The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center is rolling out this week a new speaker series that delves into the relationship between people and place.

A similar format to its annual Parlor Talks offered every Thursday afternoon in the summer, the “Water/Ways” speaker series set to launch at 2 p.m. Wednesday at the museum on Harkers Island is an extension of the Smithsonian’s traveling “Water/Ways” exhibit on display until Aug. 9.

The exhibit “explores the centrality of water in our lives including its effect on the environment and climate, it’s practical role in agriculture and economic planning, and its impact on culture and spirituality,” organizers said.

Geoffrey Adair, an area historian from Beaufort, is to give the first talk this week on waterfowling traditions. Other topics for the series include water and the arts with Connie Mason July 8, water and a changing coast with Dr. Reide Corbett July 15, water as recreation with Frank Tursi July 22, and water as a way of life with Wayne Davis and Staci Davis Basden July 29.

The museum began its fifth year of Parlor Talks, which focus on the history, heritage and the research taking place in Carteret County, earlier this month.

Next on the schedule is Dr. Nathan Hall who will focus on “Our Amazing Seagrass.”

Hall is a research assistant professor and director of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute for the Environment’s Morehead City Field Site at UNC Institute of Marine Sciences. His primary research focuses on understanding the factors that control microalgal biomass and community composition in lakes, rivers, and estuaries.

His talk Thursday afternoon will highlight why seagrass matters and why it need lots of light, what factors determine how much light reaches the seagrasses, and why scientists are worried about the current state of seagrass. Hall plans to wrap the talk up with what data exists on water quality where there are seagrass beds, and new efforts led by the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership to improve understanding of water quality.

Parlor Talks summer schedule:

• July 9: “The Wit & Wisdom of Ordinary People of Harkers Island” with Joel Hancock.
• July 16: “Opening Season for the Krakens” with Carteret Community College.
• July 23: “Everyone Has a Story” with Wayne and Staci Davis.
• July 30: The Atlantic Hotels of Morehead City with Geoffrey Adair.
• Aug. 6: Cape Lookout Foundation’s restoration of the U.S. Coast Guard Station with Bud Doughton, Mason Williams and Garry Brown.
• Aug. 13: “Coastal Heroes: An Old Newsman Looks Back at Those Who Fought to Make a Difference” with Frank Tursi.
• Aug. 20: “Growing Up in the Promise Land and the Inevitable Changes” with Promise Land friends.
• Aug. 27: “100 Years of Shark Research off Cape Lookout” with Dr. Joel Fodrie, who is moving from his role as UNC-IMS director to director of Duke University Marine Lab.
• Sept. 3: “Songs & Stories We Love the Best” with Connie Mason

Dr. Joel Fodrie has been named the new director of Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort.

Most recently director of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, Fodrie will succeed outgoing director Andy Read, who was in the leadership role for 10 years and will remain on the faculty once Fodrie comes aboard, Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment said Wednesday.

“The Duke Marine Lab is a gold standard among centers of coastal and marine research, both in the social sciences and the natural sciences. Its coastal setting is ideal for exploring how humans and natural systems affect one another. I’m very excited about working with the faculty, staff and students to support, and even enhance, place-based research and teaching that has local and far-reaching impacts,” Fodrie said in a statement.

Fodrie will join later this summer the lab that “has centered on field-based discovery, immersive learning and close mentorship” for nearly nine decades, the university said.

“As director, Joel will build on Andy’s legacy and further strengthen strategic connections between Beaufort and Durham while guiding the Marine Lab’s next chapter as a world-class leader in marine science and research,” said Lori Bennear, Stanback Dean of the Nicholas School.

Fodrie earned his bachelor’s degree in biology and history from UNC Chapel Hill, and his doctorate in biological oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego.

His research focuses on coastal and estuarine ecosystems, fisheries ecology and the resilience of marine communities and his scholarship includes more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and extensive external grant support.

“Joel has the research, academic and leadership expertise we were looking for in a director. But beyond that, he brings a reputation as a trusted community partner deeply appreciative of and knowledgeable about North Carolina coastal ecosystems,” said Erika Weinthal, the Nicholas School’s John O. Blackburn Distinguished Professor, who chaired the Marine Lab director search committee

Among various honors, Fodrie received recognition as an Early-Career Research Fellow with the Gulf Research Program, part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. In 2024, he was named one of five recipients of the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair in Public Policy, a five-year term professorship to recognize and honor outstanding teachers and scholars.

“On a personal level, I grew up in Beaufort, North Carolina, and have known about the significance of the Marine Lab essentially my whole life,” Fodrie said. “I certainly view this as a one-of-a-kind opportunity to help shape the direction and impact of the Lab to ensure wise and sustainable use of our coastal and marine ecosystems.”

Annie Harshbarger had been interested in animal behavior ever since she was young. Now, as a doctoral candidate at Duke University’s Marine Lab, she is currently building her thesis on decision-making in pilot whale social groups.

“I sort of knew when I started college that I wanted to study the behavior of whales and dolphins,” Harshbarger said. “The way that they navigate this really challenging environment that they’ve evolved to live in is very interesting.”

Harshbarger spoke about the way we can see this in the behaviors of whales off the coast of Cape Hatteras. She said in a talk at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences that the behavior of pilot whales in that area demonstrates this flexibility. “They’re generalist foragers, so they can eat a lot of different things, so that means they can live in a lot of different habitats, and their behavior varies with what they live and what they’re eating.”

Pilot whales’ flexibility is tempered by the needs of their social groups, however. Unlike other whale species, they stay with the same group of whales for their entire lives (with occasional exceptions of males who join other groups to mate). When pilot whales dive for food, they do so together. Harshbarger is studying how those groups make decisions at different points throughout this process — a question without a lot of known answers, as of now.

New technology brings new information

One of the tools Harshbarger is using for her thesis is data gathered from digital acoustic recording tags, or DTAGs. These tracking tags can capture whale movement in three dimensions, painting a much more holistic picture of their behavior, and as the name implies, they record sound as well as movement. The technology was initially developed in 2003 by Mark Johnson and Peter Tyack in order to better understand the ways in which human-made noise pollution potentially affects the behavior of whales and dolphins.

“They were designed to study the effects of anthropogenic noise. We didn’t have the tools to understand the ways that noise pollution affects marine life. Peter and Mark came up with the tags to tackle that,” said Dr. Andy Read, director of the Duke Marine Lab and Harshbarger’s academic adviser.

Now this technology is being used to paint a fuller picture of what pilot whales are doing beneath the ocean’s surface. Harshbarger explained that the acoustic tags not only captured sound, but depth and movement in three dimensions. This allows researchers to study specific details about the whales’ diving behavior. Harshbarger is particularly interested in this data because of her focus on how pilot whales decide as a group when and where to look for food.

The information shows that pilot whales usually stick together throughout the entirety of their dives. It was originally hypothesized that while hunting, pilot whales would stay far enough apart from one another so as to avoid competition while also staying close enough that they could still hear each other.

To test this, researchers used information gathered from the acoustic tags. Because the tags have special hydrophones attached, they are able to record the sounds in such a way that they can gain an approximation of each whale’s position relative to the others.

“We can really understand how the group is foraging separately and together like we never have before,” Harshbarger said.

Tackling the big questions

One of the great unknowns with pilot whale behavior has to do with their decision-making processes. They are flexible animals who eat a wide variety of food found in many different environments. So how do they decide when and where to eat? Because pilot whale populations around the world are so large and varied, it can be difficult to track any one group consistently enough to determine the specifics of their behavior.

This is the question that Harshbarger is trying to help answer. “I found that decision-making process really interesting. So I’m studying how groups of pilot whales make decisions at different points in the dive cycle,” she said. Harshbarger compared it to a large family or group of friends trying to decide where to go for dinner. There are a number of options, and it can be difficult to make a decision for a big group of people. The same rule applies to pilot whales.

Harshbarger hopes that her research will begin to tackle these questions. Data gathered from the tagging of the Gibraltar whales has already answered some of them. By examining the audio and movement information gathered from the acoustic tags, researchers have learned that pilot whales not only dive together, but they usually forage for food at the same depths as well, even though there isn’t currently any evidence of them sharing prey.

The question of how pilot whales make decisions as a group remains mostly unanswered. Large populations and limited technology makes tracking them difficult in the long term. Acoustic tags stay on the whales’ bodies for around 24 hours maximum, so information is still limited.

“I think Annie’s work is probably going to leave us with a lot more questions. The potential conflicts between animals in groups is a really interesting idea. But Annie’s going to address the first, fundamental questions,” Read said.

Harshbarger said she believes in the value of studying and understanding these whales’ habits and behaviors, even if they are not currently endangered. There have been instances where local populations have suffered declines due to disease, and those populations’ behaviors changed as a result. Researchers were only able to notice that change because they had been observing the population beforehand.

“I think that’s kind of why I’m really interested in this, even for pilot whales, which are not necessarily something that people think of as the species with the most pressing conservation needs,” Harshbarger said. “That’s why I think it’s valuable to understand social behavior in any species, because you know that could change for them at any time.”

A team has scheduled two discussions for later this month to hear from Ocracoke residents their thoughts on the challenges associated with changes to the physical environment the island is likely to experience.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, Duke University and East Carolina University researchers have already completed a multiyear research project that simulates how the physical landscape such as beaches, shoreline, dunes and marshes of Ocracoke Island may change in the future because of road management decisions.

The team now is looking to hear from residents their perspective on meeting these challenges, particularly to transportation and accessing the island.

Sessions are scheduled for 1-3 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30, and 10 a.m.-noon Saturday, Jan. 31, at the Ocracoke Community Center. Reserve a spot to join the discussion. Participants must be an adult residing in Ocracoke.

“We’re conducting community deliberative dialogues to better understand your unique perspective about the challenges Ocracoke faces due to increasing environmental hazards,” researchers said. The two “events are a part of a research study to gain a better understanding of how communities demonstrate scientific literacy, within the context of coastal resilience issues and solutions.”

A deliberative dialogue is a structured discussion, moderated to help foster open conversations and provide an opportunity to share and hear different perspectives.

K.C. Busch, who can be reached at kbusch@ncsu.edu, is leading the study titled, “Redefining Scientific Literacy At The Community Level.”

Reprinted from North Carolina Health News

Though the holiday season is here — with all the responsibilities it entails — some North Carolinians might consider adding one more thing to their to-do lists: weighing in on an EPA proposal that could reshape how the government collects information about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. The agency is taking input during the public comment period, which is open now and closes on Dec. 29.

On Nov. 10, the EPA announced a proposal to loosen reporting requirements for businesses that make or use PFAS. Agency officials say the changes are intended to make the rules easier for companies to follow and to avoid duplicate or unnecessary paperwork, while still allowing EPA to collect key information about how PFAS are used and what risks they may pose.

Currently PFAS are regulated under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a federal law that allows the EPA to require businesses to report, test, track or even ban chemicals that may threaten human health or the environment.

In October 2023, the Biden administration’s EPA finalized a one-time PFAS reporting rule under TSCA’s Section 8. The rule requires companies that manufactured or imported PFAS between 2011 and 2022 to disclose how the chemicals were used and provide available environmental or health data. Industry groups have pushed back, saying the rule is too costly and difficult for small businesses to navigate.

“This Biden-era rule would have imposed crushing regulatory burdens and nearly $1 billion in implementation costs on American businesses,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said when announcing the proposed changes. “Today’s proposal is grounded in common sense and the law, allowing us to collect the information we need to help combat PFAS contamination without placing ridiculous requirements on manufacturers, especially the small businesses that drive our country’s economy.”

But environmental advocates and clean water managers say the proposal would significantly weaken PFAS oversight.

“By EPA’s own estimate, the proposed rule would eliminate more than 97 percent of the information that would have otherwise been generated by the (current) rule,” said Stephanie Schweickert, NC Conservation Network’s director of Environmental Health Campaigns.

“With PFAS and Chemours in North Carolina, we really need more information about PFAS, not less. This (proposal) is very problematic for public health in North Carolina,” Schweickert said. 

Harder-to-detect PFAS raise new concerns

The proposal comes when North Carolina researchers are uncovering PFAS pollution that standard monitoring can’t detect — raising new questions about whether EPA already has blind spots.

Recent Duke University research uncovered a previously unrecognized source of contamination in the Haw River, a tributary of the Cape Fear River: tiny solid PFAS “precursor” particles in industrial wastewater from a Burlington textile manufacturer that entered the local sewer system. These nanoparticles don’t show up in standard PFAS tests, which typically look for dissolved chemicals. But during wastewater treatment processes, the particles break down into better-known PFAS compounds that can contaminate rivers, drinking water sources and agricultural sludge.

At peak discharge, researchers detected precursor-particle levels exceeding 12 million parts per trillion — millions of times higher than EPA’s enforceable drinking-water limits of 4-10 ppt for regulated PFAS. The findings highlight major blind spots in current monitoring and suggest that industries may be releasing far more PFAS (or PFAS precursors) than regulators currently can detect.

“We have some of the most sophisticated instruments in the world for PFAS analysis, and we couldn’t detect these until we dramatically changed our approach,” said lead researcher Lee Ferguson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke, in a release. “Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know, and there is a lesson to be learned about blind spots in our analyses when it comes to looking for new PFAS in the environment.”

In a follow-up email, Ferguson said the findings show why PFAS disclosure rules should be strengthened, not rolled back. “Our work highlights why it is important to increase, not decrease, PFAS waste discharge reporting requirements for industries.”

Downstream utilities feel the impact

A public utility that relies on the Cape Fear River, echoed Ferguson’s concerns.

The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, which provides drinking water to more than 200,000 customers in New Hanover County and spent $43 million installing a granular activated carbon filtration system in 2022 to remove PFAS, said weakened reporting would make their job harder.

“We are concerned that these (proposed) exemptions could create additional uncertainty for utilities, such as CFPUA, that are located downstream from known PFAS polluters,” the agency said.

“Utilities rely upon detailed, accurate data from potential and known contamination sources to inform our treatment processes in order to protect the drinking water we provide our customers,” the statement continued. “Rolling back reporting requirements for PFAS manufacturers passes more of the burden of monitoring and testing source water on to utilities and our ratepayers.”

Advocates say the stakes extend beyond utilities.

“The EPA is carving out loopholes under the Toxic Substances Control Act that allow industry to avoid reporting its use of PFAS — current forever chemicals that pose serious risks to people’s health,” a Southern Environmental Law Center spokesperson said in an emailed statement to NC Health News. 

“These exemptions include PFAS produced as byproducts, the very issue at the heart of the Chemours crisis,” the SELC statement said. “For decades, Chemours discharged GenX as a byproduct before intentionally manufacturing it, yet the harm caused by byproduct PFAS is no different from that caused by intentionally produced PFAS. This reality devastated 500,000 North Carolinians who drank—and continue to drink—water contaminated by Chemours’ PFAS pollution, and it remains true for communities across the country today.”

Health risks tied to PFAS exposure

These gaps in monitoring matter because PFAS exposure has been associated with a growing list of health concerns. Often called “forever chemicals” because they break down slowly and accumulate in the body over time, PFAS have been linked to immune system suppression, developmental and reproductive harm, thyroid disruption, elevated cholesterol and certain cancers.

In North Carolina, the GenX Exposure Study has documented elevated PFAS levels in blood samples from people living near the Cape Fear River, along with health markers such as increased cholesterol and changes in liver enzymes that have been associated with PFAS exposure. Researchers say the findings underscore the risks for communities living downstream of industrial PFAS sources.

“Some PFAS are formed as byproducts of chemical manufacturing. These chemicals, even though they aren’t used to make new products, are released into air and water and have been found in the blood of people who rely on downstream drinking water,” said N.C. State University epidemiologist Jane Hoppin, when responding to questions about the new Duke research and the EPA’s proposal.

“In our research, PFMOAA was detected at the highest levels in blood samples collected more than a year before the contamination was publicly identified,” she said. “Other byproducts of PFAS — Nafion byproduct 2 and PFO5DoA — were found in nearly all Wilmington residents tested in 2017 and remain in people’s blood today. We need more, not less, information about chemical byproducts to ensure drinking water safety.”

“The mission of the EPA, in the beginning, was to protect the public and the environment,” said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University who’s widely regarded as the father of the environmental justice movement. “Anytime you’re relaxing rules that would not only threaten the environment but also compromise public health — that’s the wrong way to go.”

The public comment period is open through Dec. 29. To submit a comment, go to: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/EPA-HQ-OPPT-2020-0549-0311.

This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Plastic may be cheap to make and convenient to use, but it comes with a staggering economic cost to the United States — possibly more than $1 trillion a year — according to a new report.

The study, released Thursday, estimates that the economic cost of the life cycle of plastic – from how it’s made, to its conversion into products, to its use and disposal – ranges anywhere from $436 billion to $1.1 trillion annually.

That figure is likely a significant underestimate, according to Duke University researchers who authored the report.

“We, from the beginning, wanted to focus on the harms and costs of the entire plastic life cycle, not just focus on plastic pollution,” said Dr. Nancy Lauer, a co-author of the report and staff scientist and lecturing fellow with the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. “That was because there really is this entire life of plastic product that has now-well-documented harms at every single stage that we are paying for. It was important for us to make those harms and those costs more transparent to consumers so that they understand this is not just a problem when plastic escapes into the environment and becomes litter or marine debris.”

The team of researchers was able to explore this concept after the university in 2023 awarded it a small grant. That grant led the researchers to host a workshop in early 2024 that brought together experts from across different fields with experience in analyzing the social costs of plastic from its production to its disposal.

Those experts were given a list of studies examining economic costs associated with plastic’s life cycle compiled and initially reviewed by a team of graduate students. The experts then advised researchers on what categories of studies were missing from that list and whether there was additional research that could be examined.

In the end, researchers reviewed 13 existing studies focusing on plastic’s harms and costs on the environment, human health, and the economy.

The report breaks down the economic impacts of plastics by several categories, from greenhouse gas emissions associated with plastic production to human health effects.

The largest cost, by far, is human exposure to toxic chemicals in plastics.

Researchers estimate that increased disease and mortality from plastics use is between $410 billion and $930 billion each year.

“These high costs are driven largely by the value of IQ loss and reduced productivity associated with exposure to plastic activities,” the report states.

Exposure to chemicals such as phthalates, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, bisphenol A, or BPA, and those found in flame retardants are linked to a host of adverse health outcomes, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, reproductive disorders and neurological damage.

Lauer explained that only within the last couple of years studies on the economic impacts of human health-associated harms from plastics use have “really taken off.”

“So that was certainly a category that we, in those initial searches and before the workshop, did not have as great of a handle on, but that research has just really continued to take off in these last two years or so,” she said.

And while studies of the economic effect on human health have come a long way, Lauer said there’s still a long way to go.

“The studies that we found document the harms and costs from exposure to just a tiny fraction of the chemicals that are in plastic. There’s thousands of chemicals in plastic, several of which have known health effects, and several of which we don’t know enough about to know if they have health effects,” she said.

There is also lack of research on the cumulative effects on human health from chemical mixtures in plastics.

“If we take in a plastic particle, we’re not just taking in one or two chemicals, we’re taking in that mixture of chemicals,” Lauer said. “How those chemicals interact together to spur health impacts, we don’t have a good sense of that at this time.”

The report highlights other research gaps, including economic costs associated with plastic recycling and incineration, the effect of plastic on property values, and the cost associated with loss of terrestrial environment.

“When plastics get into the environment, often our first thought is when it ends up as marine debris and the harms that it causes in the ocean, entangling animals and creating these great garbage patches that need to be cleaned up,” Laure said. “Plastics also impact the terrestrial environment. They get into streams and lakes, along our roadsides, and studies have documented that plastics also cause harm to terrestrial animals like invertebrates and freshwater fish. But, there’s not estimates in the literature for that loss of terrestrial ecosystem services in the same way that the literature has begun to document the cost of the loss of marine ecosystem services.”

According to the report, the estimated cost of the loss of marine ecosystem services ranges from $1.4 billion to $112 billion a year.

Other categories and estimated annual costs detailed in the report include the following:

• Greenhouse gas emissions produced from fossil fuel extraction and manufacturing: $6.4 billion to $15.9 billion.
• Increased disease and mortality from oil and gas extraction: $2.9 billion to $31.9 billion.
• Landfill disposal: $2.9 billion.
• Plastic litter cleanup: $9.8 billion to $13.3 billion.
• Loss of tourism: $2 billion.
• Damage to fisheries and aquaculture industry: $88 million.
• Damage to marine shipping: $909 million.

Lauer said that a motivation to make these costs more transparent to the consumer is to highlight that, though products we buy that are made of plastic tend to be relatively cheap, “that’s just the price we’re paying right there on the spot.”

“There’s so many other costs that we may not necessarily realize we’re paying when we use that plastic,” she said.

And while plastics are important for certain industries, including the medical industry, “we’re still using a lot of plastic in places that we don’t necessarily need to be,” Lauer said. “The patchwork of state and local laws on the books are important to reduce plastics on that local and state level, and they’re important to have proof of concept and build momentum towards something that is more comprehensive. But I think what that more comprehensive strategy needs to look like is really focusing on reducing plastics at the source, and that can be through phasing out needless plastics.”

An overwhelming majority of litter captured over the course of three years by in-stream traps set up in watersheds throughout the state was plastic waste, according to a recently published study.

About 96% of litter North Carolina waterkeeper organizations and their volunteers removed from trash traps between June 2021 and November 2024 consisted of plastics, said Dr. Nancy Lauer, lead author of the paper published in the journal Community Science.

“Plastic is lightweight, it’s buoyant, it floats easily,” Lauer, a staff scientist and lecturing fellow with the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, said in a recent telephone interview. “The plastic items, they can very well make their way through the stormwater system, through the stream and end up in the trash trap before they are ever going to biodegrade.”

During the course of the three-year study, 150,750 pieces of litter were removed from 21 traps.

The litter traps were funded through a 2020 North Carolina Environmental Enhancement Grant as part of a statewide microplastics research and pollution-prevention infrastructure project sponsored by Waterkeepers Carolina, a group of 15 licensed waterkeepers in the state.

By removing and documenting the litter that gets caught in the traps, waterkeeper organizations are able to get an understanding of the most prevalent types of litter entering North Carolina rivers. They are also able to look at correlations between litter accumulation and characteristics such as development, impervious surface, road density and human populations within different watersheds.

Using the data collected by those waterkeeper organizations, researchers can provide a big picture of riverine litter in the state and use that to shape policy.

For this study, seven waterkeeper organizations and their volunteers were tasked with separating and organizing the trash they removed from traps into categories.

Those categories included plastic film, hard plastic, polystyrene foam, metal, glass; and paper covering items, such as drink containers made of plastic, glass and metal, plastic straws and stirrers, cup lids, bottle caps and food wrappers.

Fragments of polystyrene foam from consumer products like Styrofoam cups, food takeout containers and packing materials were removed from all 21 traps in “very high” loads, Lauer said.

Those fragments and single-use plastic bottles made up about 83% of the litter that was collected and documented.

“If you do a cleanup of a roadside, you’re going to find a lot more plastic bags, a lot more food wrappers and we would find those occasionally,” Lauer said. “But I think that those just tend to snag on branches or get weighted down in the stream banks before they would ever be able to reach the trap. It was sort of eye opening to realize which of these plastic items, when they get into the environment, are extremely mobile. It seems like the trash traps are telling us that Styrofoam fragments and plastic bottles can really effectively be transported by surface waters downstream just because they made up such a large fraction of what we were finding in the traps.”

The paper is the latest to highlight single-use plastic pollution in the state.

A 14-page report published last March and created through a collaboration of nonprofits and the policy clinic concluded that state agencies, local governments and nonprofits spent more than $56 million in 2023 cleaning up more than 7,000 tons of litter.

Related: State’s fix for costly litter problem ‘not efficient or sufficient’

That same year, legislators injected language into the state budget prohibiting counties and cities from adopting rules, regulations, ordinances, or resolutions that restrict, tax, or charge fees on auxiliary containers.

The provision stopped locally elected officials in Asheville from voting on a proposed ban of single-use plastic bags and Styrofoam food containers. The law also barred local elected officials in Durham from deciding whether to require retailers tack on a 10-cent fee for each plastic bag given to customers in restaurants, grocery stores and shops.

That law “dealt a huge blow” to North Carolina, Lauer said.

The volume of single-use plastics removed from riverine traps clearly indicates that type of pollution is a huge issue in the state, she said

“I think what this data really highlights is that there’s still work that needs to be done and that work now, because of that preemption law, can’t necessarily be done on the local level in the same way that it could before,” Lauer said. “But there are state-level actions like banning Styrofoam, or a bottle bill that would incentivize people to return their bottles to receive a small deposit. Those could be really effective at reducing stream litter.”

She said it is important to keep in mind that there are types of litter that aren’t being captured in trash traps.

“These traps have a lot of positive aspects, but ideally we want to live in a world where we don’t need them because that trash is never ending up in our streams,” Lauer said. “I feel really strongly that there needs to be action by the corporations and the businesses and the government to stop these items from being provided in the first place. We go through life and you can make choices as an individual, but single-use plastics are still so prevalent that it can feel impossible to avoid them, no matter how hard you try.”

Plants on land are increasingly absorbing more carbon, while Earth’s oceans are taking in and storing less, according to a study released earlier this month.

The study published Aug. 1 in Nature Climate Change found a strong upward trend of global photosynthesis on land between 2003 and 2021.

That trend, however, is partially offset by a decline in photosynthesis occurring in oceans.

“At the global scale, if we put land and ocean together, it shows an enhanced photosynthesis, so that means, currently, our nature ecosystem is still showing an ability to absorb more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Yulong Zhang, a research scientist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and primary author of the study. “Overall, this is encouraging news.”

That’s because, as the climate is warming, the system of plants, animals and microorganisms that referred to as the land ecosystem, still functions as a potential carbon sink to offset the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, he said.

Plants on land and algae in oceans absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, a crucial process that uses sunlight to create the base of the food chain.

But, it should be noted, Zhang said, that photosynthesis is a driver of carbon cycles because the ecosystem, like humans, can breathe out CO2.

Scientists have largely studied the net primary production, or the rate at which plants and phytoplankton store energy and make it available to animals, by focusing their research on either the land or sea.

Zhang primarily focused his research on the land until this study, one that treats both the land and ocean as two components of one global system and how those parts, together, are responding to climate warming through photosynthesis.

To conduct their study, the team of researchers used sets of data collected from satellites and large-scale climate information to create models to try and simulate various environmental factors, such as air and water-surface temperature, light and precipitation.

Scientists then compared year-to-year fluctuations in photosynthesis with the long-term trends on land and, separately, in oceans. The research team included scientists with the University of Iowa, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, University of New Hampshire, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and U.S. Forest Service.

“We found that, globally, the photosynthesis on land showing a strong increasing trend in the past 18 years from 2003 to 2021,” Zhang said. “But, by contrast, the ocean just shows a weak, declining trend.”

The rate at which plants on land store energy and make it available to animals during that 18-year span increased 0.2 billion metric tons of carbon per year, except in the tropics of South America.

During that same time, marine net primary production declined by about 0.1 billion metric tons of carbon per year, with strong declines occurring largely in tropical and subtropical seas, especially in the Pacific Ocean.

The trends show that during those 18 years global net primary production increased at an overall rate of 0.1 billion metric tons of carbon per year.

The changing trend of the land and the ocean are not uniform at the regional scale.

In tropical seas, scientists have found a large-scale decline in photosynthesis.

That’s a worrying pattern, Zhang said, because that decline equates to a decrease in energy that is provided to fish.

“So, the fishery in the tropical ocean may show a decline and it may particularly have influence on the local fisheries and also the economics for the tropical countries,” he said.

What remains unanswered is the question of what happens if this trend continues. Will the decline our oceans’ ability to absorb carbon continue and, if so, how long can the land ecosystem potentially make up for the declines?

To get answers, that will require “us to do long-term, coordinated monitoring of both land and ocean ecosystems as integrated components of our Earth,” Zhang said.

Shades of color are deepening in ocean waters, where water is getting greener in the polar regions, and turning bluer at the equator. A change that could have an effect on fisheries, according to a newly released study.

The changing colors indicate that concentrations of chlorophyll in the blue waters of the tropics and subtropics are declining while simultaneously increasing in the green-colored ocean waters at the Earth’s poles, the authors explain in the paper published Thursday in Science journal.

Chlorophyll is the green pigment that give things like plants and algae their color. In the ocean, chlorophyll concentrations are a measure of phytoplankton, or microscopic plants that are the base of the ocean food chain and convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis.

“This is the first time that we say, okay, if we look at our ocean globally, we would say see, we have high chlorophyll concentration in the north high latitude, but we have low chlorophyll concentration in the subtropical and tropical region,” Dr. Haipeng Zhao said. Zhao is first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher who worked with Dr. Nicolas Cassar, a professor of biogeochemistry at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, and Dr. Susan Lozier, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech.

Why this is happening will take further investigation, as does how it may impact coastal fisheries.

For this study, researchers analyzed two decades’ worth of satellite data collected by a NASA instrument that scans the globe every two days.

The team focused on the open ocean.

“There’s still a lot of limitation by using satellite data to observe the coastal change of phytoplankton because, in the coastal border, the sediments, a lot of minerals, they just come to the surface of the ocean and that makes it difficult for the satellite to detect whether it’s the phytoplankton blooms or something else,” Zhao said. “But we think (these areas) are very important.”

More than half of the world’s fish catch comes from tropical and subtropical regions, according to the study. A significant amount of that catch comes from coastal fisheries within those regions.

“Although our study focuses on open ocean waters, any persistent changes in these areas could profoundly affect low- and middle-income nations, such as Pacific Island nations, that rely on fisheries for sustenance and economic development,” the study states. “Future investigations should focus on these regions to provide a more comprehensive understanding.”

The authors note that it will be particularly important to study how climate change may be affecting these changes.  

This study does not correlate the changes in chlorophyll concentrations with climate change.

The satellite records researchers analyzed go back no more than 20 to 25 years, Zhao said. That’s a relatively short amount of time in terms of changes in the ocean process.

Researchers looked at different variables, such as wind speed, water surface temperature, and sunlight, to see how those may be affecting the changes they noted in chlorophyll concentrations.

“But we did find that the water is getting warmer, which is widespread increase in the temperature in the global ocean,” he noted.

The global ocean is complicated to study, he said. It involves currents and the moving of a lot of materials, like sediments, through the water.

“I think we need to get a lot of support to continue the research,” Zhao said.

That will entail getting away from solely relying on satellite observation and physically traveling to the open ocean to collect more data, he said.

“That will increase our confidence and I think that will generate more evidence to support our conclusion,” Zhao said. “At least we have already observed and what has been striking to tell people is our oceans are changing and it has potential impacts to everywhere.”

With eyes roughly the size of softballs, it may stand to reason that one of the largest mammals on Earth should have exceptionally sharp vision.

Humpback whales have some of the biggest eyes of any animal on the planet, or the oceans in which they migrate thousands upon thousands of miles during their lives.

But their journeys through open seas are done with limited vision, according to a newly published study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Duke University.

These mammoth creatures have to be very close to an object in order to see it in fine detail, which explains why they are particularly vulnerable to getting tangled up in fishing gear.

“Humans have exceptionally high spatial resolution of vision by comparison to most animals,” said Dr. Lori Schweikert, an assistant professor of biology and marine biology at UNCW. “But what is surprising is the fact that whales have the structure of the eye to support even better vision, but they don’t have that.”

Using a specimen of a humpback whale eye archived more than a decade ago at UNCW’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program, researchers were able to measure a humpback whale’s vision at 3.95 cycles per degree, or CPD.

CPD measures the number of black-and-white line pairs that appear within 1 degree of space.

To grasp this measurement of sight, Schweikert gave this example: hold one arm straight out and put your thumb straight up. The width to your thumb is about 1 degree of your visual space. Human eyes can resolve about up to about 60 cycles per degree.

Most animals have low spatial resolution of vision. In animals, the larger the eye, the greater their spatial vision. But for humpback whales, “they are just way off the line,” Schweikert said. “Way off.”

What researchers found when they cut into the eye is that humpbacks have unusually thickened eye walls. Nearly half of the depth of the whale’s eye was filled with its own wall, shortening the distance from the center of the lens of the eye to the retina.

That distance is called focal length.

“The longer the focal length, the sharper the vision that’s possible,” Schweikert said.

Researchers also found that the cell density in humpback whale eye retina was exceptionally low. These cells send visual information to the brain.

Based on their calculation of 3.95 CPD, researchers then modeled how humpback whales might visually perceive things in their natural environment.

The reality is, their vision, or lack thereof, is suited to their environment.

Humpbacks prey on huge bait balls of fish or krill that silhouette against an open light field, or light that is projected directly into a space without being redirected. They have few predators – mainly orcas, or killer whales, false killer whales, and large sharks, particularly great whites. And, when a humpback whale searches for a mate, it can see a potential love match well enough from a distance.

So, humpbacks did not need to evolve with the ability to see fine-scale things, Schweikert said.

Where a humpback whales’ sight gets it into trouble, she said, is when it comes across a structure in the ocean that has more visual fine-scale information, such as a net or gillnet. One of the leading causes of humpback whale deaths is entanglement in fishing gear.

“In our modeling of how they might be able to resolve this detail in the environment is that, at roughly three to four body lengths away would be where they might be able to start resolving the structure of the net. Based on swimming speed, that only leaves them a few seconds to get out of the way,” Schweikert said.

This helps explain why humpback whales get entangled as frequently as they do.

Humpback whales live in every ocean on the planet. They have one of the longest migrations, with some populations swimming up to 5,000 miles, of any mammal on the planet.

In additional to entanglements, vessel strikes are also a leading cause of humpback whale deaths.

To figure out ways to try and mitigate such human impacts to humpback whale, more studies will need to occur.

“I think that understanding how animals will interact with things in their environment is certainly more complicated that any one study or even a mix of studies that would take in all their sensory abilities to detect what’s in their environment,” Schweikert said. “It’s one thing to know if an animal can see it, but it’s totally another thing to know how they will respond. It’s quite possible that they can see some of the threats in their environment, but behaviorally, they are just not making the decision early enough to move out of the way.”

This study could be considered in the larger puzzle of those types of considerations, she said.

Two University of North Carolina Wilmington professors are collaborating this semester on a documentary celebrating community resilience, adding a new perspective to the overall effort of the Down East Resilience Network.

The network, often referred to as DERN, evolved in the years after Hurricane Florence ravaged coastal North Carolina in September 2018. It’s a project of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, which was hit particularly hard by the slow-moving Category 1 storm.

Museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher coordinated the network of government agencies, researchers, residents and nonprofit organizations.

The idea was to connect similar and overlapping research on flooding, saltwater intrusion, infrastructure damage and other risks associated with rising sea levels in the 13 Carteret County communities, and to offer resources to navigate the changes.

“Our DERN partners continue to work in the Down East area with mapping projects, continued flood monitoring, along with journalism and documentary students during spring semester and the 2025 class of interns this summer,” Amspacher told Coastal Review.

The network holds meetings a few times a year to discuss the research and projects that are carried out year-round. The most recent gathering was in late January on Harkers Island.

UNCW’s Jennifer Biddle, associate professor of environmental policy, and Laura Dunn, film studies professor, attended the Jan. 31 meeting — their first.

Biddle told Coastal Review that she and Dunn attended the meeting to identify how they “could plug in,” and after listening to the research and types of projects, she really appreciated the intention of the network, “to help the local people and local communities adapt to all these changes.”

The next morning, during a roundtable discussion, Biddle and Dunn recognized that their original plan to use a short documentary to help raise awareness had been done.

So, they worked with Amspacher on finding a new perspective, to identify what was missing, “and what was missing is the voice of the future — younger people’s voices. What have they heard and learned from the elders that they want to carry forward? And how do they do that in a changing political and economic society, as well as a changing landscape?”

The documentary became about the community’s resilience. It has “weathered a whole lot of big storms. This is just another big storm,” Biddle said.

The spent February organizing the trip then headed to Down East March 3-7 to film interviews. They stayed in a vacation rental on Harkers Island, where it “was so amazing was to be immersed in the community,” and the week provided a chance for the students to bond and meet people, Biddle said.

The 10 students divvied up into three teams. “We affectionately called them Nature, Culture and Resilience,” Biddle said.

The Resilience crew focused on what’s happening in the area, and how the people are resilient, with a focus on the Core Sound museum.

“The museum itself is a kind of hub of social activity,” Biddle said, adding that one morning there they had seen preschoolers learn about commercial and recreational fishing.

While observing a high school shop class build a skiff, Biddle said they asked the students what they saw for themselves for the future.

“They all had an answer. A lot of it was things they wanted to do, but maybe couldn’t do full time, like shrimping and building boats, because there wasn’t a lot of money there.”

Some said they wanted to work at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point and shrimp in the summers, or be a chef and build boats on the side. “They had these cool, but very realistic plans in terms of how they could make a livelihood,” she said.

On the Nature crew’s first day filming, Biddle said they stumbled upon an oyster farmer who had just pulled in bushels of oysters. He explained how he had grown the oysters, and then opened up a few. “We all got to cheers over half-shells that were really delicious.”

Residents and transportation officials talked to the students about the status of the roads, and a scientist gave an interview about visible signs of change, such as ghost forests and marsh migration, Biddle added.

The students met a father-son team and mother-daughter team of decoy carvers. Witnessing the “passing on of these beautiful traditions and the bonds it builds was really touching.”

Biddle said she joined the Culture crew for an interview with a shrimper and his daughter. The old-timer had described how his kin dated back to the 1700s in Carteret County and are a multigeneration commercial fishing family.

“What was really cool, especially for my policy students to hear, was he described how they self-regulated,” Biddle said. “Up until the ’80s, they were self-regulating their catches” by being assigned a night to catch certain fish, and the fish houses would only buy so much.

The man’s daughter had spoken “eloquently but passionately about her love of gigging flounder and how she would go out at night with her sister to spend time together and how impactful the moratorium” on flounder fishing has been, Biddle said. The state has limited or canceled flounder season altogether over the last few years because of overfishing and being overfished.

Seeing how policy affects people is why she takes students out in the field, to witness how rules can have unintended consequences, especially to those being the most impacted, she said.

Coastal and ocean policy graduate student Kennedy Huntsman is part of the documentary team who visited Down East. She said that policy and documentary film “share intrinsic goals.”

They “both serve as powerful tools for translating complex issues, like science, into accessible and meaningful information for the public. But effective science communication requires a deep understanding of the intended audience. Too often, the communities most impacted by these issues are left out of the conversation, their perspectives overlooked,” she said.

Being able to put this into practice Down East “was an invaluable experience, one that simply couldn’t be replicated in a classroom,” Huntsman said.

Abigail Schindler, a senior in the film studies department, said her favorite moment Down East was the boat ride on the last day of filming.

“This was a truly unique and impressive group of people who love the place they live,” she said, adding they had seen the wild horses, “which was such a cool experience.”

Her biggest takeaway from the experience was understanding why the people Down East love their home so much.

“It’s not just about one thing — family, nature, tradition — it’s everything combined about the place. I heard the phrase ‘why would I want to live anywhere else’ several times and by my last day I finally understood. It’s a place with so much natural beauty and land without hotels and chain restaurants covering its landscape,” Schindler said.

The next step for the documentary is to edit.

“We have probably 150 hours of footage,” Biddle said.

The documentary will likely be a series of vignettes focusing on commercial fishing, boatbuilding and decoy carving. The plan is to give the recordings back to the community and the documentary will be available to the museum.

The project is funded through the Seahawks Advancing Interdisciplinary Learning, or SAIL, program to integrate policy-rich content into short documentary films to help educate and raise awareness about the threats facing coastal communities and what can be done to help them adapt.

Another new face at the Jan. 31 meeting was Jenny Adler, who was getting ready for a stint as a visiting professor at the Duke University Marine Lab on in Pivers Island in Beaufort.

“Having never lived in North Carolina, I knew I had a lot to learn before teaching a course in Science Journalism at the Duke Marine Lab this spring,” Adler explained. “I felt confident I could teach the journalism part of the course and help students report on science, but it was unsettling moving to a place where I had no community connections.”

While writing a grant proposal to fund the students’ stories, she said she came across a ton of coverage in Coastal Review and also quite a few pieces by visual creator Ryan Stancil and photographer Baxter Miller, who are both members of the network and have worked extensively Down East.

Adler said she contacted the two, who then told her about the network meeting.

“So, a week before I started teaching, I drove to Harkers Island from Massachusetts and walked into a meeting where I knew nobody,” she said, and the next eight hours “were informative and inspiring.”

She said the connections she made that day held strong.

“Karen (Amspacher) and several other members I met that day have spoken with my class, been interviewed by my students, shared local knowledge, and provided guidance and stories that have made training the next generation of journalists in a new place such an incredible experience,” Adler said.

Haven Cashwell, a postdoctoral research scholar for the State Climate Office at North Carolina State University, has been coordinating communications for the network.

Over the last few months, she and other members have been working on a website. It wasn’t quite ready at publication, but those attending the Jan. 31 meeting had a sneak peek.

“The goal of the website is to have a place where community members and those interested in the Down East Resilience Network can access information about areas of concern,” which include saltwater intrusion and sunny day flooding, Cashwell said in an interview.

Plans for the website include providing resources, such as how to navigate Federal Emergency Management Agency, raising your home, obtaining a fortified roof, and updates about the network.

“We are currently asking researchers about information they think should be included on this website that community members should know about. We hope this will be used in the future by both community members and DERN members,” Cashwell said.

Dr. Kiera O’Donnell, another member of the network, is a postdoctoral associate at Duke University and is working on a study to better understand coastal water quality concerns in North Carolina.

Residents are being asked to fill out a survey “to help us understand the water quality concerns for surface and ground water throughout Carteret County. We are currently taking surface water quality samples to get a snapshot of the water quality throughout Down East and the surrounding areas,” O’Donnell said. “But we are looking for local perspectives and water quality concerns to help inform us about the current issues locals are dealing with and what they care about when it comes to water quality.”

Dr. Ryan Emanuel does not remember when he first heard the English translation of the word pocosin.

He suspects it came from an authority figure, likely a teacher or professor. No matter. He believed the literal meaning of the Eastern Algonquian word was “swamp on a hill.”

It’s a translation that has been passed from generation to generation, one that Emanuel himself regurgitated in the courses he taught at North Carolina State University before accepting a job at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

That changed after the Lumbee and environmental scientist, in preparation for a television interview, took a deep dive into the word’s meaning.

He surfaced with not only the fact there is no evidence to support the longstanding translation, but a broader lesson about humility in accepting the unknown, vigilance in search of the truth, and ethically and responsibly distinguishing between Western academic knowledge and Indigenous knowledge.

Emanuel details the intricacies of why it’s important for scientists to thoroughly vet Indigenous-to-English translations in a paper he authored that was published last fall.

“We all know that, as scientists, we can’t make things up, and we have to cite properly as scholars,” Emanuel said. “And we’re used to doing that with our Western scientific knowledge. Why is it OK to not be careful with something like the translation of an Indigenous term when we’re so careful with other aspects of our science?”

He’s not pointing fingers.

His aim is not to convey a message that scientists, himself included, take the translations of Indigenous words at face value with bad intentions.

“It’s just that we didn’t do due diligence and we were not careful with the use of this word in our science,” he said.

It wasn’t until roughly a decade ago when Emanuel was invited to speak in an episode of “Exploring North Carolina,” a popular PBS program hosted by Tom Earnhardt, that he decided to give in to his own curiosity about the word’s translation.

Indigenous peoples pass along their histories through stories and oral tradition.

“But there’s a conspicuous absence in any of our communities of anything resembling this translation,” Emanuel said.

He started going through a chain of citations back through time. They all converged on a linguistics paper written in the late 1800s, the text of which is in a volume carefully filed at N.C. State’s Hunt Library.

Emanuel opened the old, dusty cover to the volume, read and reread its contents, realizing the paper says nothing about pocosin meaning “swamp on a hill.”

“That’s when the lessons of this paper started to hit home,” he said.

The first lesson? His own irresponsibility at taking the translation at face value and perpetuating “this myth of a translation.”

“I felt bad about doing that, especially as an Indigenous person who had learned the translation through nonIndigenous sources and didn’t even think to put it through our own kind of knowledge verification processes,” he said.

What also struck him as “uncomfortable,” he said, was that “nobody else had either.”

“I do think that this speaks to the humility aspect of the lesson,” Emanuel said. “As scientists who want to know everything, we have to be OK with the fact that there are some things we can’t know and this is one of those things.”

That’s a fact Indigenous communities live with every day. Their ancient languages were taken away, erased in different ways throughout colonial records and government documents.

The frustration or incompleteness someone may feel because they wish they knew the meaning of the word is certainly not lost on Emanuel.

“I’ve got an entire world view that I can’t truly know because all of that language has been taken away. We have to accept the fact that there is nobody around who can tell us any deeper meaning of that word that is used to describe the place that it is,” he said.

By and large, Indigenous communities do not dwell on this fact, he said. It’s not productive, nor healthy.

Instead, they think about what they have been able to preserve. Their strong sense of kinship, their responsibilities to their community, their relationship to the places from which they come, which include pocosin-filled landscapes.

But even those are a fraction of what they once were.

Once extensive in North Carolina, the freshwater wetlands of the Southeastern coastal plain have been destroyed or degraded by logging and ditching and draining for conversion to agricultural land.

Pocosins are sometimes referred to as “carbon sinks” because of their ability to sequester and store carbon dioxide, or CO2.

But even as efforts have in recent years been made to restore some of these areas to their original form, a North Carolina law passed in 2023 strips protections for pocosins, undermining not only their ecological and hydrological value, but their cultural significance to Indigenous communities.

“When you look across Indigenous communities in this part of North America, these landscapes are incredibly important culturally to us, yet that’s not part of the conversation when it comes to whether and how to protect and preserve these places,” Emanuel said.

He doesn’t want the mistranslation to be a distraction to the work that’s occurring in restoring pocosins.

“It’s just a reminder that the words that we use matter and that words that come from Indigenous languages remind us that these names were used for these geographies and other things for centuries, if not millennia, before we took them up and starting using them for our purposes,” he said. “They’re special and unique places and one of my favorite things to do is to take students out into the pocosins and have them tromp around on those organic soils and dig down into the muck and get that sticky soil all over their hands.”

The acclaimed coastal scientist Orrin Pilkey, who died at the age of 90 on Sunday, had more stories than an old wet dog.

A few years back, we were sitting around the kitchen table in the retirement community in Durham, North Carolina, where he lived in later years. It was a comfortable apartment, messy with books and papers and walls filled with Orrin’s impressive collection of Indian arrowheads. Importantly, it was close to Orrin’s beloved Duke University, where he taught coastal science for a half-century and still had a coveted parking space in the faculty lot.

Orrin was telling me how he grew up in Richland, Washington, near the Hanford Reservation Reactor.

“We used to play in the puddles after it rained,” he said. “It drove my mother crazy. When the whistle went off, she would rush to the door and call us kids inside because they were about to release a radioactive cloud. We liked to say the dogs in Richland all glowed at night. It was great fun growing up there.”

In a 2019 book, “The Geography of Risk, Epic Storms, Rising Seas, And The Cost of America’s Coasts,” I described Orrin this way: “Pilkey is a short, square hobbit of a man, with an unruly gray beard and a disarming sense of humor. Depending on your point of view, he is either a prophet or the antichrist of the coast.”

I worried a little that Orrin might be offended, but when an acquaintance brought up the description, he roared and said, no, he loved it. It was exactly right.

Orrin was maybe 5 feet, 4 inches tall, and had an impressive belly. He swore to me that he used to run marathons and had broken three hours at the Boston Marathon. I was a decent enough runner back in the day and had struggled to break three hours, which is considered the standard separating real runners from hobby runners.

Like many of his stories, it verged on the unbelievable. But Orrin was like that, always surprising, a prolific and important writer of books on North Carolina and other coasts, a provocative critic, a generous, dedicated teacher, and as Rob Young, one of Orrin’s former students and the head of a coastal science program at Western Carolina University, wrote in a LinkedIn post, “He was funny as hell.”

You had to work hard to not like Orrin. Over a quarter-century, I watched developers and engineers scream invective at him for challenging the way they stacked fragile beaches and sand dunes with ever-larger investment properties. But I also reveled in how Orrin could disarm even his most hostile critics with an impish grin and a joke.

Once, back in the winter of 1998, I was showing Orrin around some of the new development in Corolla, on the northern Outer Banks. We had just finished emptying our over-caffeinated bladders behind some wax myrtle, when one of the developers roared onto the gravel lot in his Caddy and began screaming at us for violating private property. This lasted roughly a minute when suddenly he stopped, stared at Orrin, and exclaimed, “Hey, I know you. You’re that Pilkey guy.” Orrin smiled and marched over to the car. By the time it was done, the developer had Orrin’s email and was his next best friend.

Some of the engineers at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bitterly criticized Orrin’s science and complained that he was training a cadre of young “Pilkeyites,” who would ruin the coast. By ruin, I think they meant put a halt to the development and the Corps’ costly beach replenishment projects, in which they pump millions of cubic yards of sand onto eroding beaches to save the property lining the shoreline. Pilkey correctly pointed out that those projects were mere Band-Aids, lasting a few years before the next storm came along and washed the sand out to sea. “It’s madness,” he told me many times. “Absolute madness.”  

A Florida engineer complained that Pilkey “got all of the students who got 1600 on their SATs,” and then indoctrinated them in his ways. I loved that. They just didn’t know what to do with Pilkey.

“My approach to coastal science and management is very different from his,” Young wrote. “But, my approach to life is not. My dad died when I was 21. Orrin was the closest thing to a father I had for the last 40 years. He gave me my current position. I owe him so much.”

Orrin got his Bachelor of Science in geology at Washington State University and his master’s in Montana and figured he would become an expert on mountains and shale. During summers, he worked as a smoke jumper and manned a fire tower deep in the forest. Instead of staying out West, he picked up his PhD in coastal science at Florida State and became an expert in sedimentology.

He lived for a time on Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, where he attended church in a ramshackle chapel with the Gullah Geechee. “Hey, I really like the singing, Pal,” he told me. He called everyone pal. Later, he researched the abyssal plain, a gaping mud hole in the ocean so deep sunlight does not reach the sea floor.

In the mid-1960s, Duke took a chance and hired Orrin to start a marine geology program. “It was a big leap,” he said. “They were taking a big chance.”

Over the years, he helped to train thousands of students now scattered across the land. Early on, he was approached by Paul Godfrey, a marine biologist working for the National Park Service on Cape Lookout, and asked to sign a petition protesting a reckless development along the coast. “I was new and didn’t sign,” he told me, with a frown. “It was a big mistake, one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.”

In time, he would become one of the loudest critics of what we were doing to our coasts, penning scores of opinion articles and essays, often appearing on radio and television. Duke was his local podium, but he traveled the nation and the world, spreading the gospel of Pilkey, which might be summed up this way: Preserve as much as possible of what we have left at the coast, stop hardening eroding shorelines with groins and sea walls and, above all, allow the barrier islands to keep moving, the way Mother Nature always meant.

Orrin wasn’t impressed with many of the incremental policies being implemented to protect the coast. He believed they were too little, too late. In time, he became a national advocate for retreating from the coast as the seas rose and storms became larger and more destructive. His position felt impractical to some coastal geologists, who knew that developers, politicians and property owners would fight efforts to remove them. Far too much money was at stake.

When I asked him if he was becoming out of step, he shrugged and told me “I’ve always been out of step.” And then he laughed.

Deep-diving whales that rely on sound rather than vision to hunt in the ocean’s darkest depths are confusing plastic marine debris for prey, new findings suggest.

For the study, “Acoustic signature of plastic marine debris mimics the prey items of deep-diving cetaceans,” researchers from Duke University as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, compared the way sound bounces off plastic that is floating underwater to that of typical whale prey, in this case, squid and squid beaks.

It is widely assumed that seals and toothed whales mistake plastic for food because of appearance, particularly plastic bags and films that look like squid and jellyfish, according to the study, but that doesn’t explain why deep-diving species like sperm whales and beaked whales that use echolocation are ingesting plastic. To echolocate, the whale emits sounds that reflect off an object. The whale then interprets the object’s target strength, or measurement of the intensity of the sound’s echo.

“Assuming these animals are ingesting plastic at depth and not at/near the surface, they are consuming plastic without visually identifying it. Deep-diving toothed whales may therefore be misinterpreting acoustic cues when echolocating; presumably plastic’s acoustic signature resembles that of primary prey items, driving plastic consumption,” the study states.

Researchers for the new study found that 100% of the plastics they tested that are typically found in stomachs of stranded whales — plastic bags, rope and bottles — have either similar or stronger acoustic target strengths, which is how strong a sound wave is reflected off an object, compared to that of squid.

The findings support the study’s hypothesis that deep-diving whales are consuming plastic because of “a misperception of acoustic signals.”

Duke University doctoral candidate Greg Merrill Jr. led the peer-reviewed study published a few weeks ago in Science Direct.

From California, Merrill has been at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort for the past few years to examine the impacts of microplastics and large plastic marine debris on whales.

Merrill graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a bachelor’s in biological science in 2014. He then pursued his master’s at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he worked with northern fur seals, trying to understand how climate change was impacting their breeding success. That experience planted the seed for this study.

While he was working on his master’s, Merrill said he spent many months on the remote Pribilof Islands of Alaska in the middle of the Bering Sea where the threatened northern fur seal breeds.

“All too common a sight was a seal entangled in plastic debris, such as packing bands and discarded fishing net. The animals often died as a result. This motivated me to study the impacts of plastic pollution on other marine mammals like the deep-diving sperm whales and beaked whales off the North Carolina coast,” he said.

Merrill explained that these animals, in particular, hunt especially deep in the ocean where there is no light to see. Instead, they rely on echolocation, or biosonar.

“In other words, they use sound waves to locate and identify food. Because we know from autopsies of stranded whales that they are eating plastic, it occurred to me that plastic may be causing whales to misinterpret their echolocation signals. So, we wanted to see if that was true,” Merrill explained.

He said in simple terms, the study was to see if plastic in the water confused echolocating whales into believing it was instead food.

“We collected plastic trash from the beach and then blasted those objects and whale prey with various sound waves at sea using an instrumented called an echosounder mounted to the bottom of our research vessel. The plastic objects were strung up on monofilament fishing line and held underneath the instrument while the measurements were recorded,” he said.

An echosounder is a device that uses sound waves to measure the water depth or where objects are in the water. The hull-mounted echosounder tested three different sounds at the same frequencies of whale clicks.

“Based on the measurements we recorded, plastic has similar or stronger echoes than the whale prey items we tested. The way an object reflects sound depends on what it’s made of,” Merrill explained, for example what the plastic is made of or (its) thickness. “Plastic unfortunately ‘sounds’ the same as whale food.”

The study notes that plastic pollution in the oceans is pervasive and increasing with more than 1,200 marine species known to ingest plastic debris. For marine mammals, there are hundreds of examples of whales, seals, sea lions and manatees “consuming plastic, ingestion of which constitutes a major threat to individual health,” the study states. “Consequences of macroplastic ingestion include abrasion and perforation of tissues, infection, reduced reproduction and growth, suffocation, clogging the baleen filter false satiation, occlusion of the gastrointestinal tract, starvation, and ultimately death.”

The finding underscores just how complex the plastic pollution issue is, Merrill said, adding the most common plastics found in whale stomachs are plastic bags, single-use packaging, and fishing gear such as nets, ropes, and lines.

“I’m not sure many people would have ever imagined that the way something sounds could have such big consequences as affecting large whales who hunt so very far away from human activities. The scale of the plastic pollution problem is enormous, a global issue that requires policy action at the level of local all the way to international governments. And it is having so many impacts on our planet and on human health, Merrill said.

He encourages “anyone who cares about this issue” to contact their elected officials and let them know you want to see action on this front.

Michael Cove, a conservation ecologist and mammologist, told Coastal Review that “this research was fascinating and provides some much-needed insights into how and why marine mammals might intentionally ingest plastic waste that could severely impact them and ultimately lead to their deaths.”

The research curator for the mammalogy at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, Cove explained that so much of our perception of food and foraging is based on visual cues, because humans use their eyes to find food, “and that has been shown in research with seabirds and sea turtles, but many deep-sea-diving marine mammals are going off of sound through echolocation and not sight.”

Studies like Merrill’s show that there’s still a lot to learn about how some of the sperm and beaked whales forage. In many cases, there’s still much to understand about what they forage because they are feeding at such great depths, Cove explained. He has often assumed that most plastic consumption is incidental or intentional based on visual cues, citing Mylar balloons looking like squid as an example.

But this study, “points to intentional consumption of plastics based on their sound, which spells trouble for deep sea diving whales since the accumulation of plastic in our oceans continues to increase and it persists for thousands of years.”

Cove said that this work highlights and renews that calls to end balloon releases, especially in coastal areas, should be revisited and policies to reduce plastics entering marine food webs will be critical to maintaining maintain diverse marine mammal communities into the future.

“After all, marine mammals along with sharks and large fishes make up the top of the food chain, which largely regulate the lower trophic levels (links in the chain) and the loss of any species and that top-down regulation can have cascading effects throughout the community that could even influence fisheries and ecosystem health processes well beyond the deep ocean,” he said.

Coastal Review will not publish Monday in observance of Veterans Day.

After a year of record coastal flooding, eastern North Carolina may feel a slight reprieve from high-tide flooding days between now and April 2025.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service last week released its 2024-25 Annual High-Tide Flooding Outlook, which projects slightly fewer of these flooding days through spring 2025 than last year. That’s because El Niño conditions are transitioning to La Niña conditions, and these two opposing climate patterns in the Pacific can affect weather worldwide.  

“Bottom line: Over the past year, we’ve seen record coastal flooding, or high-tide flooding, along our coastlines,” Nicole LeBoeuf, National Ocean Service director, during the Aug. 6 online news briefing, said. “When the ocean runs hot, sea levels run high, and we see that playing out in our coastal flooding data.”

The outlook recaps high-tide flooding events from May 2023 to April of this year at 97 NOAA tide gauges along the U.S. coast, and it projects what to expect at these locations through April 2025.

High-tide flooding, which is sometimes called nuisance or sunny-day flooding, happens when tides reach anywhere from 1 to 2 feet above the daily average high tide, and cover what is typically dry land along the coast. “As sea levels continue to rise, high-tide flooding occurs more frequently, even without severe weather,” she said.

For the 2023-24 season, coastal communities in the United States experienced seven to eight flood days, LeBoeuf said. In 2023, 34 locations broke or tied their records for flood days, which she called “a dramatic increase” from the previous year.

Hot ocean temperatures led to the highest levels of sea level measurement on record. There were 44 NOAA tide gauge locations, mostly on the East Coast, that broke or tied their previously recorded sea levels to date. This means “we got an additional 6 inches of sea level rise and five median coastal flood days annually compared to the year 2000, roughly a 200% increase,” LeBoeuf said.

The recurring climate pattern called El Niño contributed to the record-breaking 2023-24 observations.

“El Niño typically raises ocean temperatures and can result in more frequent and intense storms hitting the coastlines, especially along the East Coast, where we saw many records break this past year,” she said. “With sea level rise and high-tide flooding increasing, El Niño simply makes things worse for coastal communities, home to almost 40% of the U.S. population.”

Because high-tide flooding can degrade infrastructure, damage property and disrupt coastal ecosystems and people’s daily lives, NOAA works to help communities predict this kind of flooding and its potential impacts, she said.

NOAA maintains the tide gauges across the U.S. and its territories that make up the National Water Level Observation Network. Some of the gauges have been recording water-level data for more than 150 years. Through this network, “NOAA monitors the unrelenting creep of sea level rise and the rapid increase of high-tide flooding,” LeBoeuf said.

The outlook brings together data about high-tide flooding events between May 2023 and April 2024. That time frame is used to “account for increased sea levels in the fall and increased stormy weather during winter months, so that we can most effectively predict the year ahead,” she continued.

There are four National Water Level Observation Network stations on the North Carolina coast. According to the annual outlook, Duck experienced 22 high-tide flood days between May 2022 and April 2023 compared to 13 the year prior. Oregon Inlet Marina encountered seven days, up two from the previous year’s five. High-tide flood days at the Duke University Marine Lab at Pivers Island in Beaufort increased from six to 11. At the Wilmington tide gauge, high-tide flood days increased from two to three.

“Almost every location we measure between New York and Georgia broke their sea level and flood-day records in 2023. It’s like El Niño had the US East Coast in its Bullseye,” she said.

In the coming year, NOAA projects that the country’s coastal communities will see a median range of four to eight high-tide flooding days between May of this year and next April, which she said is slightly down from last year “as we move away from El Niño and into La Niña conditions.”

The outlook projects that for Duck, there will be nine to 15 high-tide flood days, four to seven at Oregon Inlet Marina, four to six at Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, and two to six in Wilmington.

NOAA’s National Ocean Service researchers predicted that this year’s Atlantic hurricane season will increase the chance of significant flooding in some places, particularly along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Hurricane predictions are not directly factored into NOAA’s high-tide flooding outlooks, but the product “can provide situational awareness regarding baseline flooding that can compound the impacts from real-time weather events like hurricanes and tropical storms” she said. “Events like hurricanes get a lot of attention, but high-tide flooding is one of the most tangible impacts of long-term sea level rise, reminding us that while we brace for impact today, the United States must also plan for a wetter future.”

NOAA scientists project that communities across the nation will experience an average of 45 to 85 high-tide flood days per year by 2050, which means that “every four to eight days, Americans along our coast will face disruptive and damaging seawater inundation regardless of the weather at the time.”

The federal agency also produces a Monthly High Tide Flooding Outlook to provide flooding likelihoods each day of the year, up to a year in advance, offering windows of time where there’s increased flood risks.

“Together, these outlooks complement one another with information across time scales to protect lives, ecosystems and economies as towns, states, tribes and businesses are faced with increased coastal flooding,” LeBoeuf said.

Coastal Ecologist Dr. Christine Voss, who recently retired from University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences based in Morehead City, in response for comments about this high-tide outlook, explained that the trends in rising sea levels and the acceleration of global, regional and local water levels are sustained, and the data are clear. 

“If one examines the entirety of the data, there is some annual variation, yet the ‘big picture’ is unchanged. In its reports, including this one, NOAA makes clear that the Southeast US region, including coastal NC, is experiencing more high-tide flooding due to global sea-level rise, land subsidence, and regional oceanographic effects — compared to 2000 and the previous century,” she said in an email.

NOAA’s Aug. 6 article suggests that the expected development of La Niña is likely the reason that their models predict a lower number of high-tide flooding events from May 2024 through April 2025, compared to the previous year.

“So, this is the ‘regional oceanographic effects’ part of the equation. There are also numerous astronomical harmonic constituents that cause variation in our water levels,” Voss said. “Some of these harmonics have a period of up to almost 19 years,” pointing to the harmonic constituents at the NOAA Beaufort, Duke Marine Lab gauge and the Wilmington gauge.  

“Regardless of the flux in water levels, the major trend is the continued rising of sea levels and an acceleration of this trend. We, along the NC coastal region, need to proactively prepare for higher sea levels and do what we can to slow climate change,” Voss continued.

Post has been updated.

Duke University Marine Lab scientists, researchers and students will showcase their marine research at an open house Saturday, June 22.

The lab’s state-of-the-art facilities on Pivers Island in Beaufort will be open to the public at no charge between 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Attendees of the open house will have an opportunity to engage with scientists and students, who will be on hand to talk about their research and how it shapes our understanding of the marine environment and maritime communities.

This will also be an opportunity to learn more about the lab’s local outreach activities and ways to get involved.

For more information, including a list of activities, visit the lab’s website.

WILMINGTON – North Carolina’s leading PFAS researchers aim to trace the chemical compounds found in waterways, air and soil in the state to the polluters emitting them.

Using newly acquired machines called mass spectrometers, scientists will also have the ability to identify per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances not in the Environmental Protection Agency’s registry, one that has steadily grown over the past several years from a few thousand to 15,000 known PFAS today.

The brand-new fleet of mass spectrometers are being disbursed to research labs on a handful of university campuses that are part of the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory’s PFAS Testing Network.

Referred to as the PFAST Network, this group of academic researchers was created after scientists at N.C. State University and the EPA discovered that the Cape Fear River, the drinking water sources for tens of thousands, contained elevated levels of PFAS.

The discovery sparked what has become a nationally-recognized, state-led effort to better understand the potential human health effects of PFAS and ways to cut down the amount of these chemicals from getting into the environment.

Academic researchers, state legislators, environmental regulators and representatives with Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., the multibillion-dollar company that makes the mass spectrometers, recently hosted a press conference on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science to announce how the technology will be used to expand PFAS research here in the state.

Related: Secretaries’ Science Board to review PFAS’ effects

Dr. Lee Ferguson, an environmental analytical chemist and assistant professor at Duke University, said the investments by the North Carolina General Assembly, which has pumped millions into PFAS research, and the collaboration with Thermo Fisher, puts the network at the cusp of increasing the sophistication of its PFAS investigations.

The mass spectrometers will allow researchers to move from canvassing the state for PFAS contamination to “understanding sources, tracking those sources, fingerprinting those sources and then move into collaborations with treatment technologies and treatment engineers to try to remove those contamination sources,” he said.

“Specifically, the new instrumentation that we are getting, and already have in some cases, will allow us to do things like ultra-fast and ultra-sensitive, targeted and nontargeted analysis so that we can try to get a picture of those 15,000 PFAS compounds that may be present,” Ferguson said.

In all, five mass spectrometers are being delivered to labs at Duke University, N.C. State, UNCW and East Carolina University.

Thermo Fisher showcased a mock mass spectrometer at the March 27 afternoon press conference. The instrument is not exactly a visual marvel. It looks like a large, boxy-shaped piece of equipment you might see in any given lab.

Each machine will be used like a key that will unlock some of the mysteries about PFAS –which PFAS are in the environment, what levels of them are in the environment, where they’re coming from and what treatments are available to reduce the amount that get into the environment.

UNCW Professor Dr. Ralph Mead explained that the mass spectrometer in a lab he heads at the university’s Center for Marine Science will be used to investigate samples of everything from rain and snow to soil.

“Specifically, the questions that we’re trying to address is understanding can we use that instrument to develop a forensics approach to trace the source of PFAS, as well as understand the fate and ultimate transport of it,” he said.

As researchers gather this and other information, they will be able to create an online library, one that would be a resource for environmental regulators and law makers navigating how much to crack down on industries that use PFAS to make a sweeping array of consumer goods.

The General Assembly will, by this July, have appropriated more than $50 million for the collaboratory specifically to perform PFAS-related research in the state.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-New Hanover, one of a small number of state delegates who spoke at last week’s press conference, said North Carolina is fortunate, not because it is, in some respects, ground zero for PFAS, but because the state has some of the leading experts to take on PFAS research.

“Here we are today utilizing state-of-the-art equipment from a great company to really accomplish some of the goals that we not only want as a state, but we want as a solution to a worldwide problem,” he said.

Rep. Deb Butler, D-New Hanover, said the discovery of PFAS in the Cape Fear region is a reminder of the far-reaching consequences of unchecked pollution.

“For too long, PFAS contamination has lurked beneath the surface undetected and unchecked,” she said. “In my opinion, we have not been diligent enough on the front-end of manufacturing and that must change. We must demand stringent standards for PFAS emissions, as well as any discharge that affects our public trust resources. We must strengthen enforcement mechanisms and promote pollution prevention initiatives. By addressing the root causes of contamination rather than focusing on the cleanup, we will better serve the citizens of North Carolina.”

BEAUFORT – From tagging sea turtles at Cape Lookout National Seashore to writing stories on personal and ecological resilience for Carteret County middle and high schoolers, nine Duke University undergraduates were immersed in the community this spring and early summer during the DukeEngage program at the Duke Marine Lab on Pivers Island.

The program May 8 to July 3 titled “Conservation and Community: Working with education and conservation organizations in rural, coastal communities,” is one of the numerous Duke University DukeEngage programs taking place across the country and beyond. The program’s goal is to have students and faculty “collaborate with communities – locally and globally – to address critical social issues through an immersive summer of community engagement.” 

DukeEngage’s Conservation and Community program supports coastal organizations with educational and conservation missions. Students in this program will work with the Community Science Initiative at the Duke Marine Lab, an initiative that increases community engagement through research, according to DukeEngage.

In its second year, the Beaufort program students worked with six area organizations, many of which have small staffs, to accomplish much-needed projects. The students were also able to go camping and take field trips to see Carteret County. 

Two groups focused on youth in the community. One group worked with the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Coastal Plain’s Morehead City and Beaufort locations to create hands-on science programs for club members. Another group designed a resiliency curriculum for Carteret County Public Schools.

Another two groups worked to protect sea turtles. One group created a way to track how light pollution affects sea turtles for Cape Lookout rangers while another worked with the state Wildlife Resources Commission, based in Raleigh, to create content about protecting sea turtles. 

The students spent time working behind the scenes as well. At the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, one group archived material for a yet-to-be-launched website about Carteret County communities. Students working with Coastal Carolina Riverwatch helped plan one of that organization’s major annual events and collect resources for educators.

The last meeting for DukeEngage was July 3, when community partners were brought together to discuss and celebrate the work. 

DukeEngage Site Coordinator Laura Givens, a marine science and conservation doctoral candidate at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said that the final meeting went well.

“Most of our community partners were able to attend and expressed how much they enjoyed working with the students and how impressed they were with the work they completed,” Givens told Coastal Review.

She said the wrap-up session was one of her favorite parts of the entire experience. 

“Our partners were really engaged with their own students, which was unsurprising since they’d been working together closely the past eight weeks, but they also seemed to be inspired by the other projects and their enthusiasm for the whole program was encouraging. All of them have said they want to work with the program again next year as well, which is great,” she continued. “The students did an incredible job with every single project that we had them working on and the output will be truly helpful in our community. They were great to work with and it was sad to see them go.”

Early in the morning of the last Friday in June, which was the seventh week of the eight-week program, the students were seated at tables for two in a semicircle discussing their progress with DukeEngage organizer Liz DeMattia, who led the meeting remotely. DeMattia directs the marine lab’s Community Science Initiative put in place to increase community engagement through research.

During the meeting, the group helping with Coastal Carolina Riverwatch excitedly shared the details of their recent field trip to look for new water sampling sites. Coastal Carolina Riverwatch is an advocacy organization working to protect and enhance the waters of the White Oak River Basin.

Undergraduate Amy Buckalew explained that in addition to helping with sampling, the group compiled a list of activities and resources on subjects such as stormwater, wastewater, plastic pollution and marine debris for educators to use in their classrooms. This group also helped with the annual North Carolina Marine Debris Symposium to be held in October.  

Lisa Rider, executive director for Coastal Carolina Riverwatch, told Coastal Review that the organization was grateful to be a part of the student engagement and community support program offered by Duke University.  

“This program is a huge value to our community environment,” Rider said. “We have a small staff and as a growing organization, we are incredibly grateful for additional support and work for the mission.”

Rider said the DukeEngage students pulled and consolidated educational resources on water quality issues, prioritized concerns and prepared public outreach materials including creative content. Students were also efficient in leading the due diligence efforts of comparing venues for the North Carolina Marine Debris Symposium. 

Spencer Moyle, an environmental science and policy major, said during the meeting in June that the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum group was making progress digitizing material for the Carteret County community history website.  

DeMattia explained that the website effort with Core Sound began with the DukeEngage program last summer. “Then this year, this group has just exploded and put even more staff and more resources onto it.” 

One objective for DukeEngage is to work with community organizations that do not have the staff or resources to take on large projects, such as the website, DeMattia said. Not only is it a great product these students have created but, she said, it’s something that the community wants. The museum didn’t have the human and monetary capital to do this without DukeEngage. “It’s been a nice win-win.”

Museum Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher told Coastal Review that this second summer with DukeEngage “was another great team of hard workers.”

“Our focus was on a website that serves as a community archive for the Core Sound communities that involved website design, formatting and editing, but most of all, provided the students with a glimpse of how Down East’s past has helped shape the communities we are today,” Amspacher said. “Students this year got to visit many of the Down East communities in person, giving them a real-life experience to balance all the historical documents and photos the website work included.”

Participant Blake Todzo, a psychology major, said the group working with Cape Lookout had been surveying activity on the protected seashore, helping with turtle tagging and researching how light affects sea turtles.

DeMattia added that the National Park Service wanted to figure out how to measure light. The group worked with scientists and created an instrument that the students used to collect data to share with the park service. “And again, this was something that rangers really wanted to do but didn’t have the time or energy to do because it always comes up in the middle of the nesting and tagging surveys.”

Cape Lookout National Seashore Superintendent Jeff West called it an outstanding project. 

“One of the foundations of our protection efforts is that we have science to back up any regulations that might be imposed upon the public. One of the concerns we have is specific nighttime driving habits at this park,” West said in an interview

The work this group did is laying the framework for understanding local habits, behaviors and impacts, West said. “What we found, although preliminary — it will need more research – is that typically nighttime drivers at Cape Lookout are few, tend to locate a camp or fishing spot and stay there, and are cautious when driving at night.”

They also identified potential problems with the way campers use light at night, West said. 

“Some camps leave lights burning all night, and some have brighter lights than are necessary for safety around the camp. Based on what we learned, we are putting together educational information to use next year on camp lights — what to use, why it is important to avoid bright fixed lights and when it is appropriate to use light in a camp based on sea turtle protection and safety,” he said, adding that it was a great effort, timely and beneficial to the park.

Undergrad Andreas Hernandez said his group worked on sea turtle conservation projects with the Wildlife Resource Commission, “essentially just getting the word out about protecting sea turtles on the Atlantic Ocean. We’ve been doing that through a website that has the dos and don’ts of sea turtle conservation,” she said. They also worked on a documentary.

The students were able to spend time with and create programming for county youth, as well. 

Participant Emma Lofgren said that the Boys and Girls Club group had worked on creating programs for members. She said the group went weekly to Morehead City and Beaufort club locations to engage in activities with the children, such as hands-on science and creative problem-solving exercises. For the older students, Lofgren said there were drone days at the Duke Marine Lab.

Spencer Moyle, an environmental science and policy major, said the group that worked with the Carteret County school system began the program by writing stories with personal resilience and ecological resilience woven together. The group read their stories to teachers during a recent workshop and developed a curriculum on resilience. He said they worked to publish their stories and create a podcast.

Moyle said during the meeting that he had joined DukeEngage for the experience. As an environmental science and policy major, Moyle said he knew that after college he would be focused more on policy. DukeEngage provided a chance to  experience the community in a different way.

Other students piped up that they enjoyed camping, collecting data while spending time in nature and seeing the community’s youth participate in science. 

DeMattia said that DukeEngage is one of her favorite programs “because it pairs amazing Duke students with community organizations that need and love having the influx of their brains and energy during the summer. So it’s such a win-win in a positive situation that is really fun to be part of.”

DeMattia said the program was set to go in 2020 but was canceled because of COVID-19. Last year, the program was held virtually, and this year, they were able to do it in person. 

“Last year was great and this year, it has been phenomenal,” she said

DukeEngage works with the same community organizations that the university’s Community Science Initiative does during the regular school year. The initiative was started as a resource for conservation and education groups here on the coast and to connect the Duke Marine Lab with the community. 

When DeMattia asked the community groups whether there would be interest in DukeEngage, the answer was a resounding yes.

These partnerships deepen “the connection the Marine Lab has with the community in ways that isn’t just research but is a kind of human capital into our community,” she said.