North Carolina is home to nearly 4,000 species of plants. A small percentage of them, but some of the most unusual, can be found in the Green Swamp Preserve, a 17,424-acre nature preserve managed by The Nature Conservancy.

The Green Swamp Preserve in Brunswick County, about a 40-minute drive southeast of Wilmington, remains closed after a recent wildfire, the result of flames escaping the area of a prescribed burn that was in process in June. The fire spread across most of the preserve, covering nearly 16,000 acres and prompting state air quality alerts.

But once it reopens later this summer, visitors can see 14 species of carnivorous plants, 16 species of native orchids, and other endangered wildflowers on the sun-dappled ground beneath a tall longleaf pine canopy.

The recent blaze was prevented from reaching any nearby private property, and due to the distinctive nature of the fire-adapted longleaf pine ecosystem — and conservancy’s management practices, which included a successful controlled burn in January — it’s more a problem for people who wish to explore the area than the plants that live there.

“There are already grasses popping up in the preserve,” Michelle Ly, conservation coordinator for the conservancy’s southeast coastal plain office, explained last week to Coastal Review. She noted that they expect to see some plant species recovering in areas where they previously had been crowded out by taller vegetation. “This wildfire and burnout will benefit the preserve greatly.”

The Nature Conservancy also hosts a “Fire in the Pines” festival in Wilmington, where visitors can learn how controlled burns help plants and animals in these coastal environments and watch a live demonstration burn. This year’s festival is set for Oct.14.

With the recent containment of the blaze called the Pulp Road fire, conservancy officials and scientists on Thursday led a media tour of a part of the preserve that was unaffected by the most recent fire but that was subjected to the controlled burn in January.

The area of the media tour was lush with color and new growth emerging from the char below.

Protecting star species

The star plant species of the Green Swamp Preserve include a huge range of carnivorous plants: Venus flytraps, sundew, bladderworts, butterworts, and four species of pitcher plants.

The conservancy works to ensure the Green Swamp remains a healthy, balanced ecosystem for these specialized plants. It has taken care of the land since 1977, when the Federal Paper Board Co. gifted it nearly 14,000 acres. The company donated an additional 2,577 acres in the late 1980s. Over time, the conservancy has purchased the rest.

The conservancy’s conservation activities center on the longleaf pines that tower above the understory layer. These trees once covered about 90 million acres of the Southeast, from Virginia to Florida and as far west as Texas. Logging and urban development have shrunk their numbers. Today, slightly more than 5 million acres remain, up from just 3.2 million acres in the early 2000s.

The conservancy has been protecting and restoring longleaf pine ecosystems across the tree’s original range. In Ly’s experience, walking through the Green Swamp is like stepping back in time to a less anthropogenically influenced landscape. Longleaf pine stands are naturally open and were historically maintained by low-intensity natural fires often sparked by lightning strikes.

In the early 1900s, forest management policies changed, ushering in an era of fire suppression. This altered longleaf pine ecosystems and put people and infrastructure in danger of larger, uncontrolled wildfires fueled by newly dense understories.

Now, prescribed fire is once again an important part of longleaf pine management. The conservancy performs controlled burns on regular intervals of three to five years to mimic natural fire regimes.

“Preserving longleaf pine is not just about the tree, it’s about the ecosystem,” Ly explained.

The controlled burns knock back any hardwood trees that have taken root and open the understory, so Venus flytraps, orchids, and other native flora can get the sunlight they need to flourish. These burns are also great for birds and other wildlife that thrive in longleaf ecosystems.

‘An iconic plant’

The conservancy’s website notes the preserve is closed to the public through Aug. 31 as it upgrades the trail, including building a new boardwalk. Don’t let that stop you from planning a trip to visit this fall, though – seeing Venus flytraps in the wild can be a special experience.

“This is such an iconic plant, and there’s just no other place in the world you can see this plant in the wild except here in the Carolinas,” explained botanist and author Scott Zona, who took his first trip to the Green Swamp earlier this year. Zona manages North Carolina State University’s North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox and has an appointment at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Herbarium.

Wild Venus flytraps are only found within about a 75-mile radius of Wilmington.

Venus flytraps catch their prey using special leaves with sensitive hairs called trigger hairs. Once the hairs sense that an insect has landed on the trap, it snaps shut in less than a second. Any further movement of the prey causes the trap to stay clamped tightly shut as it digests the unlucky passerby. If some nonprey item, like a stick, falls onto the trap, it will slowly open back up for the item to be blown away or fall off.

Venus flytraps also have special reproductive adaptations. While their leaves and stems are low to the ground, their white flowers grow on tall stalks stretching about 8 to 12 inches into the air to keep the insects that pollinate them from becoming lunch.   

Zona’s initial visit to the Green Swamp and seeing Venus flytraps in the wild for the first time did not disappoint: “To me, it’s right up there with the first time I went to the Muir Woods in California and saw redwood trees.”

That may be high praise coming from a man who has traveled around the world studying plant ecology and evolution and has a species of palm named after him.

Zona’s colleagues from the United Kingdom, who visited with him, also enjoyed the experience.

“Both of them are very well-respected, well-known botanists who travel the world, and they were just as excited to see these plants as I was,” he said. 

Myriad other fascinating plants also inhabit the Green Swamp. Its purple pitcher plants lack the umbrella-like leaf “hoods” that other pitcher plants have. The preserve also is home to bladderworts, extremely unassuming plants with tiny sacs used to catch prey. Bladderworts are the fastest carnivorous plants in the world, able to trap and eat their prey in less than a millisecond. And the noncarnivorous plants are worth a close look, as well.

“If you’ve never seen native orchids out in the wild, they’re so beautiful and so unique, they’re much different than the ones you see in the grocery store,” Ly said.

While the area’s nutrient-poor and often waterlogged soil might not sound like a great place to be a plant, according to Zona, those are great conditions for Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants. During the winter they go dormant; in the spring, they revive, unfurling new green leaves. Their diet of insects is an adaptation that helps them make up for the lack of nutrients in the soil.

A 2020 study of the Venus flytrap genome found that the genes associated with flytrap “traps” — the leaves that snap shut on prey — came from copies of genes found in their ancestors’ roots.

The Green Swamp is not only a botanist’s dream, but also a fantastic day trip destination for any nature enthusiast. Zona has just one regret from his trip to the Green Swamp: “We did not have the foresight to pack a lunch with us,” he said. “If we had packed lunch, we could have stayed there even longer.”

Beaufort’s historic Front Street is a bustling hub for local businesses, and strolling around the area is a must-do for tourists. But all this activity is disrupted when the town experiences flooding.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this has been happening more frequently over the past 20 years and will become increasingly common as sea levels continue to rise.

Thoroughly understanding flood dynamics is important for protecting people and property along the North Carolina coast.

A new study from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University researchers, led by former UNC Institute for the Environment researcher Adam Gold, has illuminated a hidden aspect of flooding not captured by NOAA’s flood observations. Gold currently is with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.

The researchers, who work together on the Sunny Day Flooding Project, used Beaufort’s Front Street as a case study to test a new, real-time sensor framework for detecting and measuring coastal flooding.

NOAA flood observations are based on data from tide gauges, which measure changes in water levels due to the tides, storm surge and river flow. But, the researchers found, they don’t capture flooding caused by rainfall, which accounted for 25% of the 24 flood events they observed in Beaufort during the five-month study period from June to November 2021.

These new measurements of rainfall-induced flooding begin to fill an important gap in flood records.

“It’s kind of an insidious problem,” Gold said. Because downtown Beaufort is so developed, rain can’t soak into the ground, and it runs into the underground drainage system instead.

“Ideally that would flow out to the sound or to Taylors Creek,” Gold explained. “But what we’re seeing is with these higher water levels in the tidal creek, that water is creeping up into the stormwater network.”

The drainage system eventually fills and water spills out onto streets and sidewalks.

“That’s the exact kind of flooding that future projections of coastal flooding don’t take into account,” Gold said.

This type of flooding, caused by the combined effect of sea level rise and rainfall, is called compound flooding. Colloquially, it is known as rainy-day flooding. Its counterpart, sunny-day flooding, occurs during exceptionally high tides in the absence of precipitation. Sunny-day flooding accounted for the remaining 75% of floods during the study period.

“Compound flooding is important to measure because flooding frequency is increasing with local sea level rise combined with heavy precipitation events,” said Molly Bost, an estuarine research scientist on contract with NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Science Coastal Resilience, Restoration, and Assessment Branch in Beaufort and who was not involved with the research.

In addition to increasing scientific understanding of compound flooding in Beaufort, another benefit of the sensor framework the Sunny Day Flooding Project researchers developed is that it is linked to a publicly accessible web app. This means anyone with an internet connection can access the camera to see water levels on Front Street in real time. Headed to New Bern, Down East Carteret County, or Carolina Beach? Additional cameras extend the app’s reach to thoroughfares there, as well.

Bost said having real-time data and flood cameras can help mitigate risk. “Compound floods make roads impassable, hindering day-to-day operations across many industries at the coast,” she explained while pointing out that chronic flooding also degrades infrastructure.

The root cause of all this flooding — whether it occurs on sunny or rainy days — is sea level rise. Even on sunny days, during high tide, water can spill out onto roadways through stormwater drainage systems. The problem is magnified on rainy days. And it will only get worse: a 2022 report led by NOAA predicts sea levels along U.S. coasts will rise, on average, by 10-12 inches over the next 30 years.

Both Gold and Bost said quantifying the frequency and severity of compound flooding will help communities better adapt to sea level rise. Flooding can be hyperlocal depending on an area’s vegetation cover, distance to water bodies, topography, and even winds.

The sensor framework the Sunny Day Flooding Project team describes in their study published March 27, which is relatively inexpensive at just $650 for a pressure logger, subaerial camera and communications equipment, could be deployed elsewhere around Beaufort and other communities to see which locations are most susceptible to compound flooding.

This information could then inform adaptation planning. For example, on a street vulnerable to rainy day flooding, one-way valves in the stormwater drainage system are likely a better solution than higher sand dunes or waterfront bulkheads.

As towns up and down the North Carolina coast grapple with how they will adapt to flooding, one thing individuals can do is sign up for flood alerts through the Sunny Day Flooding Project’s web app. The system is still preliminary, but anyone can sign up to get an email when the sensor network detects likely flooding. 

Dr. Andy Read’s first encounter with a whale was, in his words, “the most gross, disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”

He was a college student who had just landed a job with the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, putting together the skeleton of a beached fin whale that couldn’t be saved.

The catch? The center’s team hadn’t been able to fully clean the skeleton before they brought it back from Nova Scotia, and it was buried somewhere in Toronto until they had the time to finish the process – that was Read’s job. “I almost quit the first day,” he said.

It’s a good thing he didn’t. Read’s close encounter with that whale skeleton fascinated him and was the beginning of a prolific career. Now the Stephen A. Toth Professor of marine biology at Duke University and director of the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, Read studies the ecology and conservation of whales and other marine mammals.

Read’s move to North Carolina was a geographic stroke of luck. After completing his doctorate at the University of Guelph in Ontario, where he studied harbor porpoises in the Bay of Fundy, he took a postdoctoral position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

During that time, he met his wife, Kim Urian, who was working at the Mote Marine Lab in Florida. The distance was a challenge, and the pair agreed to settle down somewhere in the middle. Read started at Duke in 1995.

North Carolina has been the perfect place for Read to pursue his research and conservation work. “It’s just a great place to do what I do. We have lots of access to marine mammals and sea turtles here,” he explained.

The diversity of animals he encounters in his research is a big perk, and another geographic stroke of luck: North Carolina sits at the confluence of the tropical Gulf Stream and the boreal Labrador Current. This brings a huge diversity of animals to our waters, which host 36 species of marine mammals and five of the six species of sea turtles found in the United States.

Navy sonar study

Read is currently leading U.S. Navy-funded research on one of these 36 marine mammal species, the Cuvier’s beaked whale, also known as the goose-beaked whale, off the coast of Cape Hatteras. His team is working to understand how and why the midfrequency active sonar the Navy uses to detect small submarines affects the behavior of these whales. Cape Hatteras is a great place for this study because it has a high density of beaked whales and a relatively low level of Navy training activity. 

Cuvier’s beaked whales are both the deepest-diving mammal in the world and the mammal capable of staying underwater the longest. They use their exceptional abilities for hunting — according to Read, they forage at an average depth of about 1,500 meters, or close to a mile, but they can descend to depths twice that.

In 2020, a team of researchers including Read recorded a Cuvier’s beaked whale dive that lasted 222 minutes – over three and a half hours. “It’s like running a 5K, taking a breath when the starting gun goes off, and you don’t take another breath until the end of the race,” said Read. “Which is just … How does a mammal do that? They shouldn’t be able to!”

Unfortunately, midfrequency active sonar alters these impressive diving behaviors. Cuvier’s beaked whales that hear the sonar tend to surface very quickly, interrupting their hunting and putting them in physiological danger from decompression sickness. Read and his team think this is because the sonar sounds like killer whale calls. Killer whales are the only natural predators of Cuvier’s beaked whales. They don’t usually dive very deep, which must make hearing their calls thousands of meters below the surface extra disconcerting for the Cuvier’s beaked whales.

“When they’re foraging … where they should be safe from killer whales, all of the sudden they hear the sounds of their predators, and they panic,” Read said. The team’s most recent experiment took place with the help of the USS Farragut, a Navy destroyer, in August 2022. They hope to continue their work until at least 2025.

Read and his students are also studying the ecology of short-fin pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins off Cape Hatteras. He’s also been involved in marine mammal studies all over the world, including a project on humpback whales in Antarctica. “But now that I’m director of the (Duke Marine) lab here, it’s hard to get away for a couple months every winter” to do that research, he said.

It’s not just the director’s job that keeps him busy. Read has also recently been appointed by President Biden as one of three commissioners of the federal Marine Mammal Commission.

The commission was established in 1972 as part of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It is charged with oversight of all marine mammal research and conservation initiatives in the country, most of which are performed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

While Read had previously served on the commission’s committee of scientific advisers from 2003-2008, this is the first time he has been confirmed by the Senate as commissioner. He was also nominated by President Obama, but never confirmed.

One of the commission’s species of concern – and a personal one for Read as well – is the North Atlantic right whale. “The population is declining, we have fewer than 400 whales left, fewer than 70 adult female whales,” he said.

North Carolina is an important migratory corridor for the species. North Atlantic right whales travel yearly between their feeding grounds in New England and Canada and their breeding grounds off the coast of Georgia and eastern Florida.

One major threat to right whales is entanglement in fishing gear. Ship strikes are another, and are particularly relevant in North Carolina. There are already seasonal restrictions on large ships coming into North Carolina ports in Morehead City and Wilmington. Those restrictions may soon affect smaller ships as well, if changes proposed by NOAA Fisheries to the existing right whale vessel speed rule go through.

“It’s seasonal, so it’s only from November through April. But we have a big bluefin tuna fishery here in some years … We’re very interested to see what NOAA Fisheries decides to do with that rule. That’ll have an impact here locally,” Read explained.

A necessary challenge

Balancing conservation and industry is a necessary challenge, and one Read readily takes on.

Early in his career he helped develop and test small pinging alarms to warn dolphins and porpoises away from gillnets. These pingers are now used by fishers around the world, and when used properly they can reduce bycatch of porpoises by about 90%.

“I think that’s the thing, probably, I’m most proud of, and working directly with fishermen has been challenging, but it can also be very rewarding,” Read, who speaks admirably about the ingenuity of the fishers he has worked with throughout the years. said.

Fisheries and coastal management can be a complex but critical undertaking, particularly when there are endangered species like right whales plying the waters. After decades in the field, Read remains hopeful that society can figure out some of these pressing conservation issues.

“We are industrializing the coastal ocean. But we have so many resources in this country and such good legislative frameworks through the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act,” he explained. However, simply having those frameworks is not enough – we also need the political will to find a way to coexist with marine mammals, he stressed.

So how can the average North Carolinian help on a daily basis? According to Read, figure out where the shrimp, tuna and other seafood you eat comes from, and seek out seafood that’s harvested in a way that has a “gentle, light touch on the environment.”

Despite our state’s abundant marine resources, much of the seafood we eat still isn’t locally or sustainably harvested. Consumers’ small changes could make a big difference for marine ecosystems and local fishers alike. “It’s worth a little investment. We should all think about where our food comes from,” said Read.