Category: Shellfish

“Long Island is All Clammed Up” – Is It Too Late For Our Bays?

It is important to remember that many of the land use issues discussed each week have real impacts to the lives of Long Islanders, and failure to heed economic and environmental warning signs can lead to real consequences. If we fail to protect our water system, the consequences will be dire.

In recent weeks, environmentalists, New York State government leaders, News 12 Long Island and others have been working on a public campaign to increase public awareness about Long Island’s drinking and surface waters. Failing to protect the aquifer is costly on a variety of fronts. With the recent call for state intervention, and the return of brown tide on the South Shore, it’s critical that action is taken sooner rather than later.

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Volunteer To Seed The Great South Bay With Clams

Volunteers should be prepared to lift upwards of 40-60 lbs repeatedly and be prepared to do so on the water as well. We can provide waterproof gear but volunteers should be prepared with warm clothes as it is often much colder on the water. A snack, water, and potentially lunch is a good idea as well. A typical day of stocking can run from 10-2 but may end up to an hour earlier or later depending on availability of spawner clams.

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In Praise of The Stony Brook Southampton Coastal and Estuarine Research Program (SCERP) — “Like” Them on Facebook If You Care About The Fate of The Great South Bay and Every Bay

Knowing now the task at hand, we have no choice but to take it on. To say this problem is too big is to say Long Island has no future. Without clean water, we have no bays, rivers, and ponds worth having. Without clean water, what do we drink, bathe in, or wash with? In the end, it is up to us to act responsibly on the conclusions of SCERP's research. The very first step we can take in that is to make sure everyone on Long Island is familiar with their work and their conclusions. Tell your family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. We must move from knowledge to awareness to action if we are to preserve Long Island and its waters for future generations. Make no mistake - this problem will cost billions to fix. Eco friendly septic tanks and toilets would need to be deployed throughout Nassau and Suffolk. Sewage treatment plants would need to be modernized and rebuilt. With the total value of Long Island real estate easily in the hundreds of billions of dollars, one would think the infrastructure investment would be worth it.

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The Breach Report July 8th, 2013 – Damaging Brown Tide Spreads Across Great South Bay, Cell Count Much Lower Near New Inlet – A Report From SCERP

DAMAGING BROWN TIDE SPREADS ACROSS GREAT SOUTH BAY
June rains kick starts event; Presence of The New Inlet keeps levels lower in Eastern Bay

Stony Brook, NY, July 8th 2013 – An intense and damaging brown tide has emerged across much of Great South Bay. Monitoring by The Gobler Laboratory of Stony Brook University has revealed that a brown tide developed in late June in western Great South Bay and has intensified and spread east since. Abundances of the brown tide organism were recorded at more than 1,000,000 cells per milliliter in western Great South Bay as of July 2nd in the region between the Robert Moses Bridge and Islip. Densities declined to less than 100,000 cells per milliliter within eastern Great South Bay. Densities above 100,000 cells per milliliter can be harmful to marine life. This marks the first summer brown tide in Great South Bay since 2008.

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From Newsday 6-08-13 — Carl LoBue and Christopher Gobler Weigh in On Algal Blooms This Spring and How the Breach Is (Thus Far) Sparing The Great South Bay From Brown Tide

The dreaded brown tide is back in some South Shore bays, threatening everything from eelgrass to scallops, but Great South Bay has been spared so far thanks to superstorm Sandy, a marine scientist said Friday.

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WYNC Interviews Carl LoBue and Nancy Kelley of The Nature Conservancy on Water Quality and Importance of Restoring Clamming In The Great South Bay

Summer is right around the corner, which means many of us will head out to Long Island for clams bakes and time on the beach. But there’s a problem lurking in the waters around the Great South Bay. According to studies from The Nature Conservancy, excessive nitrogen is polluting the waterways.

“We have these symptoms in many places, either harmful algal blooms, some of which are actually toxic to fish and wildlife, some of which are toxic to people,” said Carl LoBue, The Nature Conservancy’s senior marine scientist on Long Island. “So that actually has a big impact on which fish enter our bays, which fish are healthy to eat. And then in some places, like Western Long Island Sound where the water is deep, we get hypoxic dead zones, like you might hear about in the Gulf of Mexico.”

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Reviving New York’s Rivers — With Oysters!

Architect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean -- thus driving even more innovation in "oyster-tecture." Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.

Kate Orff asks us to rethink “landscape”—to use urban greenspaces and blue spaces in fresh ways to mediate between humankind and nature

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