CTFishTalk.com: Fall of New England's Cold Water Fisheries 1890-1910 Part 1 - Connecticut Saltwater Reports ( CT Saltwater Reports ) - A Community Built for Connecticut Fisherman.

BlueChip

The Fall of New England’s Cold Water Fisheries 1890-1910
Warm Waters Reach the Canadian Maritimes 1910
IMEP #55 A
Part I
Habitat Information for Fishers and Fishery Area Managers
Understanding Science Through History

(IMEP History Newsletters can be found indexed by date – Title on the BlueCrab.info™ website: Fishing, Eeling and Oystering thread) and on Connecticut Fish Talk™ (See Saltwater Reports thread)

Timothy C. Visel, Coordinator
The Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture Center
60 South Water Street
New Haven, CT 06519
Revised for Capstone ISSP/SAE Proposals, July 2015

How Did Heat and City “Wastes” Bring Disease and Pollution To The Coast?
A Sound School Capstone Proposal-
“Building an Environmental Fisheries History for Coastal Habitats”
ASTE Performance Standards Aquaculture #4, #5, #6, #8;
And Natural Resources #6, #4, #9, #14

Preface
It was John “Clint” Hammond a retired oyster grower on Cape Cod who first told me about the 1880-1920 period in New England – the “reverse” as he termed it. The cold water fisheries would collapse to be replaced gradually with those that preferred warmer climates. These 1982 conversations must have made an immediate impression – a Rhode Island letter (in the appendix) was responding to questions I had sent about this 1880-1920 period I now call The Great Heat.
It was Mr. Hammond that “planted the seed” to look at this period and in time I did – it has been a frequent topic of these habitat newsletter posts. It was also Mr. Hammond that was so concerned about “hard nitrogen” those nitrogen compounds locked away in organic matter not the current concern about soft nitrogen (human) that was dissolved in water. Mr. Hammond was correct about the habitat species reversals and now nearly 40 years later it looks like he was correct about the nitrogen as well.

The 1880-1920 period saw the end of many cold water species both fresh and salt – Brook trout was thought to be extinct in Southern New England in 1901 (more heat resistant trout strains were transplanted in our New England streams) the Southern New England lobster fishery failed between 1898-1905 and the last large Quahog bed “failed” in the 1920s off Nantucket. The Bay Scallop Fishery once huge in Rhode Island, by 1900 was just a memory. In its place oyster sets improved reaching its zenith in 1898 the same year lobsters starting to die off. When Tarpon were caught in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island officials called for a special commission - also in 1898-- to investigate the “hot term”. In 1899 southern New England suffered an ice famine – ice did not form in time, the freshwater ice ponds and lake were just too warm from the “heats” of summer. In this “hot term” soft shell clam sets now soared, blue crabs became abundant even into Buzzards Bay; Striped Bass became huge feedings off huge amounts of shallow warm water forage (now suspected to be silversides). Even water fowl benefited for a time eelgrass grew out to deep waters became very dense and Brant fed upon these thick meadows of eelgrass a favorite food as waterfowl populations increased to the delight of hunters (see appendix). When eelgrass died Brant starved by the tens of thousands as their forage collapsed.

The marine “reverse” as Mr. Hammond called it was not as quick – rather slow a gradual decline of one species matched by a slow increase in another and in 1982 he believed were in another reverse. Many times he would mention his concern – that for some fisheries of the Cape – Bay Scallops and Quahogs were declining (natural sets) creating the need for shellfish hatcheries – just as oyster hatcheries were needed at the end of his oystering career. In fact the increase of oyster sets was a sign to him that things were going to get warmer and they did. It would take decades to research the fisheries history that Mr. Hammond described but in time I was able to look at this period in more detail – every point, every concern expressed by Mr. Hammond has in fact happened. In 1998 our lobsters starting to die, while blue crabs were starting to increase and by 2010 New England media outlets called it New England’s “Blue Crab Explosion” – it was.

Water temperatures increased and a habitat/species reversal did happen exactly how Mr. Hammond described. In 1968 Mr. Hammond would provide testimony to the Army Corps of Engineers regarding sea water temperatures. Nitrogen was a concern on Cape Cod in the 1980s – Mr. Hammond felt strongly that a larger nitrogen picture needed to look at energy storms and temperature – he once took a wood pole drove a nail through it stuck it down into the Oyster Pond River gave it few twists on the bottom and came up with a ball of eelgrass and leaves – black muck mixed in and this words now as clear as they were decades ago – (almost scolding after all I was from the University of Massachusetts and here “to help”). “This is your nitrogen problem here at the end of this pole” he called it humus but today it is termed Sapropel – rotting organic matter in the absence of oxygen. His nitrogen concern also appears now to be correct again. More and more attention is going to the bacterial strains that consume this compost – under low oxygen conditions. This paper describes how analytical measures replaced biological ones and may have caused one of the largest lapses of environmental history in recent times.
Several people have asked me recently how could this have happened—the under reporting of eelgrass habitat history and now nitrogen questions about which include will we really see any seafood benefits from nitrogen reduction programs. I usually respond to the effect we didn’t know our climate or fishery history. In 2006 I attended the ICSR conference in South Carolina and detailed several shellfish restoration projects that failed because of habitat conditions, that same year issuing the first of many cautions about the habitat history of eelgrass. In 2008, the first warning of many regarding linking eelgrass to nitrogen in extended heat to seafood*. [* On July 17, 2008 I provided information to Philip Trowbridge of the New Hampshire Watershed Management Bureau of a negative relationship of eelgrass to Niantic Bay CT bay scallop harvests. August 11, 2008 the department issued a report titled Methodology and Assessment Results related to eelgrass and nitrogen in the Great Bay Estuary – MD DOC R – WP –08 –18. My submission is mentioned pg 16 but the caution of including it as a substantial estuarine indicator was not. (My comments it seems are the only ones not to make it into the report).] In 2011-2012 several agencies had additional warnings about nitrogen in extended heat, and dissolved oxygen changes in response to colder temperatures which both had far larger habitat considerations for seafood than just nitrogen.

More recent information suggests that nature after all had bacterial filter systems to restore nitrogen imbalances.

John “Clint” Hammond was far ahead of everyone it seems and it was just beyond his career to see this habitat reverse. In 1984, he sent me with a simple hand written note; “Tim, ‘it’s happening.’” And in the envelope was a July 5, 1984 Cape Cod Times article: Scientists Seek input in Oxygen Depletion.

One of Mr. Hammond’s concerns (and many shellfishers on the Cape) was the habitat successive characteristics of eelgrass Zostera marina there. The historical literature (some produced by state and federal agencies) describes several negative habitat characteristics of eelgrass growth including smothering shellfish, aiding in the deposition of waterfowl fecal bacteria material, slowing tides, degrading bathing beach water quality, slowing water flows (anoxic) described as ‘stagnation” and reducing algal food flows to benthic shellfish. A review of the current eelgrass literature (about 300 articles or reports) only a few mention to some extent any negative eelgrass habitat services. Methods documented to control eelgrass growths include hand digging, blades and drawn metal cutters, towed chains and drags, hydraulic jets, mechanical mowers, some powered by gasoline engines, herbicides including references to Agent Orange and 2,4D also in Connecticut explosives (Niantic Bay).

Recent eelgrass reports appear to be subject to the “funding effect” in an effort to perhaps satisfy contractual arrangements only positive ecological services have been published and negative habitat aspects glossed over or forgotten. A growing bias is now apparent in respect to negative eelgrass habitat services in heat, and that eelgrass habitat values is directly related to temperature, and dissolved oxygen levels. The eelgrass/sapropel is a deadly habitat in heat and have been fully reviewed in other reports. This situation reinforces the need to have unbiased habitat histories for seafood that includes temperature and energy – my view.

I hope that these reports continue to be of interest and appreciate the ability to post these outreach publications.

Tim Visel

Introduction

Heat and Pollution Brings Disease to the Coast 1890s

The habitat failure for many cold water fisheries occurred during a time of rapid commercial expansion 1870 to 1900. Mill towns grew up around a different type of water powered machinery- the factory. Connecticut geology was perfect for cheap renewable water power as some streams were dammed up many times before reaching Long Island Sound.

As previous water powered machinery the 18th century factories would be a new level of mechanical advantage –belts, pulleys required grease, high friction, many parts required water cooling and production chemicals and washings (wash water) were wasted into local waters. At the same time factories needed waters and as towns grew into cities, the problems of human waste became a concern far more serious that unsightly effluent, sewage became a direct health hazard. People needed clean water also, so also the seafood industry.

The disposal of factory waste and cooling waters would have almost immediate negative impacts upon local fisheries. Some of the discharges were sometimes outright toxic, dyes, chemicals, and a growing reliance upon petroleum products that coated bay bottoms. And, the rivers of New England because of geography gathered up these wastes and carried them south to the sea. New England shellfish and oyster growers were often at the end of these “rivers” when they finally reached bays and coves. It was also getting warmer, during the 1870s; Connecticut residents experienced some of the coldest winter temperatures not seen in a century (minus 30° Fahrenheit) recorded by Philo S. Beers in Cheshire, (1870) but the 1890s was a completely different matter. Into these hot organic bacteria contaminated waters, people looked to fish and swim, provide water for farms, power factories and finally to grow oysters.

Bacterial contamination soon became problems for food products and consumers, some of the largest food producers and consumers lived on the coast. Some of the most cited examples for this period include oysters and milk. In the end, bacteria would extract a very deadly cost as New England’s climate warmed. It was a time of dramatic habitat change, both inland and along the coast. The heat waves were the shock and awe that soon would bring disease and pollution to the coast. As the century proceeded into the 1900-1910 most of its cold water fisheries lay in “ruin.” These included Halibut, Quahog, Bay Scallop and lobster fisheries.

Pollution and The Great Heat

The regulation of polluting sources would take a century from early warning of toxic and disease impacts of contaminated coastal waters. Many of these first disease impacts occurred during the turn of the century starting with the Wesleyan Rowing Team getting sick from the consumption of raw oysters consumed in New Haven, CT (1898) and ending with the pasteurization of raw milk in 1917.

While the US had warm periods in the 1850s nothing would be as severe as the 1890-1910 periods in New England. Here the impacts of urban pollution and climate change would be combined into public policies regarding diseases causing new rules for the sanitation of streets, collection and diversion of waste from urban areas in sewage canals, and the manipulation of salt marsh mosquito breeding areas to prevent Malaria.
It would also define a growing awareness of bacterial disease first dismissed a scientific fraud called the “germ theory” in the 1870s but a accepted as fact in the 1890s. Disease outbreaks were linked to poor sanitation and not at first climate change. A period of killer heat waves swept New York City in the 1890s, and a newly appointed Police Commissioner seized ice supplies within 20 miles of New York City and provided city residents a life saving supply of ice chips in 1896; we now know that New York City police commissioner as Theodore Roosevelt. After that event, a growing acceptance of climate change was mentioned only as the “hot term.”

Fish kills, horrible smelling marshes, the disease causing “bad airs” and killer heat waves were to forever mark this period. It gave rise to the Miasmatic Theory or bad airs that filled city streets with choking fumes carried disease while Victorian porches now wrapped around houses so that residents could benefit from any direction of nighttime cool air movement. [The miasma theory (also called the miasmatic theory) held that diseases such as cholera, or the Black Death were caused by breathing in miasma, a noxious form of “bad air”, also known as “foul air” (common in summer). The theory held that the origin of epidemics was due to miasma (diseased air), emanating from rotting organic matter, mostly from city sewage and poor sanitation of cities. (Extracted from Wikipedia). Many times cities were blamed for causing disease outbreaks.

Habitat Changes Influenced by “Hot Terms” of the 1890’s

New England coastal villages largely forested in pre Colonial settlement period 1650 to 1850 had now largely been cleared for agriculture and timber harvests. The forest canopy had been slashed and burned, cut, harvested in a natural resource capitalization that mirrored ongoing population expansion. Many now saw these cleared areas picking up solar heat, especially in cities and the absence of shade a national movement now called Arbor Day to replace this lost cooling tree “canopy” happened in the early 1900s. The industrial age had tapped abundant, cheap energy, water power and factories and then mill towns grew to satisfy both a burgeoning domestic and international markets for raw materials, especially lumber and then finished goods in assembly manufacturing centers mostly centered on or near flowing water. This natural resource (water) was first a source of power and the waste removal. Farms, (especially dairy farms) had already used streams in “clear pastures” to provide good fresh drinking water (to farm animals) but also carried wastes (manure) from fields during heavy rains. This had occurred during a period of cooler temperatures in the northeast. Oxygen levels are naturally high in cool water rather than warm. Then it became dry and hot in the 1890s and the first water rights conflicts started as some water supplies ran low and as a final blow, New England suffered a commercial ice failure in 1899. This resulted in an ice market “panic” then called ice famines. It just did not get cold enough for ice to form on deep lakes. Many shore communities now according to Elmer Edward of Groton grew “faster than spring corn” referring to the shore community at Groton Long Point – as many started as small tent Platforms quickly erected to escape dangerous heat waves.

The “hot terms” were upon New England as summers had record “heat” waves. In these now warming waters native brook trout died by the thousands, a combination of toxic residues and low oxygen. Cities now growing quickly dumped raw sewage into coastal waters, many from open canals as fish kills increased and the stench along some of Connecticut’s waterways became in heat unbearable. At times according to a printed report during a three hour speech in opposition to the germ theory and in support Miasma beliefs, John Olcott of the Hartford Courant recalls the practice of stuffing glycerin soaked cotton into nostrils while walking alongside of the Quinnebaug River in the 1870’s. This practice was widespread and was to prevent “wretching” (The Germ Theory Speech. CT Board of Agriculture was about three hours in length). Shallow drinking wells in heat became contaminated with bacteria. In high heat, milk also now is linked to bacterial vectored disease. Life was very hard in these hot New England cities in summers. Steamship companies soon developed routes to transport city “residents” to the cool shores and shore summer communities developed along New England Coast. Ferries transported thousands of summer visitors to Marthas’s Vineyard and Nantucket – cooler water made them extremely popular. New England’s coast and rivers and into the maritime - now warmed as heat waves hit Canadian Maritimes in 1912

Many trout habitats were also damaged by manure and organic wastes in high heat during this period. Sawdust and wood waste had also filled New England rivers and streams and time stopping flows creating huge jams of logs, branches, wood bark, pulp and the same high heat “black waters” sulfate reduction associated with paper production soon appeared in the Androscoggin River, Maine. But it was to be the factories that would over time galvanize public opinion regarding pollution. You could see the dyes from thread mills, or the copper and petroleum wastes; you could see the pipe and that pipe had an owner. Although New England was in a period of intense heat and few storms, a warm climate period, it was natural to assume that oxygen was low in coastal rivers, streams and bays; it had to be lower. But natural cycles were to be pushed off the table for unnatural “human” pollution impacts. The pipe carrying factory wastes into receiving waters certainly wasn’t “natural.” So in many fish population reports during this time natural conditions got a free pass as pollution not natural climate cycles became the focus of public policy debates. The debate over pasteurization of milk for example split the agricultural community for decades, laying the blame for milk diseases to unclean city streets (Miasma theory). While scientists pointed to bacterial contamination of food such as milk and oysters, or the “germ theory” a debate that raged for decades ending in the mid 1890’s. Bacterial did well during this heat especially in shallow water with organic matter along the shore.

In one of the most publicized cases attributed to the decline of Connecticut’s oyster industry was sewage pollution from three of its largest cities, Norwalk, Bridgeport and New Haven – also the location of its principal oyster centers as the court case history “Lovejoy vs. the City of Norwalk” in 1918 explains it wasn’t unreasonable to use coastal waters as waste receiving waters.

This was a time of heat and often low rainfalls, drought conditions worsened and water rights and sewage rights went to court as several states dealt with riparian water rights legally extinguished by the grounds of a greater “public necessity” or “reasonable use” of cities. Water cases related to this legal policy would be used in a ruling against oyster growers who sought compensation for monetary loss for oysters lost to sewage pollution. A national consensus was forming around bacterial contaminated waters and shellfish and an interstate conference came to an agreement around shellfish growing waters which started in 1915 ending a decade later in 1925. Bacterial counts in waters became the indicator of pollution; today that report is known as the National Shellfish Sanitation Program or NSSP. Pollution over time was blamed for most of the natural resource loss along the coast (fisheries), not local conditions that were also impacted by climate cycles.

Although sewage pollution did not help the oyster industry, the NSSP was directed at growing waters not reproduction. A chief cause of the oyster production decline were set failures not sewage it was beginning to get colder. Decades later it was cooler temperatures which had diminished seed oyster supplies. The climate had changed and apparently and altered habitat quality for oysters after the 1880-1920 period (see Rhode Island letter in Appendix). The obvious reason at the time had a bias towards pollution not natural causes regarding the decline of lobster, bay scallops, even cod and halibut. This bias of perception continues today, but it is natural to have forest leaf litter or organic matter cause damage to fish habitats in high heat and biologists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s knew it. As it got warmer in New England in the 1890s not all fish and shellfish suffered; as oyster production grew, quahogs now became scarce as well as bay scallops. When the Noank Lobster Fishery collapsed in 1898, no one seemed to notice a surprising surge in blue crabs. Some species seemed to do better in heat, striped bass for example, as others namely the Eastern Brook trout now “failed” in warm “trout” streams.

In the Biology of Polluted Waters’ History of Pollution, Hynes mentions this bias towards human pollution in Chapter 1 on page 1 (HBN Hynes Toronto Press 1971).
“Even ‘natural’ streams may show the characteristic signs of pollution. In densely wooded regions the autumn leaf-fall may add so much organic matter to water that fish are asphyxiated Schnellen (1955) has investigated this effect in an American stream, and the reader will be familiar with the fetid appearance of many woodland streams, pools in this country. In such places the water is murky and smells foul when the surface is covered with a white coat of sewage fungus. These conditions accurately occurring near a cesspool or a town dump would immediately be attributed to gross pollution by human agency. There is little doubt however that they have occurred in some places in every age since the invasion of the land surface by plants.”

The habitat failure for brook trout, for example, would aid in the construction of trout hatcheries, later into this warm period brown and rainbow trout species were introduced by states to offset the continued decline of “cold water” native species.

But natural soon was to become many things to many people and the public soon tired of endless debate and the discussion of biologists as they struggled to present a unified reaction to pollution or disease vectors. Often groups came to their own conclusion as to the absence of science. This was quite evident during the germ theory miasma city debates. By 1915, Massachusetts fishers would go on strike protesting a new capture device termed a trawl net. Blamed for the decrease in the Halibut fishery the truth of the matter was Halibut were already leaving for northern cooler waters according to three decades of trip reports. Even Connecticut at one time had a halibut fleet centered in Niantic Bay and Connecticut Cod fish were not uncommon. In a much colder period in board live wells in fishing vessels kept fish alive until delivered to markets (Nelson J. Huntley The Passing of the Fishing Fleet 1906, East Lyme Library, reprinted 1997). As waters warmed he describes these live fish wells soon became “a black hole of Calcutta” as fish trapped in warm surface waters quickly perished. Fishing vessels soon abandoned the live well concept. The Halibut had moved north and eventually also the fishing fleet that pursued them. (See Huntley’s description of the 1840’s Niantic Bay Halibut Fleet in IMEP # 54). But as is often the case cause and effect had many variables and the public wanted a concrete measure, a firm and consistent response to what seemed to be a growing national problem, pollution and the disease problem of cities was being directed to one source “us” ignoring the impacts of climate (temperature) and energy, otherwise known as habitat succession with natural “energy” inputs.

By the 1900s for example, Tarpon would be caught in Narragansett Bay as strange schools of never seen before fish were observed off Block Island. These events had little connection to the germ theory but tremendous importance to climate change. The Gulf Stream may have been strong and not suffering wind stress from strong westerly’s that became less a dominant climate factor.

The heat waves of the 1890s would forever change shoreline demographics and cause the largest inshore habitat reversal in a century. However in the recent fisheries literature this time period is rarely mentioned as habitats reversed and species changed in a southern New England. Habitats transitioned during a massive lobster die-off 1898-1905 leading to the construction of many lobster hatcheries – the first being in Rhode Island. Decades later in a much cooler storm filled period many of those same hatcheries would be closed – kelp-cobblestone habitats had succeeded again to these that now once again favored lobsters. Habitat succession was not understood then and the concept of marine habitat succession remains poorly defined today, even with recent energy (Hurricane) impacts. This is a public policy example of terrestrial research not carried being forward into marine studies which still lags behind terrestrial counterparts. Some of the lessons acquired during much colder times (floods) were not carried into development policies of the 1950s and 1960s as stream energy.

Very little was published about warm marine composting habitats during this time period away from the coast. The value of terrestrial composts to soils for agriculture however, was well known, and detailed in relation to soil bacteria or habitat succession processes.

Farmers, it seems here have long known about the benefits and dangers of the “long” and “short” nitrogen cycles. An account of oxygen and oxygen limited bacterial reduction is detailed a century ago in an abridged agriculture record, a publication of the United States Department of Agriculture and Experiment Stations in 1914 (Double Day Page and Company, The Farmer’s Encyclopedia, 778 pages).

In reviews the waste of manure and nitrogen “loss” - the report provides descriptions of fermentation and heating with the types of bacteria in each. The short cycle with oxygen and the long cycle without oxygen.

Animal compost and also that of vegetable matter, bedding hay and straw was an important source of nitrogen to farmers. So much attention was given to its use as soil replenishment when oxygen was limited or oxygen prevented from entering the compost. The production was a loss of nitrogen from ammonia is noted and the value to crops was “lost.”

On page 420 of the report is found in this section (and the same process occurs in the marine composts as well T. Visel):

“When manure is piled against the side of the stable or in piles, it soon heats and throws off more or less vapor and gas. This heating is caused by fermenting or breaking down of the materials composing the manure.

The formation is caused by the action of bacteria or low orders of microscopic plants. The bacteria which produces the most rapid fermentation in manure need plenty of air or oxygen (short cycle). Therefore, fermentation will be more rapid in loosely piled manure. A certain amount of moisture is necessary for fermentation, but if the manure is wet fermentation is checked, because it lowers the temperature, and excludes part of the supply of air (long cycle). The fermentation which takes place in manure breaks down the organic matters, and cause a loss of humus, and also of nitrogen through the ammonium compound, which are volatilized. The odor of ammonia, which is commonly noticeable about horse stables and piles of horse manure, is an evidence of the fermentation and loss which is taking place.

Fermentation of Manure— The fermentation of manure is due to the action of minute microscopic organisms which belong to two great classes: (1) Those which require an abundant supply of air (oxygen) and which die when deprived of oxygen — known as aerobic ferments; and (2) those which grow without oxygen and die when exposed to it—known as anaerobic ferments.

The decomposition observed in the manure heap is due as a rule to the combined action of these two classes of ferments. On the outer surface of the heap, where the air circulates freely, the first class (aerobic) is active, while in the interior of the heap, where the supply of air is limited, the fermentation is due to the anaerobic ferments.”

The agricultural community realized the nitrogen (ammonia) loss in low oxygen conditions. When climates change, temperature and energy become key factors in agricultural habitat quality for plants. This is the cycle or pattern of abundance so often found in historical fisheries literature. The problem has been a failure to acknowledge how long it takes for this change to occur. The first hints of widespread habitat succession in New England was in 1931 and then rapid after 1938. Some of the first observations of habitat quality transitions (failures) came from inshore shell and from fishers after the 1938 Hurricane – The “energy” from this hurricane caused horrific shore and coastal damage and much loss of life. This storm did cultivated huge deepwater areas setting up a series of great Quahog sets in Southern New England.

While millions of Americans decades later purchased new homes in the 1950s and maintained millions of acres of grass monocultures (lawns) and provided countless units of work (energy) cutting grass weekly to prevent habitat succession (a return to forest canopy), marine habitats also changed: lobsters, bay scallops and winter flounder all recovered. Even Halibut made a brief return to the Flemish Cap and northeast Georges Bank. However, the concept of marine habitat succession remains poorly understood. The “restoration of fisheries” and habitat quality changes from energy and climate cycles would be removed from the pollution table of public discussion questions in the 1970s. It was to be replaced by chemical analytical measures, parts per million/parts per billion, simple quick measurable but in the case of toxic substances including organic nitrogen impact upon coastal resource abundance to be very inaccurate. Nitrogen inputs must be indexed to temperatures. So must other toxics, even those that occur naturally such as the complexing of heavy metals in organic deposits by sulfur reducing bacteria. The absence of climate discussions to fisheries management would evolve into the study of just static habitat profiles, many of them merely points of time and seafood “declines” nearly always attributed to negative impacts of human activity. That is a bias that needs to be recognized and identified- my view. Many habitats are not static they just succeed over much larger time periods.

In a key study of estuaries a collection of esteemed biologists studying the estuarine environment were invited to submit position papers in 1963. “The Conference on Estuaries,” the first of its type was held at Jekyll Island Georgia from March 31 to April 3, 1964. “Estuaries” is the published conference proceedings, hosted by the University of Georgia and chief sponsor, the US Bureau of Commercial Fisheries Biological Laboratory, (then part of the US Fish and Wildlife Service); and the proceedings are 757 pages long.
Bostwick H Ketchum of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of Woods Hole Mass, in his paper titled, “Phytoplankton Nutrients in Estuaries” takes an opportunity to reexamine this bias, the tendency out of decades of dealing with just pollution issues to place blame for change we do not fully comprehend is only due to our negative
involvement along the coast. “As a type of confusion,” on page 334, he even mentions scape-goating as he describes competing resource uses as a backdrop to natural changes.
Estuaries – Nutrients and Biological Productions – Bostwick Ketchum (1964)

“The natural resources of estuaries are continuously threatened by the expanding populations along their shores. This inevitably raises problems because of conflicts of interest among the diverse groups who want to use the waters primarily for fisheries, for recreational purposes, for transportation, or for the disposal of the waste products of our civilization. Only within narrow limits can all these uses of an estuary develop without severe conflicts and interference. In a highly prosperous and industrialized society, we cannot hope to return our estuaries to their unspoiled natural state, but we can hope, as our knowledge increases, to control the effects of man’s activities so that the interests of all are respected and protected.
Our lack of understanding of estuaries can be blamed for much of the existing confusion. We are unable to define accurately the factors which control the circulation in estuaries, for example, and are consequently unable to predict the effects of proposed dredging of channels or of diversion or modification of river flows by the construction of reservoirs. The biologist fears all changes of the environment since he knows that each will modify in some way the normal balance of populations. Although he is unable to predict what the changes will be, history provides ample evidence that there will be a loss of some biological resources. However, natural populations do change even if there is no man-induced change in the environment, and the biologist still cannot predict these changes nor explain them when they occur. Sometimes man’s activity is the scapegoat, blamed for all changes the scientist cannot explain.”

And during a key time in our environmental history the biology and natural source of estuarine change was replaced by analytical chemical measures - not on the balance associated with natural fluctuating conditions as well such as climate cycles which include temperature and energy levels (storms).
Hines in The Biology of Polluted Waters (1971) blamed biologists themselves for the movement to analytical measures, nearly a half century ago. (The desire to have a concrete measures would lead to the development of standards of measure to discharges many now termed polluting from Hines, 1971)
“Even now, when freshwater biology is an established science and capable of making a great contribution to the assessment of pollution, one still finds biologists making appeals that more use should be made of their methods (Liebmann, 1942; Surber, 1953; Patrick, 1953). Personally I am in full agreement with these appeals, but I also feel that the neglect of their viewpoint has been in some measure the fault of the biologists themselves. Their subject is a difficult one, and it is much less easy to explain to the layman than is chemistry. In their attempts to do this and make their methods generally available they have sometimes tended to over-simplify, while at the same time forgetting that the layman is very soon discouraged by long lists of scientific names. This was a particularly unfortunate thing to do during the first few decades of this century when many members of the general public, and indeed many scientists, were disinclined to take biology seriously. To them, the biologist seemed to be a slightly ridiculous figure with a butterfly net, and when they found that his analytical methods were incomprehensive to them they, somewhat naturally, turned again to the familiar and apparently more precise methods of the chemist.

This state of affairs was, however, more marked in the English-speaking countries than it was elsewhere, and serious study of the biological aspects of pollution was begun in Germany at an early date (Liebmann, 1951). The results were first codified by Kolkwitz and Marsson (1908, 1909) who developed their now well-known ‘Saprobien System’ for the assessment of organic pollution.”

The discussion of the Saprobien system never really occurred here (US) as pollution control captured much of the public policy agenda in to the 1950s and 1960s. By this time the Great Heats of the 1890s were distant memories.
Therefore over time the public policy drift towards analytical chemistry and related concepts of “maximum loads” to the environment as evidence of toxic impacts. From this effort we have parts per million or per billion or toxicology impacts of mortality response’s today. (A mortality response is just a way of saying how many died).

But I think that is a little too critical of field biologists who did not agree universally on species change and assessments because they could not all speak the same language. What was a dominant species in northern coastal regions was far different than those found in “southern salt marshes.” Most importantly they did not have the concern of environmental history except perhaps forestry which had evolved historical growth/climate conditions by comparing the width or growth rings of lumber. This science had evolved from the Middle Ages, that trees grew differently in different climate conditions is attributed to studies in Northern Italy and the Swiss Alps. The best example of this knowledge is perhaps the Stradivari violin, one of the distinctive features is the use of this wood. Antonio Stradivari, the famous maker of musical instruments especially violins handpicked spruce trees living in the Italian Alps. These trees and the wood parts of maple and willow lived under severe climate conditions caused stunting now associated with the little Ice Age, 1645 to 1750, a much cooler period as wood products on average during this period have higher wood density with closer growth rings. (Dendrochronology is the science or technique of dating events, environmental change, and archaeological artifacts by using the characteristic patterns of annual growth rings in timber and tree trunk). The type and density of the wood is now associated with unique acoustic tones of musical instrument by Stradivari and others during this time.

As trees could grow differently over time so would estuarine species, populations would rise and fall for no apparent reason. And, what evolved from this wide difference in estuarine resources and values within the field of biologists was a new type of biologist who would bring clarity to the role and function of salt marshes and near coastal habitats, the ecologist. Much of that field would become ecology and natural to help describe negative human actions along the coast. That is still with us today, the “natural” bias continues that estuarine change is primarily human based and that the analytical chemistry science is superior to life resources (life sciences) measuring that change. That is how in this latest total maximum daily load measure for nitrogen is an example of assessing the impacts of human pollution upon living marine resources undergoing constant change themselves. Mervin Roberts a naturalist and nature writer in Old Lyme took issue with this bias in his 1985 book titled the Tidemarsh Guide makes a direct statement on pg 356.

“I submit that we have no business establishing rigid categories for the works of Mother Nature (p.356)” and further,

“Biological surveys and censuses are difficult to design and sometimes impossible to carry out so as to be free of bias. They are often hard to compare since very few are conducted under identical circumstances; but then even the accuracy of our national census of people is frequently challenged.

Now please come back to that word which appeared several paragraphs previous: bias. If you are a political or social activist you may have punched on “bias” and wondered how scientists apply it. As a matter of fact, scientists used it long before it became a catchword. Examples of bias in science are sometimes found in collections of living organisms whose population is in motion. To be without bias, such a collection would have to be made over an extended period with no regard to inclement weather, ice, time of day or holidays.

Consider the swallows at the Capistrano Mission in California. How would a report on their habits look if no observations were made during those few days when they were all arriving or leaving? Consider a flyhatch on a trout stream, all over in one day, only once a year. Consider a run of river herring. If you miss it, no one will be able to make you believe it. Visit a bat cave at noon on a summer day. It will be crowded with adults. Come back at midnight; there will be not one adult bat present.

Alice and Robert Lippson in their book, Life in the Chesapeake Bay, list 108 species of fishes that show up there. A still longer list appears in Hildebrand and Scroeder’s Fishes of Chesapeake Bay. They gave us 202, and in a later edition of the classic, John A. Musick added another 80 or so, mostly rare stragglers.

Now, what are all those ocean fishes doing in lower salinity waters? And what are all those fresh water fishes doing in brackish waters? Maybe there is no need to answer. Those questions are “loaded” since it wasn’t they, it was we who set up these salinity distinctions. Let’s take the facts of life at their face value. I submit that we have no business establishing rigid categories for the works of Mother Nature.”
(Copyright, 1985 by Mervin F. Roberts)

(First Edition, Library of Congress, Catalog Card Number: 85-90364, ISBN 0-9615047-0-6)

We did in fact use such surveys in the nitrogen reduction program and namely eelgrass as a species of special importance. In doing so, did we give a free pass to natural seafood population changes resulting from climate cycles and nitrogen impacts or is this is just a continuation of that struggle which like the Saprobien System as a benchmark, from 1908 and is now over a century old --Is it natural or is it “us?” To respond to that question requires involvement from several disciplines not just biology or ecology. To date, that has not happened and important answers to resource questions just haven’t happened, as well often as any fault or consistent overtime. We just did not even have the correct questions. How did this happen and what are the consequences of this “miss” if climate change reported as overfishing in recent seafood cycles. That response is attributed to a chemical analytical explanation which largely excluded natural resource cycles – those so often observed and reported by fishers.

Toxics and Habitat change

For “wasted waters” it became necessary to determine the lethal limits of concentrations of various industrial waste chemicals. These limits looked at impacts to living organisms not the habitats upon which they needed. Today these habitats have been defined to life stage/cycles common use terms include essential, critical or dependent. At first the determination of lethal or dangerous limits (often themselves defined by chemistry analytical methods) provided a regulatory legal “footing” not to exceed certain regulatory thresholds, etc. In a report on the Water Quality of Long Island Sound (March 1971) EPA Water Quality Office Northeast Region that Long Island Sound (in a much cooler time period) had already violated federally approved water quality standards. Many of those threshold limits had been set in a relatively cool period as a gradually warming took place 1980s-1990s; these limits would naturally be exceeded. As less oxygen is naturally contained in warmer waters, waters that were warmer would continue to fail to meet set oxygen standards. When faced with such habitat change fish “moved” they simply swam to more suitable conditions, other species suffered habitat compression and other reproductive failures for many coastal species it was not adopt or die but move or die, especially when it came to oxygen levels. This was especially true for lobsters which suffered a spectacular die off 1998-2000*. Hot water with or without nitrogen naturally contains less oxygen, they also contain much more bacteria and different bacteria that prefer sulfur not oxygen* For those interested in how bacteria can alter habitat conditions, several papers are found on the Blue Crab Forum™ Environment and Conservation thread.

In the *1971 EPA Report [* The 1998 Lobster Die off is connected to Hurricane Floyd which at a critical time dumped 11 inches of rain washing a tremendous load of organics and West Nile Insecticide treatments (improperly stored) into Long Island Sound, see lobster lawsuit United States District Court Eastern District of New York 00-5145.]its conclusions list low oxygen as a concern:

“The small quantity of oxygen normally dissolved in water is perhaps the most important single ingredient necessary for a healthful, balanced, aquatic life environment. The discharge of inadequately treated municipal and industrial wastes with their high concentrations of biochemical oxygen demand has resulted in seriously low levels of dissolved oxygen in violation of the Federal-State standards in many areas of the Sound. EPA studies show that these areas are: East River, Off Stepping Stones, Off Hewlett Point, Eastchester Bay, Hutchinson River, Norwalk Harbor, Housatonic River, Milford Harbor, New Haven Harbor and Thames River. At present, the main body of Long Island Sound has not evidenced signs of oxygen deficiency.” [1971] The water quality map of 1971 had already indicated western Long Island Sound “problems” decades ago.

As the temperatures increased in the 1980s and 1990s, low oxygen hypoxia events then increased complicated by very warm waters. The concept of natural eutrophication was replaced by a process of “cultural” eutrophication, human impacts of nitrogen although substantial but lacking reference to historical long term natural changes. (Climate change although well known then never was included in early public policy discussions).

This process did give rise to an entire new scientific field – Toxicology and terminology that established guidelines now described as lethal concentrations indexed to death levels or mortality “responses” to substances identified as toxic.* [Death rates described as lethal concentrations of a substance with a percentage of death within a prescribed time period “LC 50” is lethal concentration as which 50% of the sampled control organisms die.] These were often standardized with temperature and pH in oxygen unit measure of water and became the basis for much of the regulatory response to industrial pollution. It did not however, include natural events or natural environmental conditions because the total daily loadings were the result of factory or industrial waste discharges effluents – a known entity with measureable flow/discharge levels and reportable in different laboratory situations. (Tests/Trials Challenges). A warming climate that contained few storms allowed thousands of once hard or firm bottoms to become compositing.

Soon after these pollution levels were indexed to the capacity of receiving waters to accommodate waste streams, what could overwhelm a small brook would be diluted by large water courses, as such uses where still deemed “reasonable” by the courts in the 1950s. That regulatory guideline of waste effluents continues today in an effort to reduce contaminants below those described as “lethal levels,” but the movement to analytical levels, those that were found to be lethal,” eliminated the broader concepts of habitat conditions of temperature (climate) and natural bacterial breakdown of organic matter. These concepts were put forth in the Saprobien System in 1908. The concept that bacterial populations could produce toxics or create them was not included- that had occurred in Europe in the early 1900s. Bacteria could be “bad or good” depending upon life functions. Something the farm community knew a century ago.

The heart of what drove the Saprobien System was the self clearing / cleaning of steam/flow energy and natural bacterial breakdown of organic matter described a century before as the European Saprobien System although climate and energy were largely excluded in the west. They became a critical part of European habitat studies. It was not accepted in the United States. We looked to human causes for seafood reductions not natural events.

From the Collapse of the Cold Water Fisheries in New England 1910
IMEP 55
Connecticut During “The Great Heat” 1880-1920 Climate Period

SAD NEWS FROM THE CLAMS

GROWING SCARCER AND THEIR DAYS SEEM TO BE NUMBERED

New York Times, Dec. 13, 1891

MIDDLETOWN. DEC.12, 1891- As if Connecticut were not sufficiently afflicted with epidemic and endemic diseases, the tidings now come from the sad sea strand that clams are bound to be very scarce this Winter. Clams, say the discouraged diggers, not only are few and poor, but they are pretty nearly exterminated already all along the Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Long Island shores. Said an old clam digger to-day:

“The scarcity of clams will make the Winter a very hard one, for thousands of poor people in this and neighboring States, particularly the shore folks, who dwell along shore and depend mainly on the clam flats, after cold weather sets in, for breakfast, dinner, and supper. A few years ago the baymen at Port Jefferson, L.I., could catch eight or ten bushels of clams a day along that shore, and they got 25 cents a bushel for them; but now they have to work hard to get a bushel at a tide, while they have no trouble in getting $1 a bushel for their catch. Of course, the increased price helps them somewhat, but the trouble is that clams are getting scarcer and scarcer all the time.”

Of course, the long-neck or “soft” clams are the best, and they are found most plentifully along the Connecticut and Rhode Island shores. They are the clams that go into the old-fashioned Rhode Island clambake. The hard shells, or little necks, called quahogs in Rhode Island, are useful chiefly for chowders for the nutritious and stimulating juice they yield, and the little fellows are eaten on the half shell. They abound on the Long Island strand. Still, the finest and sweetest soft clams in the world came from the seven miles of sandy desert shore on Eastern Long Island known as Napeague Beach. (1891 Account).

The United States Department of the Interior
Bureau of Sports Fisheries and Wildlife
Fish and Wildlife Service

Waterfowl Tomorrow

Editor: Joseph P. Linduska
Managing Editor: Arnold L. Nelson
Artist: Bob Hines

Produced by the Department of the Interior with the assistance of officials and representatives of State, Provincial, and National Governments and Private enterprise in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
L. C. card no. 64-60084
United States
Government Printing Office
Washington: 1964

Brant, Ross’ Goose, and Emperor Goose Page 145-146
The Fast, agile, white-bellied brant once were popular sporting birds along the Atlantic coast. In the early 1930s they became almost extinct because eelgrass, their chief food in winter, suddenly died off due to a disease caused by a mycetozoan, Labyrinthula. The surviving birds changed foods and the number of Atlantic brant slowly rose again. Then another unforetold event happened. They lost prestige as a game bird because sea-lettuce, the chief item of their new diet, taints their flesh. Now eelgrass is slowly recovering, and brant once more feed on it. We hope their meat in time will become more palatable.

Another remarkable thing: As Atlantic brant changed their diet, they also changed their migration routes. By the mid thirties, about two-thirds of them, no longer dependent on coastal eelgrass beds, were using overland routes in spring flights north, instead of following the seacoast. Most of our 150 thousand to 200 thousand Atlantic brant today are their descendants; they fly directly to James, Hudson, and Ungava Bays before spreading out to their nesting grounds.

Because eelgrass on the Pacific coast was little affected by the die off, the black brant suffered less, and they still provide excellent sport and tasty game. They continue their regular migration along the coast and follow the shores of Gulf of Alaska to Cold Bay before heading to the breeding grounds. Pacific brant number 100 thousand to 175 thousand.