Connecticut
All That Glitters Is Not Gold
Maine / New Hampshire
Habitat Changes Affect Sea Urchins
MIT
Salt Marsh Grasses Key To Coastal Water Quality
New York
Extension Initiative Honored For Excellence
Rhode Island
Finding New Homes For Lobsters
Woods Hole
Scientists Team Up With Law Enforcement Officials To Protect Lobster Industry
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CONNECTICUT
All That Glitters Is Not Gold
No one expects a scientist's life to be glamorous, but Rich Orson's research twinkles with glitter. Gold, green, red, blue, and purple glitter, in fact - in circles, stars, and hexagons. Orson, Connecticut College Arboretum research associate, and his colleagues, Scott Warren and Bill Niering, both Connecticut College botany professors, use layers of glitter to mark time horizons on a test plot at Barn Island, a Stonington salt marsh. The glitter layer process was begun in this marsh by Art Bloom in the 1960s and continued by Orson to provide markers that scientists can use to pinpoint specific periods over the past 35 years. A thin layer of glitter with a specific color and shape is placed on the marsh surface to represent each application. Then, whenever cores are taken to examine changes in sedimentation, sea levels, and vegetation, the glitter incorporated in the samples clearly identifies the time frame. Because of its size, the glitter tends to stay in place in the soil, unlike smaller particles of silt and clay that may migrate up or down.
Natural and anthropogenic events also appear in the cores over time. For example, a band of fine sand marks the infamous 1938 hurricane, while 137 cesium molecules, detected by radioisotope analysis, document the beginning of atmospheric thermonuclear testing in the early 1950s and the nuclear test ban treaty of 1964. Orson also identifies and counts pollen grains in the cores and examines plant remains to document vegetation and community changes over time. These techniques are all part of a Sea Grant project to study how salt marshes grow, shrink, or change shape in response to changes in sea levels. It appears that Connecticut marshes respond to sea level rise with a resolution of 25 to 50 years, Orson said.
MAINE / NEW HAMPSHIRE
Habitat Changes
Affect Sea UrchinsSea Grant researchers monitoring sea urchins in the Gulf of Maine are suggesting that once-abundant populations may have been the result of an unintentional biological experiment. Bob Steneck, UM marine ecologist, says that the removal of groundfish from coastal waters may have allowed urchins to spread unchallenged over the sea floor until now. The thick carpet of urchins has supported a booming industry in Maine since 1987, but the intense urchin harvest is also affecting other parts of the marine environment.
Steneck and two graduate students, Stephanie Zimsen and Douglas McNaught, have monitored urchin populations as well as other marine organisms, such as lobster and kelp. "Historically, sea urchin stocks were probably controlled by large predatory fishes like codfish and wolffish," Steneck says. "However, these and other larger predators have been removed from coastal settings. So sea urchins became hyper-abundant, and in Maine that resource became attractive to the industry."
Exploding urchin populations have also had consequences for coastal ecosystems. As urchins became abundant, Steneck explains, they consumed large quantities of kelp and other seaweeds. Not surprisingly, at Steneck's monitoring sites, these plants have dramatically increased where urchins have been removed.
New Techniques May Mean New
Life For Urchin IndustryDuring preliminary research supported by Sea Grant, two UNH zoologists have coupled photoperiod manipulation with pelletized food to extend the harvest season and improve the quality of the green sea urchin. This development comes at a time when the wild fishery for urchins - which are exported to Japan, where their roe is a delicacy - is in decline due to overfishing. In fact, experts believe that the future of the fishery is in aquaculture.
The two researchers, Charles Walker, zoology professor, and Michael Lesser, zoology research assistant professor, demonstrated that a recently developed commercial urchin feed consistently improves the quality of urchin roe. In addition, they brought about an additional harvest of urchin gonads by manipulating the urchin reproductive cycle with artificial light. They will be pursuing their research over the next three years to expand the scale of their studies and to examine other factors related to the production of urchin gonads. If the early promise of their work holds, it will be part of the technology available to develop a land-based urchin aquaculture industry.
MIT
Salt Marsh Grasses Key to
Coastal Water QualityAs a buffer between land and sea, the salt marsh plays an important role in regulating the amount of nutrients and pollutants that are shunted from dry land into coastal waters. Along with tidal currents, marsh vegetation is critical in determining how various substances are transported, diluted, and deposited within the marsh. An MIT Sea Grant-sponsored study by Heidi Nepf, MIT civil and environmental engineering assistant professor, is focusing on the hydrodynamic effects of vegetation in order to better predict circulation patterns in a salt marsh.
The first part of Nepf's study has concentrated on a simple model, with imitation plant stems constructed of dowels attached to plywood boards, which mimics the varying densities of marsh vegetation. In laboratory experiments conducted with graduate student Jennifer Sullivan, Nepf placed various models in a flume and released a thin stream of fluorescent dye, which is tracked via a laser beam from beneath the flume. By tracking the flow of the dye, the researchers are able to observe how rapidly it is mixing. This summer, Nepf plans to compare predictions from the model to observations in Woods Hole's Great Sipewisset Marsh on Cape Cod.
Decreasing Vibrations In Marine Cables
A prototype device that reduces the vibrations of underwater cables may help solve problems faced by virtually anyone who relies on ropes, cables, pipes, and casings in marine environments. The device was developed by J. Kim Vandiver, MIT ocean engineering professor, and graduate students Li Li and Ethan Butler in a project sponsored by MIT Sea Grant and a consortium of 11 oil companies.
A cable in the ocean vibrates because water flows past it and creates a turbulent wake. As vibrations increase, so too does the resisting force - known as drag force - that is exerted on the cable. This can cause a variety of problems, including broken cables, lost scientific instruments, and lost fishing gear.
Tests in Massachusetts Bay have shown a near 50 percent reduction in vibration amplitude with the device. Applications for the apparatus reach beyond oceanography since vibration is also a problem with objects that are subject to wind, such as smoke stacks, antennae, and elevator cables.
NEW YORK
Extension Initiative
Honored for Excellence"The Native American Lands Initiative," a New York Sea Grant Extension program, has been awarded the Northeast Director's Cooperative Extension Award of Excellence from Cornell Cooperative Extension in recognition of outstanding programming accomplishments.
New York Sea Grant Extension specialists David Greene, Robert Kent, Jay Tanski, Diane Kuehn, and David MacNeill, and Sea Grant researcher Joseph Buttner, have been cited for establishing communications with Native American audiences to promote cooperative efforts on environmental concerns and educational programs. New York Sea Grant was chosen from among 30 programs to receive the honor.
New York state is home to 10 Native American reservations, which are confronted by a myriad of environmental problems, including toxic dumping, sewage disposal, tank leakage, agricultural runoff, and the ensuing contamination of group and surface waters.
The initiative's first efforts involved workshops and an environmental conference that was attended by over 50 Native American environmental leaders from seven different reservations. In 1994, Sea Grant established links to the extension agents working with Native Americans across the country, and regular contact has been maintained through a computer bulletin board.
Workshops and consultations have included training of a Shinnecock Nation tribal member by the Cornell Laboratory of Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing to conduct a natural resource inventory of an 800-acre reservation on Long Island; conducting a tourism and hospitality training workshop for over 125 Seneca Nation employees; providing assistance to the Shinnecock Reservation to solve erosion problems; and planning programming to address erosion problems at Akwesasne on the St. Lawrence River. Sea Grant is working with the Akwesasne Reservation to investigate the possibility of placing an extension agent on the reservation to provide educational programming.
Community youth programs have been a vital part of the initiative. In the past three years, Sea Grant-sponsored students have assisted in the organization of the Seneca Nation's environmental department and have worked with a Sea Grant researcher on Akwesasne's aquaculture program. Last summer, a student was hired to work with Cornell faculty members at the new Akwesasne Environmental Laboratory.
RHODE ISLAND
Finding New Homes For Lobsters
Building on more than 20 years of research on lobster biology, J. Stanley Cobb, Rhode Island Sea Grant researcher and URI biological sciences professor, has embarked on a project to enhance lobster stocks in Narragansett Bay by providing new shelters using artificial reefs.
The project will be funded in part by restoration money set aside by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) from the 1989 World Prodigy oil spill. NMFS plans to place six small artificial reefs made of two different sizes of quarried cobble, thus creating new shelter habitat for lobsters. With funding from the R.I. Sea Grant Marine Advisory Service (MAS), Cobb and Kathy Castro, MAS Fisheries Program coleader, will begin this summer to determine the best locations in the Bay to place the reefs.
The researchers plan to seed three of the reefs with tagged post-settlement (post-larval) lobsters; the other three reefs will be left alone so that comparisons can be made. The tag remains attached for the life of the animal. Cobb and Castro are hoping that newly settled lobsters will be attracted to the small-sized cobble, and larger juvenile lobsters will be attracted to the larger-sized cobble habitat. Over the next five years, Cobb and Castro will monitor the reefs for growth, immigration and emigration, recruitment to the reefs, and competition between hatchery reared lobsters and lobsters already in the area.
This information could be important because Rhode Island lobstermen would like to see a lobster hatchery built in the future to enhance lobster stocks; a lobster hatchery had been in operation in Wickford until the 1940s, when it was destroyed by hurricanes. In a hatchery, eggs are collected and hatched in tanks, grown to the post-larval or juvenile stage, and then released. "This project is the first step in determining what would happen to the post-larvae once they are released onto the reefs," says Castro. "And we are hoping to follow these lobsters into the fishery. "
MarinaNet Draws on Network
Strengths to Assist MarinasIn the face of change, coastal industries are having to move from a predominantly production-based to a service-based economy. One of these coastal industries is marine trades. The number of marinas has risen steadily over the last three years, and the number of boaters using marinas and related services has increased dramatically since 1980.
But with this growth comes new concerns: How can the economic and environmental health of the marine trades industry be sustained? The Sea Grant programs of Rhode Island, New Jersey, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Michigan, and Oregon are addressing this issue through an enhancement grant from the National Sea Grant College Program. Coordinated by R.I. Sea Grant, the National Marina Network Program (MarinaNet) is drawing on Sea Grant skills across tha nation to bring information, expertise, and resources together to achieve a sustainable coastal economy and a healthy environment.
MarinaNet is located at the following address:
http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/crt/index.html#marinanet
"We see this program as an efficient way for the marina industry to acces the important work that Sea Grant has done on many fronts," says Mark Amaral, R.I. Sea Grant Coastal Resources Center specialist and MarinaNet program coordinator.
Over the next two years, the MarinaNet team will link individual Sea Grant programs that have ongoing marina-related projects into a national network to facilitate access to research, advisory, and outreach activities, and to make the network available to the marina industry, Sea Grant, and regulatory agencies. In addition, MarinaNet will focus on encouraging a proactive and economically sustainable approach to pollution abatement and will support implementation of best management and marketing practices of the marina industry.
WOODS HOLE
Scientists Team Up With Law Enforcement Officials To Protect Lobster Industry
In an effort to reduce the numbers of female, egg-bearing ("berried") lobsters harvested in New England, WHOI Sea Grant researcher Robert A. Bullis has developed a new test that will aid law enforcement officials in catching - and prosecuting - lobstermen who try to beat the system.
New England states prohibit the harvest of berried lobsters in an effort to protect the fishery and ensure a steady population of lobsters for the future. Berried lobsters are easy to spot; embryonic and larval stage eggs are carried for six to 12 months on the underside of the lobster, cemented to the swimmerets - small appendages on its abdomen. When eggs are illegally removed, usually by scrubbing the females with a hard brush or hosing off the eggs, a residue is left behind on the swimmerets. To detect scrubbed females, inspectors now use a swimmeret stain test that reacts to the cement residues. However, the effectiveness of this test has led dishonest lobstermen to come up with yet another method for escaping detection - a solution of chlorine bleach and seawater. This solution dissolves the egg residue, leaving enforcement officials with no way to determine whether the lobster was berried. Until now, that is.
Bullis, a microbiologist with the University of Pennsylvania Laboratory for Aquatic Animal Medicine and Pathology, which is located at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, has developed a test to detect a lobster altered by chlorine. He was assisted by Mike Syslo, fisheries biologist and director of the Massachusetts State Lobster Hatchery and Research Station. In their test, a swimmeret from under the lobster's tail is removed and put into a vial containing a test solution. If bleach is present, the solution turns yellow. "Our test," explains Bullis, "will stand up in court, giving law enforcement people what they need to prosecute and fine violators of the new regulations." The new regulations he refers to include updated rules, consistent state-to-state, that specifically prohibit dipping berried lobsters in chlorine bleach. The test, which is fast, inexpensive, and easy to administer, will be used by inspectors this season.
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