ACADIA NATIONAL PARK – How much seaweed do periwinkles eat, and why is it important to the park?

Visitors and interested locals are invited to stretch their scientific legs and help answer these questions during the first of three scheduled Resource Acadia workshops to be held this weekend.

“We’re trying to …. really give people some firsthand experience and exposure to scientific research that’s going on in the park,” Jim McKenna, National Park Service coordinator of the Schoodic Education and Research Center, said Tuesday.

Jeremy Long of Northeastern University in Boston will discuss his research on rockweed predation by snails, and in particular the common periwinkle, during Saturday’s workshop.

Participants will get out to the field, which in this case is the rocky intertidal zone on the southwestern tip of Mount Desert Island. Once there, they will perform “transect surveys” in order to count the numbers of periwinkles and seaweed found within a grid. The research will be useful as well as educational for the volunteer participants, McKenna said.

“If we can pull together a group of 10 or 15 people for two hours, they might do work that it would take the researcher three weeks to put together,” he said.

Park officials also hope to de-mystify the scientific process and make local resource management issues more meaningful to park users. “We’re trying to make this available for people who don’t speak science,” he said.

McKenna said that teachers and other educators will be a natural fit for the programs, but encouraged anyone interested in the park and the region to sign up, too. “We’d like to encourage the local population to attend,” he said.

The free workshop will be held from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, May 20.

Future workshops include:

. “A Novel Use For An Ordinary Fruit,” presented by a University of Maine doctoral candidate who has used marked oranges to track the wind and water circulation patterns off Schoodic Point. Jessica Muhlin’s workshop will be held from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 24.

. BioBlitz, a three-hour assessment of the mosquito and fly populations of Schoodic Point. The fourth annual blitz will be held from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, July 15.

Contact McKenna at 288-8733 for information or to register for all three of the workshops.