There we saw beautiful sun sets and sun rises and some beautiful country. The Eastern Shore is special. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel (CBBT) toll of $12 each way for passenger cars ($20 for my 4 axels) keeps it special.
Traffic on the Southside (Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth etc.) and the Peninsula (Hampton, Newport News, etc.) is heavy with elements of pure insanity. Once past the CBBT toll booth, traffic instantly becomes slow. They just don’t drive fast over there. Really, it’s quite refreshing. You might get the occasional kid in a hurry to get back to New York, but he’s got plenty of room and the State boys won’t let him be in that much of a hurry anyhow.
The economic disparity is stark. There are assemblages of McMansions, old large restored plantation houses, and other restored architecture, golf course retirement communities and then there are rows of simple dwellings each with their own outhouse. I’ve also heard that some still don’t have electricity.
Farming, agriculture, and aquaculture dominate the stratified economy. There are huge chicken factories and tomato factories and other crop factories. The operations are immense.
There’s also a large segment of the population that are watermen. All the ones that I met were friendly with a unique dialect that is well documented in William Warner’s, Beautiful Swimmers. I really did hear one old dude tell me that he’s had trouble with his “ersters” (oysters).
On the water the wind was always blowing. I have always thought of the summer as a calm time, which it is on the western side of the Bay. But on the Eastern Shore that southwest wind blows incessantly. It’s rarely calm, and the sand bars are no frickin joke. They are long and far (over a mile in places) from the beach. You have to go around them, even in a small boat like our 21 foot Privateer. Many times they are shaped like long parallel spits pointing south along the shore. At low tide many of them form beaches. At high tide the chop breaks perilously on them.
We accessed all ten sites from two boat launches, Cape Charles Harbor and Morley’s Wharf. From Cape Charles we traveled to Bay Creek Golf Course Beach, Cherrystone, The Gulf, Old Town Neck, Hungars Creek, and Church Neck. From Morley’s Wharf (on Occahannock Creek) we accessed Downings Beach, Sandy Point, Hyslop Marsh and Silver Beach.
THE SCIENCE WORK
The objective was to sample marine communities in seagrass beds with varying adjacent shorelines, like bulkheads and tombolos to marshes, woods, and lagoons.
Rachael and I took 400 samples from the 10 sites. 350 of those were taken in snorkel gear. Matt was the ever important “Yak Boy”. He kept our stuff straight in a Sport Yak so we could concentrate on sampling. Here are the things that we measured. For most of the animals, except the grazers, we measured, counted and released them, so we minimized mortality.
Here’s the rundown: Number of samples/site
Sediment chl-a 5
Epiphytic leaf Chl-a 5
Grazer mass/grass mass 5
Grass biomass 5
Predator sweeps & grass coverage 5
Faster, bigger predator scrapes 4
Physical data (DO, temp, salinity) 5
Sediment grain size and organic matter 5
Riparian assessment 1
40x10 sites = 400 samples
Some of the most important critters in the community are the grazers. These are composed of amphipods and isopods. They are important and of particular interest to us because they are good stewards of grass itself. One of the drawbacks for submerged aquatic vegetation, like eelgrass, are the presence of epiphytes (plants growing on plants). Epiphytic algae grows on the surfaces of the leaves and this blocks out the light and weighs the plants down, essentially smothering them and preventing them from producing their food via photosynthesis.
Here's an example of some smothering macroalgae in the grassbed. This was at Hungar's Creek. Too much of a good thing...Algae also respires and at night when resperiation is greater than photosynthesis, dissoved oxygen can drop to zero, which cause nasty fish kills.
Enter the grazers. They actually benefit the grass by eating the epiphytes. The other way the grazers are important to the community is as food for subsequent trophic levels. Fish of all kinds, shrimps, crabs and others regularly dine on them. This way the energy from the sun travels from the algae to the grazers to the predators, to still higher predators, and so on. It is why all energy on the earth is solar energy, with the exception of nuclear energy, which resulted from supernovae, but I digress.
SOME QUALITATIVE OBSERVATIONS
The variability between the sites appeared to be very high. Some fishes appeared at every site, like the pipefish (Syngnathus sp), but it seemed that each site had its own distinctive residents. Some sites had several black sea bass, others had a huge numbers of grunts or pinfish, and still others contained summer flounder.
Pipefish are probably so successfull because they look just like the grass, as in this video. Also, pipefish are closely related to seahorses, and like seahorses, the males are the ones to get pregnant. The female transfers her egg to the male for fertilization. We saw a lot of large pregnant males. Fish are so kinky...
Palomoneates (grass shrimp) are the roaches of the grassbeds. They are so abundant it’s stupid. They also have real sharp rostrums (see the next section).
Numbers of crabs, and most other animals, were higher at the higher energy sites, where macro algae isn’t as dominant. The macroalgae smothers. One note about crabs, Jeff Shield’s group was also at the ESL. They were taking crabs and looking at the prevalence of a dinoflagellate (dino) that gets into the blood of the crabs and kills them. One of the techs described it as being like crab Ebola. They don’t live more than 3 months once they get it.
As with macro algae, dinos are bad in polluted, over-nutrified waters.
The most striking overall observation was that where macro algae dominated grassbeds in the protected sites, the grass seem smotheredand and there were fewer animals (with the exception of Gammarus amphipods and grass shrimp). Sites with higher wave energy had less of this.
Overall though, I really enjoy the field work. It's cool to observe the amazing life forms in our midst. Complex functioning marine food webs exist right in our back yard. I hope they can hang on despite the onslaught of nutrient pollution, global warming, and other maladies.
I’ll post the reference for the quantitative published results when they appear in a peer reviewed journal.
DANGERS
Finally, I should mention that, although I love to be up to my gills in the Bay, there are some, mostly minor, annoyances, and possible dangers to look out for.
Here’s the short list.
Storms – They can sneak up in the haze and ruin your day. When the sky turns purple, it’s too late. Regular weather checking it imperative.
Midge like “no see-ums” in shady areas. They’ll send you on an air-condition mission.
Green head flies near the marsh which hit you at high speed with their mouth parts open (they tear chunks from you)
Biting worms like Glycera. Their mouth parts puke out from their un-discernable head and four very prominent hooks sink into your flesh. I had one dangling from my pinky, two weeks ago. I still have a mark.
Blue crabs – out of the hundreds that I’ve handled only a handful got a piece of me. I don’t wear gloves because I need dexterity for measuring critters. If a blue crab does ever get me good, I might lose some dexterity regardless.
Grass shrimp rostrums – are the needle sharp pointy things that poke out of their “foreheads”. Handle them long enough and you WILL get “rostrusized”, which can include a painful dose of bacteria.
Sunburn – an obvious threat to melanin challenged people like me.
Stinging nettles – I fared pretty well. I only got tagged on my limbs a few times. Rachael got one in the neck. It was 24 hours before that whelp went away.
Earaches - ahhh, the lovely green water…
Cold – You wouldn’t think you’d be cold in June, but if you plan to spend as many hours in the water as we did, you’d better have some neoprene handy. With the recent upper nineties and a few triple digit temps, I complacently left mine in Gloucester. Thanks to the PG Ross of the ESL I didn’t get hypothermia.
Hot – well, it is June.
Overall though, the trip was awesome, and I’ll jump at the next chance to DO IT AGAIN!!! If you are inspired let me know. We do accept volunteers. However, keep in mind we aren't always on the water. In fact most of our time is spent in the lab sorting through all that we collected or on a computer, analyzing. Taking samples is actually the least time consuming task in the whole business.
Tight lines and full sails,
JP
