea with no sign of saturation. Interest in this topic has exponentially increased among ecologists, environmental managers, and policy makers during the past years. However, knowledge about marine bioinvasions processes is still scarce, especially when compared with terrestrial or freshwater ecosystems. This, coupled with the complex eco-evolutionary context of global environmental and social change, hinders our predictive capacity on these processes. Along this chapter, we have addressed advances made on the causes and consequences of marine invasion processes, their synergies with other drivers of change, their vectors and introduction pathways, and the strategies used for their early detection, long-term monitoring and efficient management. In doing this, significant challenges and knowledge gaps have emerged. We have compiled these issues and provided future directions for advancing marine invasions science and improve the predictability of this growing threat.
This special issue of Coastal Management Journal is dedicated to Professor Benjamin Woods Labaree—one of the Sea’s Renaissance Men.The term “Renaissance” most commonly applies to the 14th century h...
William John Haugen (Bill) Light (Fig. 1) was born on 05 January 1938 in Waco, McLennan County, Texas USA, and died on 18 January 2020 in Marietta, Georgia, at the age of 82. He was buried in the Georgia National Cemetery, Canton, GA. As an infant, he was adopted by Col. Orin Haugen and his wife Marion Sargent. Colonel Haugen died in February 1945 at the battle for Manilla in the Philippines in World War II. Later, upon Marion’s remarriage, Bill’s surname was changed to Light. Bill’s mother Marion passed away in 1969.
In Chapter 104, “The Fossil Whale,” Melville’s Ishmael pronounces leviathan a “text” (“But when leviathan is the text, the case is altered”), later daring his comrades and his audience to “Read it if you can.” In Moby-Dick (1851) and the lesser-known Fighting the Whales (1863) by Scottish novelist R.M. Ballantyne, whalemen read the whale’s flesh like a text to imaginatively “remember” (put back together) its life story while industriously dismembering its body. They read the text of the whale’s body as a palimpsest with multiple layers of physical semiotic inscription: harpoons embedded in the whale from previous skirmishes with whalemen in addition to scars and distinguishing marks all help craft this life story (which also materially contributed to early scientific knowledge about whales). The whale is endowed with this “memory” and funereally commemorated after the cutting-in and trying-out. This act of “remembering” is then set against the constant danger of the whaleman’s life—the dismembered body is sometimes his own—and the familiar nineteenth-century trope of burial at sea in which the lack of a fixed grave marker necessitates alternate forms of commemoration for the slain whale hunter.
