• Echinoderm

    Marine animals that exhibit five-armed or part radial symmetry. The members of this group most commonly found in Maine are sea stars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers.

  • Ecliptic
    Great circle on the celestial sphere apparently traced out by the sun in the course of a year. It is so called because for an eclipse of the sun or moon to occur, the moon must lie on or near the ecliptic. The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator (equinoctial) twice during the year, at points known as the equinoxes (March 21 and September 23).
  • Ecotourism
    Tourism focused on travel for the purpose of observing or learning about wildlife or the environment.
  • Electronic depth sounder
    Electronic device for measuring water depth by bouncing a sound wave off the bottom and measuring how long it takes between transmission and reception of its reflection.
  • Electronic navigation
    Using electronic means and satellites to find your location or the location of other objects at sea.
  • Elliptical
    Used to characterize a planetary or other orbit, in the shape of an ellipse.
  • Elvers
    Young eels returning to fresh water where they will live as adults before going to sea again to spawn.
  • Engraving
    The art of making designs by cutting, corrosion with acid, or other process on the surface of a metal or wood plate, used for printing design.
  • Entrails
    Internal organs or intestines.
  • Epidemic
    Affecting or tending to affect a disproportionately large number of individuals within a population, community, or region at the same time.
  • Equation of time
    The amount of time that the real or apparent sun is ahead or behind the mean (clock time) sun. It is the difference between mean and apparent time whether expressed in local or Greenwich time. It is tabulated in the nautical almanac for every 12 hours of Greenwich time. A correction for this needs to be applied in celestial navigation.
  • Estuary
    The wide mouth of a river where it is met and invaded by the sea.
  • Ex voto painting
    A religious painting commissioned out of thanks for delivery from a dangerous situation.
  • Extractive economy
    A resource-based economy, dependent on harvesting or extracting natural resources for sale or trade.
  • Extreme clipper
    Clipper ships sacrificed carrying capacity for speed. Those whose shape had been altered most radically from a typical cargo-carrying ships were characterized as extreme. Most of the famous record breaking clippers were extreme, and the advertising press of the 1850s used the phrase to emphasize the speed of a vessel, so that many clippers called extreme were not.
  • Eye splice
    An eye formed in a rope by weaving its strands back into the rope.