Mike Palmer

Owner, Artist, Scientist

My family and I have called the Waquoit Bay watershed home for nearly twenty years. Before landing on Cape Cod, I spent chapters of my life in northern Massachusetts, Maine, and Alaska. In every place I’ve lived, I’ve felt the same pull: to get outside, learn the lay of the land, and pay attention—to the geography and geology, the cultural history, and the plants and animals that make a place itself. My art is how I process that noticing. It’s how I connect with a landscape, translate what I’m learning, and share it with other people.

I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. I didn’t follow the traditional art-school path—beyond high school, my training was mostly self-taught, shaped by curiosity and repetition. Instead, I pursued science. In a former life I was a federal fisheries scientist, with degrees in Marine Science and Fisheries Oceanography from the University of Maine Orono and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I spent more than 200 days at sea on fishing boats and research vessels—from Alaska to the Canadian Maritimes—studying fish and the ecosystems they depend on up close. At NOAA, I had a front-row seat to the collapse of New England cod, the recovery of haddock, and the complicated, human reality of managing a fishery.

My research and professional writing have appeared in scientific journals including Science, North American Journal of Fisheries Management, Fisheries Research, and the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. I’ve also discussed my research on National Public Radio and the Discovery Channel, and it was featured in Yankee Magazine. After nearly two decades of federal service, I retired in 2022 to devote more time to my family and creative efforts. In 2024, after witnessing the return of brook trout to the Childs River, I was inspired to join the Association to Preserve Cape Cod as a restoration ecologist. Today I work on fish passage, river restoration, and bog restoration projects in the Waquoit Bay region and beyond.

My artistic style sits at the intersection of science and storytelling—a kind of stylized realism that aims to be both accurate and alive. I’m drawn to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi: the quiet beauty of the imperfect, the weathered, the practical, and the ever-changing. The natural world is never static, and I try to let that truth show up in the work.

If you’re interested in a commission—or personal modifications to a piece you see at the Waquoit Bay Fish Company—I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me by email at mike.palmer@waquoitbayfishcompany.com, or through the social media links below.