Waquoit Bay Fish Company

Waquoit Bay Fish Company Cape Cod, MA. Mike Palmer - Artist, Scientist. Connecting people, nature, and place through art and science

Small, fast, and often easy to miss, the harbor porpoise is one of the quiet residents of our coastal waters. These comp...
05/09/2026

Small, fast, and often easy to miss, the harbor porpoise is one of the quiet residents of our coastal waters. These compact marine mammals move through bays, sounds, and nearshore waters in search of small schooling fish, linking the health of our coastal ecosystems to the life just beneath the surface.

I’ve just completed a new harbor porpoise drawing, now available on the Waquoit Bay Fish Company website

View it here: https://waquoitbayfishcompany.com/gallery/p/harbor-porpoise

CapeCod NewEnglandCoast NearshoreWaters OceanArt WildlifeArt MarineArt CoastalArt ScientificIllustration NatureIllustration WaquoitBayFishCompany ArtLifePlace

It’s been a hot minute since I posted any art. Here’s the start of a new project I’ve been working on—harbor porpoise.
04/30/2026

It’s been a hot minute since I posted any art. Here’s the start of a new project I’ve been working on—harbor porpoise.

04/26/2026

River herring. Their pluckiness never ceases to amaze me. Do yourself a favor—visit a river herring run this spring.

Thrilled to have my design featured on APCC’s new t-shirt!
04/02/2026

Thrilled to have my design featured on APCC’s new t-shirt!

Fish, Numbers, and the Story in BetweenA podcast on fish fraud, a car ride home, and a simple question from my son led m...
03/15/2026

Fish, Numbers, and the Story in Between

A podcast on fish fraud, a car ride home, and a simple question from my son led me to write about where fisheries science really begins. This new piece explores how the numbers behind fish populations are built, and why accurate reporting matters more than most people realize.

https://waquoitbayfishcompany.com/blog/fish-numbers

WritingAboutTheOcean WaquoitBayFishCompany

02/28/2026

Small Boats. Big Science.
Is Cape Cod ready for limited river herring harvests?

Join us on Thursday, March 5 from 6:00 to 7:30 pm at the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance in Chatham for an important community conversation about the future of river herring.

We’ll explore how fish passage is restored, how the health of herring runs is assessed, and how offshore fishing regulations can impact what happens in our local waters. You’ll hear from regional experts including Mike Palmer of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, Stephanie Ridenour of the Town of Harwich, and Aubrey Church of the Fishermen’s Alliance, moderated by WCAI’s Mindy Todd.

Whether you’re a fisherman, conservationist, or simply care about Cape Cod’s waterways, you’ll leave with a better understanding of the science and real actions you can take to support river herring.

Seats are limited. Link to register:
https://forms.gle/u9VE9ynHfzYc2DTT9

Made possible by funding from the Massachusetts Environmental Trust

A fishing vessel went under in winter water.At about 6:50 a.m. on January 30, 2026, the U.S. Coast Guard received an eme...
01/31/2026

A fishing vessel went under in winter water.

At about 6:50 a.m. on January 30, 2026, the U.S. Coast Guard received an emergency alert registered to the 72-foot commercial fishing vessel Lily Jean, roughly 25 miles off Cape Ann. Watchstanders couldn’t reach the boat. Search crews launched, and in the search area they found what the sea leaves behind when it takes the rest: a debris field, a life raft that was unoccupied, and one person recovered from the water, unresponsive.

As the hours moved forward, the outline sharpened in the way these stories always do — not by becoming clear, but by becoming real. Seven people were believed to have been aboard. There was no mayday call. And NOAA confirmed that among those seven was a fisheries observer.

Those are the facts as they arrived: brief, precise, and incomplete. They sit on the page like an update until you pause on the phrase seven people were aboard and realize what that sentence is actually doing.

They are not statistics. They’re lives with weight.

Read the rest of the blog here: https://waquoitbayfishcompany.com/blog/another-vessel-goes-down

The pumpkinseed sunfish project has been a slog. I was at about this stage with a previous draft and realized the scales...
12/31/2025

The pumpkinseed sunfish project has been a slog. I was at about this stage with a previous draft and realized the scales were too large. The scale count is about is now about right. Now it’s a matter of shading out the grayscale graphite version. I’m having to earn this drawing!

Pencil for scale.

This is a follow-up blog post to my recent cod collapse article—in this story I share what happens when fisheries scienc...
12/28/2025

This is a follow-up blog post to my recent cod collapse article—in this story I share what happens when fisheries science delivers ‘good news’ and teaches us an equally important lesson.

Haddock, Quotas, and the Politics of Science

The Gulf of Maine haddock story is a rare case where the science was embraced—right up until the quota tightened. Haddock, the unglamorous workhorse behind New England’s scrod habit, can deliver boom year classes that remake a fishery, and the tension snapped when haddock became limiting at the exact moment fishermen felt surrounded by fish. Alternative narratives surged—most notably a spillover theory from Georges Bank—but the evidence wouldn’t carry them. The real turning point was simpler and more powerful: new, home-grown Gulf of Maine year classes entered the population, the numbers finally caught up, and quotas rose. Just as quickly, the controversy drained away—revealing how often “trust in science” hinges not on the methods, but on whether the answer hurts.

https://waquoitbayfishcompany.com/blog/haddock-science

Bankers’ Hours to Bankruptcy: the Collapse of Gulf of Maine CodA first-person account of how Gulf of Maine cod went from...
11/28/2025

Bankers’ Hours to Bankruptcy: the Collapse of Gulf of Maine Cod

A first-person account of how Gulf of Maine cod went from a seemingly rebuilt stock—fueled by “bankers’ hours” trips close to port and optimistic assessments—to a collapse that rewrote the science, the politics, and my career. Drawing on years spent on NOAA survey decks and in assessment rooms, the piece unpacks how sand lance hot spots, hyperstable catch rates, shifting stock structure, industry-funded “science for hire,” and a rapidly warming Gulf of Maine combined to mask just how deep the trouble ran. It’s a story about models that kept revising the past downward, a management system that leaned on optimism whenever uncertainty appeared, and a once-iconic stock that has since been carved into multiple units on paper even as its regional footprint has faded from the water—and about why, even after walking away from federal cod assessments, I still root for the fish and the communities that rise and fall with them.

https://waquoitbayfishcompany.com/blog/cod-collapse

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Kennebunkport, ME

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