4 Kayaking in North Sea
Conscience Point Shellfish
by James Stegmann
One of the many reasons why Conscience Point Shellfish decided to grow oysters is the fact that they are incredibly beneficial when it comes to overall environmental health. In addition to being food for some crustaceans and fish, they also provide shelter for small, juvenile organisms such as crabs and fry. We learned that oysters prefer a hard substrate to attach to and grow on, this is due to the fact that, unlike clams and bay scallops, oysters are entirely immobile once they attach to a substrate. However, if oysters are left undisturbed in the wild, the juvenile oysters will all congregate together and create massive oyster reefs, providing shelter for small fish and crabs, while also filtering up to fifty gallons of water a day each! This is why their species is so important in small bays that do not effectively filter in a twelve-hour tide cycle. The picture shown above is an example of a small oyster reef at low tide. This reef sits in an intertidal zone which allows even more species to take advantage of these crucial bivalves. In addition to being used for food and shelter, oyster reefs have been known to help protect shorelines; similarly to mangroves.
This photo shows the buildings where Conscience Point Shellfish calls home. The building on the left is where the staff incubates the oysters, clams, and bay scallops before they are large enough to go out into the bay; this takes about one year in the wild, but only nine months in a lab. According to their estimations, they can produce approximately one million oysters per year.
This photo shows an aerial view of what their habitats look like. The oysters, once large enough, about one inch, will be moved from the containers on the dock into these larger containers suspended in the water column in the bay. This will allow more water, and more nutrients, to pass over the oysters allowing them to filter more effectively. Hypothetically, if there are 1,000 oysters in one container and they each filter 50 gallons per day, each box will filter 50,000 gallons of water each day. Now multiply 50,000 by 150 (approximate number of boxes) and this small oyster farm is filtering approximately 7,500,000 gallons of water a day.
On the other hand, we did also learn about the tough life cycle of the oyster. Since they are unable to move, spawning can be a treacherous time for the seedlings. Chris from Conscience Point shellfish explained to us how a sexually mature female oyster can produce anywhere from five to eight million eggs per season. However, these eggs can easily be moved by currents and reduce the chances of the eggs being fertilized. However, with the help of laboratories like Conscience Point Shellfish oyster breeding can be protected and facilitated in the most efficient ways possible.
Photos:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/storms-get-bigger-oyster-reefs-can-help-protect-shorelines-180967774/
“Home.” Conscience Point Shellfish, 13 Dec. 2019, https://consciencepointshellfish.org/.
Osprey Comeback in Southampton
by Arielle Mule
Conscience point, Southampton is a beautifully preserved area teeming with wildlife. Anyone who has had the chance to visit there, or anywhere in Southampton for that matter, has probably heard the yelling, almost chirping calls of the plentiful ospreys in the area. It’s impossible to miss their sound and almost as difficult to miss their sight, the white-bellied gliding hawks overhead. But it hasn’t always been this way. The osprey comeback in Southampton is a prime example of the good that people can do (and the bad that they can reverse) when efforts are initiated and organized by the right people.
In 1962 (Legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 2012), Rachel Carson earned her title as the mother of the modern environmentalist movement with her novel Silent Spring. This brought mass attention to the synthetic insecticide DDT and the harm it was causing to ecosystems, specifically to ospreys. Carson relabeled the substance as a “biocide” due to its indiscriminate killing of organisms rather than targeted killing of insects. Because prey organisms at the bottom of the food chain were consuming DDT, and each organism in a particular trophic level consumes many organisms in the level below it, amounts of the substance multiply, or biomagnify, as you travel up the food chain. At the very top, bioaccumulating massive amounts of DDT, were the ospreys. Evidence of the substance could be seen in the thinning of osprey eggshells, as well as its presence in various animal tissues (DDT factsheet, 2021).
As an effect of Carson’s Silent Spring, DDT was banned in 1972 (DDT factsheet, 2021). This was the first major step in bringing them back. Since then, other efforts have been made to drive up the population, such as raising and releasing ospreys and providing manmade nest locations for them. If you’ve ever seen any of what look like large wooden posts with boxes full of twigs at the top, chances are, this was one of those nests. The birds have taken to them fairly well, and as a bonus, we get to see them go about their business in their nests every once in a while. According to Patch News, the osprey population on the East End has increased by more than 200 percent in less than a decade as of 2021.
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| Platform for Success, 2020) Osprey taking off from nest on manmade structure, not taken on this trip, but on a nest cam. |
Citations
Legacy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. American Chemical Society. (2012, October 6). Retrieved September 18, 2022, from https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/rachel-carson-silent-spring.html
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021, August 16). Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) factsheet. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved September 18, 2022, from https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/DDT_FactSheet.html
Platform for success. NestWatch. (2020, July 31). Retrieved September 18, 2022, from https://nestwatch.org/connect/news/platform-for-success/
In Harmony with Nature 
This picture was taken from the water and is the coastline of Conscience Point National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is maintained and managed by the government after being donated in the mid 1900s. According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service website, is closed to the public to protect the fragile wetlands.
Most of the salt marshes in the area are not present anymore because of seawalls that were built in the past, changing the coast and the ecosystems that were able to establish themselves there. This salt marsh is in the protected area, and without houses and humans present in this piece of land, it can survive.
by Amanda Cruz
On our kayaking trip, we were able to see a lot of beautiful sights in the North Sea area. On one of the stops we made to learn about the environment, we talked about national parks. We learned about how just spending 30 minutes out in nature lowers blood pressure significantly. Enjoying naturally preserved areas is vital for mental and physical health, and there is ongoing research to prove this. Our national parks are extremely valuable, and we learned that because the east coast was colonized before the western parts of America, there was less preserved natural beauty, resulting in less national parks today.
One important aspect of national parks themselves that has caused discussion amongst ecologists is the idea of conservation vs restoration. Conservation is working toward conserving the current environment, and restoration is attempting to restore it to how it used to be before, which could disrupt new ecosystems that were created when humans interfered. Learning about how these concepts have affected preservation of our natural areas and about how sometimes, the choice is given to the people on which direction should be taken, was interesting. Addressing how we preserve the areas that we’d like to enjoy recreationally can be difficult for ecologists who hope to ensure that nature and people live in harmony in the best way for all of us.
On our kayaking trip, we were able to see a lot of beautiful sights in the North Sea area. On one of the stops we made to learn about the environment, we talked about national parks. We learned about how just spending 30 minutes out in nature lowers blood pressure significantly. Enjoying naturally preserved areas is vital for mental and physical health, and there is ongoing research to prove this. Our national parks are extremely valuable, and we learned that because the east coast was colonized before the western parts of America, there was less preserved natural beauty, resulting in less national parks today.
One important aspect of national parks themselves that has caused discussion amongst ecologists is the idea of conservation vs restoration. Conservation is working toward conserving the current environment, and restoration is attempting to restore it to how it used to be before, which could disrupt new ecosystems that were created when humans interfered. Learning about how these concepts have affected preservation of our natural areas and about how sometimes, the choice is given to the people on which direction should be taken, was interesting. Addressing how we preserve the areas that we’d like to enjoy recreationally can be difficult for ecologists who hope to ensure that nature and people live in harmony in the best way for all of us.
This picture was taken from the water and is the coastline of Conscience Point National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is maintained and managed by the government after being donated in the mid 1900s. According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service website, is closed to the public to protect the fragile wetlands.
Most of the salt marshes in the area are not present anymore because of seawalls that were built in the past, changing the coast and the ecosystems that were able to establish themselves there. This salt marsh is in the protected area, and without houses and humans present in this piece of land, it can survive.
Historical Importance of Oystering in Long Island
by Connor McCooey
This week we took a kayak trip around North Sea Harbor with the group East End Explorer. We learned that tourism, like this trip, is currently the major industry of Long Island. During the trip, we toured the facilities of the Conscience Point Shellfish Hatchery, an organization whose goal is to restore the shellfish populations in the waters of Southampton. Shellfish populations are so low because instead of tourism, oystering used to be the major industry of Long Island. Oystering has been very important for Long Island, and we learned about this through reading an excerpt from the book The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky.
This week we took a kayak trip around North Sea Harbor with the group East End Explorer. We learned that tourism, like this trip, is currently the major industry of Long Island. During the trip, we toured the facilities of the Conscience Point Shellfish Hatchery, an organization whose goal is to restore the shellfish populations in the waters of Southampton. Shellfish populations are so low because instead of tourism, oystering used to be the major industry of Long Island. Oystering has been very important for Long Island, and we learned about this through reading an excerpt from the book The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky.
According to Kurlansky, oystering has been practiced for a long time, even dating back to the Romans. When oystering started in New York, it began as an industry based in the City rather than on Long Island, specifically in the waters around Staten Island and the East River (Kurlansky 121). Oysters were abundant in these waters, and demand for them was high, which led to heavy harvesting. Of course, this heavy harvesting led to a significant decline in the oyster population, but people still wanted oysters, so rather than wait for cultivated beds to grow, oystermen searched for new natural beds. These beds were found in the waters of Chesapeake Bay, and eventually Great South Bay in Long Island (Kurlansky 131).
Prior to the oyster industry arriving, the south shore of Long Island was not very well populated with only a few settlements like Southampton, but that changed once oystering began (Kurlansky 132). Communities settled there to harvest the natural oyster beds in Great South Bay since they were not under any legal restrictions and were full of big oysters (Kurlansky 136). As a result, oystering motivated the development of much of Long Island, and the sale of oysters to the city helped build its economy. Unfortunately, just like in the waters of the City, oyster populations in Great South Bay faced significant declines due to overharvesting (Kurlansky 136). As a result, oystering is not nearly as profitable nor as widely practiced on Long Island today.
Even though oystering is no longer as important to the area as it once was, its impacts can still be seen today. It was instrumental in building up many of the coastal communities that still exist, and it continues to support them. Even in areas that no longer harvest oysters oystering can help indirectly by filtering local waters and having such a rich history, which both contribute to the success of the current tourism industry.
Kurlansky, Mark. “Eggocentric New Yorkers.” The Big Oyster: New York on the Half Shell, Ballantine Books, New York, 2006, pp. 114–139.
Kurlansky, Mark. “Eggocentric New Yorkers.” The Big Oyster: New York on the Half Shell, Ballantine Books, New York, 2006, pp. 114–139.
The Work Behind an Oyster Farm
by Ian Robinson
To support their mission statement, a considerable amount of work must be done by the Conscience Point Shellfish hatchery. In order to develop oysters, numerous steps and devices are required to support the farm in mass.
The first step to raising an oyster is acquiring spat. First broodstock gametes can be collected and mixed to form fertilized eggs. Given some time these eggs will develop into larval cultures. Naturally larval cultures attach to a solid surface, such as an adult oyster shell and metamorphose into spat. This process can be mimicked by allowing larva to be attached to collected shells in a basin. If set to a shell, larval cultures can be quickly placed into a grow out box. These boxes float just below the surface allowing for the culture to graze at will and develop with time
Larval cultures may also develop “clutchless,” meaning that larval develop without attachment. Clutchless larvae must develop in an upweller. Upwellers are small barrel sized bins that supply replenishing water to clutchless spat. Isolated from direct water flow, spat must be supplemented by algae. Although not occurring during the tour, algae can also be cultured on site within flasked and large tubes.
Once developed, juvenile oysters are placed into grow out crates. Raised in a more nurtured setting clutchless raised oysters are more fit for market standards. Spat set to clutches are more suited for seeding (placed in a conservation for ecosystem health and natural generational development).
by An Kreidler-Siwinski
Today we paddled past phragmites. Sometimes our kayaks would accidentally get pushed into the green colored reeds lining the shore. We learned that phragmites are a non-native species to Long Island, yet they were very abundant on our class trip. Phragmites are a common shoreline plant that can outcompete native plants like Spartina.
In class we were asked if we would vote to change an ecosystem back to how it was in pre-colonization times, or if we would choose to leave it as it is today. As usual, I mulled over the question until after the votes were cast, leading to a re-vote. I voted to change the ecosystem, because I thought that it would be good to have native species back in an area where they had been pushed out over time.
However, after we voted our professor informed us that the majority of people had voted to keep an actual California ecosystem as it was. One reason people voted that way was due to the cost and resources that it would take to change the landscape back to how it was. It would also potentially take decades if not centuries for the change to happen. In addition, the current species residing in the area would have to be removed, probably killing off many animals and plants. It was an interesting class discussion and now knowing more information I might have voted to keep an ecosystem, like one with phragmites, unchanged.
Photos: Both photos show the shoreline of North Sea Harbor lined with phragmites. Both photos were taken from a kayaker having a great time on the water.
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