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For more than half a century, students and faculty—from Cornell and elsewhere—have flocked to Shoals Marine Lab

By Melissa Newcomb

Each summer, Douglas Fudge ’91, MAT ’92, steps off the boat at Maine’s Appledore Island. He pauses, inhales the salt air, and absorbs the picturesque view: lush greenery surrounded by rocky coastline and tide pools teeming with marine life.

“I love that first step onto the dock every year,” says Fudge, a biology professor at Chapman University in California. “I stop to take it all in. It just feels like home to me.”

Appledore is home to Shoals Marine Laboratory, a seasonal field station—run jointly by Cornell and the University of New Hampshire—that offers myriad learning and research opportunities for high school and college students, interns, academic faculty, and the broader scientific community.

Fudge first visited in 1991 to take a class as part of his studies in science education. He never thought he’d return almost every year since.

“That trip to Shoals changed my trajectory,” says Fudge, who went on to earn a doctorate in zoology and biophysics at the University of British Columbia and become an expert in hagfish.

“It convinced me that being a marine biologist would be really fun, and also doable.”

That trip to Shoals changed my trajectory. It convinced me that being a marine biologist would be really fun, and also doable.
Douglas Fudge ’91, MAT ’92

While Shoals’s location—roughly seven miles off the New England coast, at the Maine-New Hampshire border—is remote, the 95-acre island bustles with life: birds, plants, insects, marine species, and (at least seasonally) dozens of humans.

The facilities on the island include academic buildings, dorms, a dining hall, and structures housing utilities for fresh and salt water and for power generation, primarily through sustainable infrastructure.

A map highlighting where Ithaca is in relation to Shoals Marine Lab — The island is located about 300 miles northeast of the Hill.

“We really are our own island campus,” says Sara Morris, PhD ’96, Shoals’s executive director and a doctoral alum in zoology.

“We’re built around learning from and supporting one another. You come here and find a community unlike any other that I’ve experienced.”

During the summer, Shoals typically hosts 80–100 people at any given time. More than half are students taking two-week classes in topics like shark biology and conservation, sustainable fisheries, field ornithology, and investigative marine biology.

You come here and find a community unlike any other that I’ve experienced.
Executive director Sara Morris, PhD ’96

(The island also hosts short courses that are open to the public and welcomes a limited number of day-trippers, who visit for organized tours of the restored gardens originally created by prominent New England poet Celia Thaxter, a 19th-century resident of Appledore.)

Some 200 students come to Shoals each year—roughly 70% of them receiving scholarships to attend. Each course, which packs a semester of work into an intensive two weeks, offers three academic credits.

A harbor seal pup on the shore — Ron Sher

Additionally, a group of undergraduate researchers are in residence each summer to conduct an independent 10-week project.

“I knew I wanted to come to Shoals before I even applied to Cornell,” says CALS student Ondine Morgan-Knapp ’26.

“What has been really striking to me is the level of genuine interest and involvement from everybody on the island.”

An Ithaca native studying marine biology and data science on the Hill, Morgan-Knapp conducted research at Shoals in summer 2024 as part of her work to develop more sustainable bait for lobster fishing.

She spent the season field testing a formula she’d developed the previous academic year for (as she calls it) a “fish muffin”: bait primarily made of ground carcasses that are byproducts of haddock processing.

Students arriving to the island on the boat. — Students arriving via the *John M. Kingsbury*, named in honor of Shoals's founder.

Though student researchers put in long days, she says, there are always opportunities to explore different areas of study or to assist on other projects.

“Sometimes the kitchen staff will take me out to get lobsters for my experiment, or they’ll help the bird team with the chicks,” Morgan-Knapp says, talking with Cornellians via Zoom during her stay on the island.

“The culture here is a really lovely thing to be a part of.”

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Student and faculty unload food from the boat together by forming a chain. — Working together to unload food supplies from the boat.

That culture is highly collaborative and non-hierarchical, with students, faculty, staff, and researchers all dining and socializing together.

Among the island’s traditions—as beloved as they are practical—are the human chains that are formed to unload luggage and food supplies, passing each item from boat to dock and uphill to the campus.

“Everybody looks out for each other,” says Grace Guo ’25, an ecology and evolutionary biology major in Arts & Sciences who spent summer 2024 researching how roseate terns, an endangered species of seabird, are affected by the attachment of GPS transmitters.

Researchers conducting field work on a boat — Studying a porbeagle shark.

Whenever researchers can't make it to the dining hall due to their field work, Guo notes, “somebody will save you a meal and make sure you’re taken care of.”

On the island, each morning begins with breakfast at 7:30—except for ornithologists, who start at 5:30. Evenings include after-dinner chats, board games, and cards.

There are weekly lectures known as “rock talks”; the name is a throwback to the days before the academic buildings were built, when professors would teach while standing on Shoals’s craggy shore.

Scenes from Shoals

Students head out for field work on the island

An research intern measures a gull chick

Students and staff eating dinner together.

Students conducting research on the cost of Shoals

A sunset on the coast of Appledore Island.

(Topics in summer 2024 included the hunting efficacy of sea lions and how coastlines change over time.)

Shoals traces its roots to 1928, when a UNH professor founded what was known as the Marine Zoological Laboratory on the island, which had housed private cottages and a large seaside hotel that had burned down the previous decade.

Researchers on the island surrounded by seagulls. — Field work, with some flying friends.

Scientific work there paused during World War II, when the federal government took control of Appledore for military purposes.

The facilities fell into disrepair before being revived decades later, with existing buildings refurbished and new ones built.

But the lab owes its existence, in large part, to the efforts of one man: legendary Big Red botanist John Kingsbury.

Appledore Island before 1966 — The island's buildings stood vacant for decades before Shoals was established.

More than a half century ago, Kingsbury—who wrote a seminal textbook on poisonous plants and taught on the Hill for three decades—envisioned Shoals as the vibrant hub for research and education that it is today.

Thanks to his dogged efforts at fundraising and navigating approvals by regulators and the University, Shoals started as a summer course on neighboring Star Island in 1966—and two years later, the plan to build a lab on Appledore got the go-ahead from Cornell trustees. The program took up residence there in 1973.

(In acknowledgement of Kingsbury's foundational role, both the endowed directorship that Morris holds and the boat that carries passengers to the island are named in his honor.)