Conor Fitzpatrick

My name is Conor Fitzpatrick, I am studying Ecology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Maine and I’m apart of the class of 2023. After graduating I’m looking to go into grad school, participating in a research project involving fish or wildlife. In my spare time I enjoy ice fishing, skiing, boating, hiking, and watching sports.

This summer I will be working with NOAA Marine Fisheries, Maine Sea Grant, and Justin Stevens on hydroacoustic and water quality, and bird surveys surveys of the Penobscot River Estuary. With these surveys I will be analyzing the data using programs such as echoveiw, GIS, and Rstudio to look for relationships in the fish biomass, bird densities, and water quality samples in the field. Along with this I will also be conducting river herring aging using scales and otoliths to determine what age classes are most predominant in the 2022 herring run.

In this internship I am hoping to learn more about sea-run fish and why their survival and return rates are so low. I am also interested in what is being done to improve these rates across Maine.

Conor is a 2022 Undergraduate Intern in Sea-run Fish Research.