Women in Fisheries: Carla Guenther

Carla Guenther, 50, chief scientist at the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries in Stonington, followed a career path split between the outdoor world and the indoor lab.

MCCF photo.

Born in New Jersey, her aunt and uncle ran a motel in Rockwood where she spent her childhood summers surrounded by mountains and the fresh waters of Moosehead Lake. It wasn’t until college that she discovered Maine’s saltwater coast. “The father of my college boyfriend was a sea kayaker. He led trips for Maine Sport out of Stonington. He taught me how to kayak,” she said. But more than just teaching Guenther how to be safe on the water, he also introduced her to the notion of the ocean as a place of work, not just recreation. “He was culturally attuned to Stonington. He knew how to be on the water in a working area. That was important,” Guenther said.

During her college years in the mid nineties at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts Guenther studied both international environmental policy and biotechnology for her majors. Her senior project brought her into the world of lobsters. With National Science Foundation funding, Guenther worked in a lab at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory focused on lobster behavior. Research focused on how lobsters follow chemical cues in the water. “I created a lobster backpack containing juices of things like squid and herring. I could squirt these in the water to control the lobster’s direction,” she said, laughing.

When the summer program ended, Guenther was hired as a technician in the lobster lab. It was a learning experience, both scientifically and personally. “Our lobsters were caught by a local lobsterman, George Cadwalader. He was the sole supplier for the lab. No one really saw him, the lobsters just showed up. If anyone did see him, he didn’t talk much,” she said. Cadwalader, it turns out, had started the Penikese Island School, a wilderness-based program for adjudicated teenage boys. Guenther got to know Cadwalader during the 18 months she worked at the lab, a man she described as gruff and quiet, and a deeply caring person. “I learned that it was possible for someone who comes off as salty and gruff can be a deeply compassionate and community-centered person,” she said. “It was a formative impression.”

After leaving Woods Hole Guenther spent the next five years moving between her two passions, working as a sea kayak guide in Mexico, Alaska and California and working in research labs, specifically Harvard University’s diabetes research lab. "We were starting a clinical trial and were bringing new centers into the project. I moved to San Diego to get a center up and running while also teaching kayaking in San Diego’s Mission Bay. In 2001, I started applying to graduate schools.” She attended the University of California at Santa Barbara.

By happenstance, University of Maine resource economist Jim Wilson came out to Santa Barbara to interview students in Guenther’s marine science graduate program to help shape the University of Maine’s School of Maine Sciences dual degree program. Later, in 2005 Guenther joined a research team conducting research with lobstermen in the Mexican Baja peninsula and once again encountered Wilson. “We talked a lot about lobster and about fishermen’s co-ops,” Guenther recalled.

Guenther’s studies also took her into the Santa Barbara fishing community, which was experiencing stress related to the creation of a marine protected area around the Channel Islands. "Santa Barbara lobstermen participated in the design process and were asking my advisor to create a collaborative research program to evaluate the impacts of closing these areas to fishing," Guenter said. "I chose to investigate the changes in fishing behavior and landings resulting from network’s establishment in 2002." Despite close input and engagement from a fishery leader, when it came time for Guenther to interview area lobstermen, the fisherman told her she needed to spend more time building trust. “They put me through the ringer. They were very untrusting of a graduate student, and for good reason,” she recalled.

Slowly, through many casual conversations and encounters, Guenther gained fishermen’s trust. “I had real intimate knowledge of their world. Each member of the lobster fleet mapped ten years of their fishing locations and landings, and eventually gave me ten years of tax records [for my thesis]. I have long-term relationships with some of them still,” she said.

Soon after completing her Ph.D., assorted friends from throughout Guenther’s kayaking and research careers began sending her an ad placed by Robin Alden, founder and executive director of the Penobscot East Resource Center [the former name for the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries], looking for a local fisheries organizer. “They all said that this was me, that I should apply. So I did,” Guenther said.

It wasn’t long before Guenther was firmly planted within the world of Stonington and Maine’s eastern fishing communities. First, as the community coordinator she began working with local fishermen, then engaged statewide as fisheries liaison, and was named chief scientist in 2013. In time she met and married a local lobsterman and began her family. “Today I focus on building networks and true collaborations in research with fishermen. I find this to be the best way to bring the fishing communities’ voice to management challenges,” she said.

Like many others, Guenther is concerned about what the future holds for Maine’s fishermen and their families as environmental and regulatory changes accumulate. “We are at a time where we are talking about the future of fishing communities. We have a window of opportunity to identify the future we want and to craft regulations and policies that will best support what we value in our fisheries and our communities, rather than being pushed into making a series of disjointed decisions that have been attempting to address a single perspective of the fishery at a time.”