Are Green Crabs Facing a New Predator in the Gulf of Maine

Getting the Word Out
Impressed by Siegel's project, Wells, along with Associate Director for Science Jaret Reblin, who runs the marine lab at Schiller, encouraged Siegel to promote the study more widely and present his findings beyond the campus community. "They told me it wasn't that much more work to get the study into print," said Siegel, who presented a poster of his project at a conference in Alabama during the spring of 2025 and began preparing to incorporate his findings into an academic article.

Siegel's research was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology in an article coauthored with a team from the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve (WNERR), a public-private partnership based in southern Maine that studies coastal ecology and conservation issues. Siegel said the WNERR was doing very similar research to the work he had been carrying out at SCSC, with similar results, so it made sense to combine their findings and work jointly on a paper.

With assistance from Wells, Siegel learned how to put together a peer-reviewed article in an academic journal, which was an education in itself, said the student. "I learned a lot about the process of publishing a paper. Every step of the way I learned the inner workings of how to respond to reviewer comments." At one point, Wells even set up some mock reviewer comments (provided by real marine ecologists) for Siegel to respond to so he could get used to the process. (Click here to read Wells' blogpost describing the research.)

Important Questions
What Siegel has accomplished, said Wells, is a genuinely rare achievement for an undergraduate. As well as developing the thesis and carrying out the fieldwork, he ran the lab trials, analyzed the data, and helped carry it all the way to publication in a respected journal. "Most researchers don't reach this milestone until well into graduate school or beyond. He earned shared first authorship on the strength of his work."