Reprinted from the Outer Banks Voice

Debbie Swick has a way of spotting problems that most people barely notice — and then refusing to let them go.

On the Outer Banks, the Southern Shores resident is best known as the driving force behind the push to ban balloon releases, a grassroots effort that helped shift public awareness around a form of litter that can travel hundreds of miles before landing in waterways and harming wildlife.

This time, her focus is something less visible but just as persistent: discarded monofilament fishing line — the nearly invisible plastic filament that can linger in the environment for centuries, entangling and injuring marine life long after it’s been cast aside.

In partnership with the Outer Banks Anglers Club, Swick has helped launch a new monofilament recovery and recycling program — one that aims to intercept that line before it becomes a long-term hazard in the water by installing and maintaining collection vessels at sites across the Outer Banks.

“It is a strangling mechanism,” Swick said. “It becomes entangled in fish gills, sea turtles, seals, porpoise. It doesn’t break down. It will amputate and maim marine life.”

Discarded fishing gear — including monofilament line — is widely recognized by marine scientists as one of the most dangerous forms of ocean debris. Research has found that roughly 740,000 kilometers (about 460,000 miles) of fishing line enter the ocean each year — enough to circle the Earth more than 18 times.¹

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), at least 260 marine species are known to be harmed by entanglement in marine debris, including sea turtles, seabirds, and marine mammals.² Monofilament line is particularly dangerous because it is nearly invisible underwater and extremely durable, capable of persisting in the environment for hundreds of years.³

That is something David Masters Jr., vice president of the Outer Banks Anglers Club, sees regularly. “It’s usually tumbled up in seaweed or buried in the sand,” he said. “I pick it up all the time. I’ve seen birds with fishing line caught on the wings or legs and that’s very sad.”

Local conservation groups and park officials have long warned that sea turtles along the Outer Banks can become entangled in discarded fishing line, which can impair their ability to swim or feed — and in some documented cases, lead to death.⁴ Necropsies of stranded turtles in North Carolina have identified monofilament entanglement as a contributing factor, underscoring the long-term danger posed by fishing line that remains in the environment.⁵

Swick is a member of the Outer Banks Anglers Club and last year’s Member of the Year. That, combined with her reputation as an accomplished environmental advocate and volunteer — including recognition with a Governor’s Medallion Award — gave her the standing and credibility to introduce the idea of monofilament recovery to the
anglers. She brought the concept to the club’s board in January, and by February, they were building the collection vessels.

“I told the board, under no circumstances were we going to half-ass this,” she said.

This time, Swick wanted something different: accountability. Each location would be “adopted” by a member of the Outer Banks Anglers Club, responsible for monitoring, emptying, and maintaining the vessel.

“I have the list,” she said. “I know who is supposed to be picking it up, when and where.”

Recreational fishermen are often among the strongest stewards of the waters they fish — a point echoed by fisheries managers and conservation organizations who increasingly emphasize angler participation in sustainability efforts.⁶

The Outer Banks Anglers Club has its own track record, including helping spearhead the creation of artificial reef AR-165 off Oregon Inlet.

The program itself is simple by design. Collection vessels made from PVC pipe have been installed at fishing-heavy locations across the Outer Banks, including piers, marinas, and public access points. Among the initial sites are Kitty Hawk Pier, Avalon Pier, Jennette’s Pier, the Manteo waterfront, Wanchese Marina, and several others.

“We haven’t spoken to one entity that said no,” Masters said, noting support from local governments, property owners, and organizations.

Anglers deposit used monofilament line into the vessels. From there, club members assigned to each site collect the material, clean it, and bring it to monthly meetings. Swick then weighs the line and ships it to a recycling facility operated by Berkley Fishing in Iowa. There, it is processed through the company’s national recycling program, which
has collected millions of miles of monofilament since 1990 and repurposes it into products such as tackle boxes, other plastic goods, and components used in aquatic habitat structures.⁷

The program is still in its early stages, but initial results are encouraging. At one early collection site at Pirates Cove, volunteers gathered 4.5 pounds of monofilament in a single pickup. “That could have all ended up in the water,” said Swick.

As of now, about a dozen sites are in place, with a goal of reaching roughly 20 locations. Organizers are also working to expand the program through local tackle shops and a developing partnership with the North Carolina Beach Buggy Association, whose members could help collect discarded line from beach areas on Hatteras and further south.

Swick has set a clear benchmark for the program’s first year: 100 pounds of collected line. But success, she said, will be measured in other ways too. “When the community starts talking about how much less monofilament they are seeing in the water,” she said, “and when they start asking for us to put more vessels up — that’s a good sign.”

For Masters, the effort reflects something broader about the club itself. “It’s important people realize recreational fishermen really respect the natural resources we have here, because it is our love to fish here,” Masters said. “We want to keep it pristine.”

Sources

1. Global estimates on lost and discarded fishing gear and ghost gear impacts, based on peer-reviewed research (Richardson et al., 2022, Science Advances), including annual losses of fishing line and gear.
2. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — Marine Debris Program, documenting entanglement impacts affecting at least 260 marine species.
3. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission — monofilament fishing line persistence estimates (up to ~600 years in marine environments), widely cited in coastal management and debris mitigation guidance.
4. Outer Banks Forever — Cape Hatteras National Seashore conservation guidance on sea turtle entanglement risks from discarded fishing line.
5. Outer Banks Voice — regional reporting on North Carolina sea turtle necropsies identifying monofilament entanglement as a contributing cause of mortality.
6. NOAA Fisheries — Recreational Fishing Policy, emphasizing “proactive stewardship” and collaboration with the angling community as essential to sustainable fisheries management.
7. Berkley Fishing — Berkley Conservation Institute, “Dedicated to the Future of Fishing,” documenting the company’s national monofilament recycling program (established 1990) and reuse into products such as tackle boxes and habitat materials.

This story is provided courtesy of the Outer Banks Voice, a digital newspaper covering the Outer Banks. Coastal Review is partnering with the Voice to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest about our coast.

Residents and visitors to the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher have a little more than a month to visit the state’s southernmost aquarium before it temporarily closes for major renovation and expansion.

The aquarium in Kure Beach will close May 26 for construction to include a 400,000-gallon sand tiger shark habitat, a 10,000-gallon Pacific coral habitat, an interactive shark and ray touch pool featuring bottom-dwelling sharks, and a state-of-the-art education center.

Construction is expected to take about 30 months.

“This transformative project is beginning as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the North Carolina Aquariums,” Pamela B. Cashwell, secretary of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, said in a release. “It is a thrilling way to honor a legacy of conservation, exceptional visitor experience and dedicated animal care, while launching a bold vision for the future.”

Plans for the renovation and expansion project have been underway for more than 10 years. The project is made possible with state funding, along with support from the N.C. Aquarium Society.

During the closure, residents and visitors to the area can enjoy Discovery Bay, which will feature a gift shop hosted by the N.C. Aquarium Society, habitats with seahorses, dart frogs, and lionfish, and a carnivorous plant exhibit at Independence Mall in Wilmington.

The public may continue to visit the state’s other aquariums, including Pine Knoll Shores, Roanoke Island, and Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head.

“We look forward to beginning construction, while continuing to engage our community in new ways,” NCAFF Director Joanna Zazzali said in a release. “Discovery Bay allows us to stay connected with our visitors, advance our conservation mission, and continue to inspire wonder, as we look toward our next chapter.” 

Animal care, facilities and safety teams will remain at Fort Fisher Aquarium to care for the animals that will remain at the facility throughout construction.

Visitors are encouraged to reserve tickets ahead of the closure and share their experiences on social media using the hashtag #PoseBeforeWeClose.

For updates, follow the aquarium on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.

Being able to watch a mother sperm whale give birth to her calf in the eastern Caribbean Sea a couple of summers ago “felt like an encounter with something both impossibly rare and profoundly ancient,” marine biologist David Gruber told Coastal Review.

Gruber, a National Geographic Explorer and City University of New York distinguished professor of biology, is president of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative). He founded the nonprofit based in the U.S. and Dominica in 2020. It’s made up of artificial intelligence and natural language processing specialists, cryptographers, linguists, marine biologists, roboticists and underwater acousticians from a network of universities and other partners, per the website.

He was aboard the organization’s sailing research vessel on July 8, 2023, off the coast of Dominica, where scientists have been observing whales for decades, when the team noticed that all 11 members of a known sperm whale unit had gathered at the water’s surface.

The team soon realized that they were witnessing the exceedingly rare 34-minutelong birth of a sperm whale in the wild and the coordinated care efforts for the newborn by the other adult females.

Project CETI published two reports detailing what the team observed, calling the work in a March 26 press release “the most comprehensive documentation of a sperm whale birth ever recorded and the first quantitative evidence of cooperative birth assistance among non-primates.”

The two studies analyze more than six hours of underwater audio and aerial drone footage recorded during the birth event.

Gruber, in the March 26 release, stated that these findings fundamentally reshape how we understand whale society. “What we’re seeing is deeply coordinated social care during one of the most vulnerable moments of life.”

Researchers said that understanding of labor, birth, postnatal and neonatal behavior is lacking for most cetaceans, with observations of these births in the wild recorded for less than 10% of species. Cetaceans are marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and porpoises.

“Of the described 93 species of cetaceans only nine species have reported birth observations collected in the wild,” the study states. “And reports of birth events of pelagic, deep-diving cetacean species, such as sperm whales, are exceptionally rare.”

Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, “Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events,” gives a chronological timeline of the birth framed within the context of known whale behavior, communication and evolution.

“Audio data revealed distinct shifts in vocal styles during key moments of the birth, including the presence of vowel-like structures, adding a new dimension to Project CETI’s ongoing work decoding sperm whale communication,” according to the nonprofit.

The journal Science published “Cooperation by non-kin during birth underpins sperm whale social complexity.” The organization explained that the study quantified the behavior of the 11-member unit by using high-resolution drone footage, computer vision, and multiscale network analysis using software developed for the work, combined with previously made scientific observations, including reports of whale births.

“The findings show that female sperm whales from two unrelated matrilines come together during a birth to assist the labouring mother, and both kin and non-kin taking turns assisting the newborn. This provides the first quantitative evidence of birth attendance outside of humans and a few other primates,” researchers state in the press release, adding that the birth attracted the attention of short-finned pilot whales and Fraser’s dolphins.

Gruber told Coastal Review what it was like to witness the live birth.

“To be on CETI’s sailing research vessel, in that moment, felt like an encounter with something both impossibly rare and profoundly ancient,” he noted.

“In marine biology, so much of a career is impacted by luck — being present when ocean life decides to reveal itself,” Gruber continued. “I’ve been fortunate enough to witness things like the first biofluorescent turtle seen to humans, but nothing compares to witnessing a sperm whale come into the world.”

Gruber went on to say that very few such births have been seen by humans, and the last scientifically recorded observation after the birth was decades ago.

“It makes you wonder what Herman Melville would have written had he glimpsed this: not the violence of whaling, but the circle of care and a society revealing itself through cooperation,” he explained about the author of the 1851 American novel, “Moby Dick,” that tells the tale of a whaling vessel’s captain and his quest for vengeance against the whale that took his leg.

“We witnessed culture in action,” when the 11 whales, across family lines, “coordinated to keep a newborn alive, communicating in ways we’re only beginning to understand.”

Gruber said it took more than 50 scientists 2.5 years “to begin to interpret even a fraction of that moment, because Project CETI sits at the intersection of marine biology, artificial intelligence, and network science — fields that must come together if we are to decode these lives,” he said. ”And, in some sense, this is why Project CETI exists: We are one of the few teams in the world continuously embedded with these whales, with the tools, the longitudinal data, and the interdisciplinary lens to not only witness something this rare, but to begin to understand it.” 

Shane Gero, National Geographic Explorer, Project CETI biology lead, and founder of The Dominica Sperm Whale Project, leads the research.

Researchers, who have been tracking since 2005, the mother that gave birth, observed her that day with both her mother and her daughter.

“This is the most detailed window we’ve ever had into one of the most important moments in a whale’s life,” Gero said in the release. “Because this family unit has been studied for decades, we could see what the grandmother was doing, how the new big sister acted, and how each helped mom and newborn, placing this rare birth within a deep social and behavioral context.”

The two studies point to cooperative caregiving during birth being ancient evolutionary behavior.

The behaviors documented in the research “suggest that cooperation during births functions to reinforce social bonds between sperm whales, which underpin their large-scale society. Helping unrelated companions drives them to help in return later. In this way, a foundation of trust and collective success builds their social world,” researchers said.

The Carolinas chapter of ocean advocacy organization Oceana invite the public to join “a night of whales and ales” Wednesday, March 25, in Wilmington.

Connect with the experts leading the charge for North Atlantic right whale conservation at the event set for 6-7:30 p.m. at Azalea Station, 1502 Castle St.

Related: NOAA Fisheries considers changing right whale protections

The session will include discussion of how the vessel speed rule is transforming the landscape for their survival.

Those planning to attend are asked to RSVP online by March 23, as the venue can accommodate only about 30 guests.

The Holden Beach Turtle Patrol has announced its 2026 T-shirt design, one chosen from 23 design contest entries from five states.

Its message “tells a conservation story, and it represents the teamwork and dedication required to protect sea turtles today and inspire conservation-minded leaders for the future,” the all-volunteer nonprofit said Wednesday.

The 2026 contest winners are Addison Hedin, a freshman at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and Terrie Buchner, an active member of the Holden Beach Turtle Patrol. 

Their collaborative design, “Every Turtle Counts … Every Action Matters,” “reflects the shared commitment to sea turtle conservation, education and environmental stewardship that defines our Turtle Patrol mission,” according to the organization.

Merchandise featuring the new design, also including hats and bags, is now for sale at the organization’s website at www.hbturtlewatch.org. 

Use the “Shop & Donate Here!” pull-down menu or click the online shopping link on the homepage to view the catalog and make a purchase by credit card or check. 

The merchandise is also available to purchase at The Lighthouse Gift store on the causeway to Holden Beach, 3434 Holden Beach Road.

Sea turtles face increasing threats from habitat loss, artificial light, human disturbance, and climate-related challenges, according to the Turtle Patrol, which works each nesting season to monitor nests, protect hatchlings, and educate the public on how simple actions, such as filling holes, limiting light pollution and respecting marked nests, can make a difference. Proceeds from merchandise sales support the patrol’s ongoing conservation efforts.

The Holden Beach Turtle Patrol was founded in 1989 to monitor and protect the sea turtle population on Holden Beach. The organization operates under the authority of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

For more information about the Holden Beach Turtle Patrol, visit the website or follow on Facebook and Instagram.

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.”

The North Atlantic right whale population increased slightly in 2024 from the previous year, but marine scientists warn that federal protections are crucial to the recovery of the critically endangered species.

The 2024 population is estimated at 384 individual whales, a 2.1% increase over the 2023 estimate, and a continued slow, upward trend in growth over the last four years, according to the latest numbers released by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium earlier this week.

The modest increase follows a year in which researchers documented five right whale deaths, 16 entanglements, and eight vessel strikes, according to the consortium.

So far this year, no deaths have been logged. Scientists have documented one whale that has been injured in 2025 from being entangled in fishing gear, and one whale injured in a vessel strike.

“The slight increase in the population estimate, coupled with no detected mortalities and fewer detected injuries than in the last several years, leaves us cautiously optimistic about the future of North Atlantic right whales,” North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium Chair Heather Pettis said in a release Tuesday announcing the latest population estimate. “With small population increases year to year, we still need strong protective measures for continued growth. We don’t want to take our foot off the gas when it comes to management and conservation efforts.”

Though this year has thus far proved to be a better year for right whales, researchers were hoping for more than the 11 calves born in 2025.

Scientists note that of those, four were born to first-time mothers.

“In recent years, right whales have been delaying giving birth to their first calf until they are older,” Philip Hamilton, a senior scientist with the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, said in the release. “It is encouraging to see four of these older females join the reproductive pool this year. The future of the species rests on their broad backs.”

Scientists from the aquarium’s center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, work together to calculate annual population estimates.

Vessel strikes and entanglements in fishing gear remain the leading causes of death and serious injury to North Atlantic right whales.

Last December, a 3-year-old male spotted about 40 miles off the North Carolina coast was among at least three right whales observed to be entangled in fishing gear that month.

The juvenile male (Catalog No. 5132) was “observed with rope wrapped around its head and mouth, with lines attached to two marked buoys and a single line was trailing the animal by a distance of about three body lengths,” according to information provided by the Canadian government.

That whale, still entangled, migrated to waters hundreds of miles north of Canada’s East Coast, according to an update shared at the consortium meeting.

The yearly updated population estimate is revealed in coordination with the consortium’s annual meeting, which was held through Thursday in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The consortium was started in 1986 and includes research and conservation organizations, shipping and fishing industries, technical experts, U.S. and Canadian government agencies, and state and provincial authorities.

Nora Ives, a marine scientist with Oceana, took a quick break from the meeting Thursday to speak with Coastal Review by telephone.

“These protected species have huge ecosystem benefits to all of us on the planet,” she said. “Large coastal whales like the North Atlantic right whale fertilize our oceans. They kick off the oxygen cycle of the planet. We can all benefit from their recovery.”

Right whales migrate seasonally, spending their spring, summers in waters off New England and further north into Canadian waters to feed and mate.

In the fall, the whales travel south, sometimes more than 1,000 miles, to their calving grounds off shore from the Carolinas to northeastern Florida.

The modest increase in the 2024 population estimate, “proves how resilient these whales are and that they can recover if we let them,” Ives said.

“But we cannot do that without a fully staffed and funded NOAA and a strong Marine Mammal Protection Act, which is the underpinning of all this important work to recover our large coastal whale, the North Atlantic right whale.”

The Marine Mammal Protection Act, enacted in 1972, requires the federal government to safeguard the life and well-being of all marine mammals within U.S. jurisdiction.

President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget includes massive layoffs at NOAA, slashing the administration’s Fisheries division by up to a third of the workforce that oversee the protections of marine mammals, and reduces funding for conservation of marine mammals and endangered species.

“That would be devastating for these programs,” Ives said.

Notably missing from this year’s meeting, Ives said, are NOAA employees, absent because of what is now the second-longest government shutdown in United States history.

“We have colleagues from the federal government who are not able to join us at this annual meeting to discuss the latest research and work toward solutions for the recovery of the North Atlantic right whale,” she said. “Our federal colleagues are doing their best to share their research remotely with prerecorded talks.”

Scientists are calling for the implementation of additional measures that would aid in the recovery of the right whale population, including the use of ropeless or on-demand fishing gear in crab fishing to reduce whale entanglements.

“That would be implemented only in places where whales are detected or expected, so really allowing for this dynamic and adaptive management that can both protect American livelihoods and our American fisheries while also protecting our coastal large whale as they migrate up and down the East Coast,” Ives said.

Scientists support existing federal rules that mandate vessels 65 feet or longer travel at 10 knots or less through designated North Atlantic right whale seasonal management areas in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and southeast.

Earlier this year, NOAA announced its withdrawal of proposed similar speed limits for vessels under 65 feet in length those management areas, though it “encourages” those vessels to slow to 10 knots or less.

“Another year of modest population growth is certainly better than a year of sharp decline, and we should celebrate that while also keeping our eyes on the work ahead,” Jane Davenport, a senior attorney for Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement. “We need new initiatives to reduce vessel strike and entanglement risk in the U.S. and Canada, and the current legislative attacks on the Marine Mammal Protect Act must end, or this iconic species’ extinction is all but guaranteed.”

The North Carolina Coastal Habitat Protection Plan Steering Committee is scheduled to meet this month to discuss the recommendations in a recent study summary on the status of state fisheries.

The committee is set to meet from 1-3 p.m. by web conference Sept. 25.

Included on the meeting agenda is a presentation about the initial recommendations from the Collaboratory Study on the Coastal and Marine Fisheries of the State.

Related: Report: State needs more fisheries scientists to meet goals

The committee will discuss the proposed framework for the 2026 Coastal Habitat Protection Plan amendment as well as the timeline for the 2026 revision of the plan.

The plan is revised every five years to reflect changes in the status of habitat protection in the state. It was initially adopted in December 2004 by the North Carolina Marine Fisheries, Environmental Management, and Coastal Resources commissions.

The plan includes information on coastal habitat distribution and abundance, ecological functions and importance to fish production, status and trends, habitat threats, and recommendations to address those threats.

There will be a listening location at the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries Central District Office on Arendell Street in Morehead City.

For more information, contact Zach.Harrison@deq.nc.gov with the Division of Marine Fisheries.

Each year since 1994 the members of the Holden Beach Turtle Watch Program have produced and sold a new T-shirt design as the organization’s major fundraiser. Again this year, you have a chance to design the shirt.

The 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 1989 monitors, protects and preserves Holden Beach’s sea turtle population, works to foster community-based conservation and education and operates under the authority of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. The group is also known as the Holden Beach Turtle Patrol.

If you love sea turtles and have a talent for graphic design, consider donating your design. The program’s 2026 T-shirt design contest is open Sept. 15-Oct. 15.

The winning 2025 T-shirt design was by Lois Palermo, a local sea turtle lover, and her sister Alyson Natale, of Woodlands, Texas, with “Let the Sea Set you Free.”

Submissions of original hand-drawn designs for the 2026 season T-shirt must meet the following requirements:

• Only one design submission allowed per individual.
• The design must include a sea turtle.
• The design must be an original hand-drawn design.
• The design is limited to two colors.
• The design must be in a PDF format to allow for possible changes in printing constraints.
• The chosen design will become the property of the Holden Beach Turtle Watch Program.

Submit your design to orders@hbturtlewatch.org by 11:59 p.m. Oct. 15. All submissions will be acknowledged upon receipt.

Designs for all past T-shirts can be viewed at www.hbturtlewatch.org; click “Shop T-Shirts, Hats, & Bags.”

A noted wildlife biologist and zoologist involved in researching North Atlantic right whales and credited for his work to conserve manatees, sea turtles and other endangered species has died.

The Clearwater Marine Aquarium announced Tuesday that Dr. James “Buddy” Powell, chief zoological officer at the aquarium and executive director of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, or CMARI, died Saturday, July 19, after a brief illness.

Powell, along with other CMARI scientists, collected more than 20 years of aerial survey data on North Atlantic right whales, an endangered species with only 360 individuals remaining, according to the announcement. Working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, CMARI’s data from wintertime, daily flights from North Carolina to Florida, the only known calving areas for this species, led to ship speed reduction, expanded habitat protection and halted whale mortality in the Southeast, the organization said.

For more than 50 years, Powell approached conservation issues using science and education and resulted in coastal protected areas in Florida, West Africa, Belize and Cuba.

“Buddy’s passion for marine research and his unwavering dedication made a lasting impact — not only on our mission, but on all of us who had the privilege of knowing him,” said Clearwater Marine Aquarium CEO Joe Handy. “Buddy was an integral part of our CMA and CMARI family. His intelligence, warmth and leadership will be deeply missed.”

For 20 years, CMARI researchers and staff were involved in rescuing and releasing manatees, along with other organizations in the Manatee Rescue and Rehabilitation Partnership. Powell long dreamed of making the Clearwater Marine Aquarium a home for manatees and spent years chasing that dream, navigating government funding and rallying private donors.

The CMA in August opened its Manatee Rehabilitation Center and welcomes manatees in need of care.

A native of Crystal River, Florida, Powell’s work began in the 1970s with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as a biologist and manatee specialist. In 1986, he moved to West Africa where he studied manatees and forest elephants for the Wildlife Conservation Society. He moved to Belize in the 1990s to manage WCS’s Glover’s Reef Marine Research Station.

Upon his return to Florida, Powell administered the state’s research program on marine mammals and sea turtles for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. In 2001, he became a vice president at Wildlife Trust where he oversaw the aquatic and national divisions. Powell also conducted research with North Atlantic right whales and the recently discovered Rice’s whales.

In 2008, Powell co-founded the Sea to Shore Alliance, a research, education and conservation organization, to improve the health and productivity of coastal environments for the endangered species and human livelihoods that depend on them. In 2019, Powell joined CMA as vice president of research and conservation when Sea to Shore Alliance merged with Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Powell remained executive director of Sea to Shore Alliance doing business as CMARI after the merger.

Powell was pivotal in creating the Right Whale Festival in Fernandina Beach, Florida, during the past 17 years. Co-hosted by Clearwater Marine Aquarium and NOAA Fisheries, the festival is held each November to celebrate the arrival of North Atlantic right whales as they migrate to the waters around Amelia Island from November through April. Each year, the event educates more than 25,000 people about these critically endangered whales and the efforts to protect them.

He was recently involved in research on Rice’s whales, a new species found in the Gulf of Mexico. He also helped begin the CMA Speaker Series in 2023, bringing Dr. Sylvia Earle, world-renowned oceanographer, to CMA in May.

Powell is survived by his wife, Maureen, and daughter, Morgan “Catherine.”

Powell received his bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from the University of Florida, his Master’s in marine affairs from the University of Washington, and his doctorate in zoology from the University of Cambridge in England.

He was the recipient of the prestigious Pew Award in Marine Conservation in 2000, has been featured on “Champions of the Wild” and National Geographic’s “Wild Chronicles” documentaries, and has been honored with multiple awards and certificates. Powell has authored two books, numerous scientific publications and popular articles.

Organizers of an afternoon fundraiser set for later this month invite folks to raise a glass to growing seafood and meet area aquaculture specialists to learn more about “a growing opportunity.”

Nacho Brewery in Morehead City is hosting the event set for 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, July 26, at 2900-6 Arendell St., in the Morehead Plaza shopping center. All proceeds from beer and food sales will go directly to the Carteret Community College Aquaculture Technology Program.

Organizers said the event will support workforce development and promote the future of sustainable seafood in coastal communities.

According to the college’s website, “Aquaculture is defined simply as the farming and husbandry of aquatic organisms. This can be growing seafood or ornamental specimens for commercial sale, environmental enhancement, research, or education.”

The college says its program curriculum is comprehensive, covering hatchery, grow-out, processing and marketing.

“Students learn practical skills that prepare them for future employment in a variety of industries or for continuation at a four-year institution,” according to the college.

The fundraiser will include hands-on experiences with marine life, marine science trivia and delicious craft beer brewed in Carteret County.

It’s also possible to donate online to support the college program, just select “Aquaculture Program” from the options.

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.

At first glance, the stretch of coast near the Bennett Street beach access point in Kitty Hawk blends seamlessly with the rest of the coastline. 

It’s impossible to tell that, just a few months ago, this sand cradled the lifeless, 19,000-pound carcass of a humpback whale. 

Now, the soft tissue of the humpback lies below the sand. Its skeleton is housed in the neighboring town of Corolla, where students are analyzing remains for a school project, said Marina Piscitelli-Doshkov, stranding coordinator for the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. 

Under the beach, the humpback will join a number of other whales buried along the shore. Since 2016, humpback whale mortalities have increased, along with a rise in the deaths of minke and North Atlantic right whales along the Atlantic coast. 

North Carolina coastal communities are actively debating the cause of the increase in whale mortalities, with concerns surrounding political agendas at the heart of the discussion.

Marine scientists have identified human interaction with ships as the leading cause of these whale mortalities, causing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to attempt tightening vessel speed restrictions.

Fishermen have largely opposed stricter regulations, blaming numerous economic struggles on what they see as a mountain of NOAA rules. 

Others call out the construction of offshore wind turbine facilities as disrupting whales’ migratory paths and hearing, pushing them into waters where fishing and shipping vessels often transit. 

“Everybody’s got an opinion,” said Dewey Hemilright, a commercial fisherman based in Wanchese and a former member of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council. 

‘A Huge Shift’

Piscitelli-Doshkov has spent her career working on necropsies of beached mammals for the stranding network.

“I’ve been doing this for 20-plus years,” Piscitelli-Doshkov said. “There’s been a huge shift in the past few years with people — just in general.” 

Five years ago, when the network was called to investigate a whale in the process of shoring and start the process of determining a cause of death — performing a necropsy — no one would show up, she said.

Now, people flock to the scene.

In addition to the political climate surrounding wind energy, Piscitelli-Doshkov attributes the attention that recent whale beachings receive to social media and the spectacles “going kind of viral.”

The network responded to Kitty Hawk Police officers’ report of the juvenile female humpback on the morning of Dec. 27. After the network finished the necropsy, the Kitty Hawk Public Works Department handled the burial. 

“All we could tell on the necropsy was that it was a blunt-force trauma, and that is usually done by a ship strike,” said Piscitelli-Doshkov. 

Whether the whale was alive or dead when it was hit was to be determined after histopathology and diagnostic analyses were run. NOAA must pay for all samples to be researched, so the stranding network was left “just waiting” for the agency to officially approve more tests, she said.

But the network can’t always determine a whale’s cause of death through necropsy. 

Because whales generate so much heat within their internal insulation system, once they die, “they start pretty much cooking from the inside,” said Craig Harms, director of the marine health program at North Carolina State University’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology. 

Harms, who often works with the network, added that “once you do a post mortem exam, you might be going through a lot of mush.”

‘Barely holding on’

In April 2017, NOAA declared an Unusual Mortality Event, or UME, for humpback whales. The agency defines a UME as a “marked increase in the magnitude or a marked change in the nature of morbidity, mortality, or strandings when compared with prior records”. 

“Most of those increased mortalities are being caused by ship strikes,” Harms said. 

According to NOAA, necropsies conducted on approximately half of beached humpbacks since 2016 showed that around 40% of their deaths involved a ship strike or entanglement. 

NOAA has determined two other whale species — the minke and North Atlantic right — as also experiencing UMEs.

Currently, under NOAA’s North Atlantic Right Whale Reduction Rule — regulations intended to specifically protect right whales — vessels over 65 feet cannot go more than 10 knots in certain areas of the ocean called seasonal management areas.

“There’s only about 360 of these whales left,” Harms said. “And we could very well drive them to extinction within 10 to 20 years if we don’t do something more than what we’re doing.”

In 2022, NOAA proposed to apply the 10-knot speed rule to vessels longer than 35 feet. This suggestion was officially withdrawn Jan. 16 due to “ongoing requests from the public for further opportunity to review and engage with the Agency on the proposal.”

Hemilright said the majority of commercial fishing vessels operate under 10 knots, so recreational fishermen, such as charter boat operators, would suffer most under these speed limitations. 

The speed restrictions make running charters extremely difficult for recreational fishermen, whom Hemilright said have been “devastated” by the regulations. 

“And these are individual, small businesses,” he added. “These ain’t corporations.”

Cane Faircloth, a former recreational fisherman and board member for the North Carolina For-Hire Captains Association, who currently manages a few charter boats, said the reduction rule would mainly affect larger recreational boats.

But many recreational fishermen, he added, are worried that restrictions will continue to apply to smaller and smaller boats. 

“If you start getting into that under 30-foot range, then that hits the majority of boats that are going out in the ocean fishing,” Faircloth said.

It’s not fair, he continued, for speed restrictions to be placed on boats that have never hit or come close to hitting a right whale. Slowing from an average speed of around 25 knots to 10 could double the travel time to fishing waters and hurt business, he said.

Faircloth, a 49-year-old fifth-generation fisherman, said that he has never heard of a recreational fishing boat hitting a whale. 

“I think when those whales are hit, it’s more of your big freighters, big ships,” he said. “Because those big ships, they move as fast as us little boats do, and they take up such a big area — it’s a lot harder for a whale to get away from them than it would be to get away from one of us.”

Between 2022 and 2023, NOAA filed 53 complaints against vessel operators, totaling nearly $1 million in civil penalties. The agency uses satellite technology, portable radar units and active patrols to detect speeding and enforce restrictions. 

While paying a violation can be detrimental to local fisheries, large shipping vessels incur the fees as “just the price of doing business,” Hemilright said.

For big companies, “What the hell’s a $20,000 fine?” he added. 

Where Hemilright sees the largest economic loss for North Carolina’s fishermen under NOAA regulations is competition from imported seafood.

“If every other country had to fish by the same regulations that I have, it’d be a lot more fish in the ocean,” he said. 

According to NOAA, the U.S. imports 70-85% of its seafood.

“We’re barely holding on as an industry, because there’s so many regulations,” Hemilright noted.

‘Doesn’t make any sense’

But fishing charters and cargo shippers aren’t the only entities being blamed for increased whale deaths. Offshore wind turbine facilities have also faced criticism. 

“These facilities are being placed in whales’ migratory paths and feeding and calving areas, and their construction and operations are excessively noisy, which is especially dangerous to whales who rely on sonar, pushing them into shipping and fishing lanes where they suffer deadly boat strikes and fishing entanglements,” Jon Sanders, a research editor for the John Locke Foundation, wrote in a Jan. 3 blog post. 

Harms, however, said humpback, right or minke whales are among the species of whales that do not use sonar. 

Andrew Read is director of the Duke University Marine Lab on Pivers Island in Beaufort and primarily studies longer-living marine species including marine mammals, namely the effects human activity can have.

Read noted that marine scientists such as him and Harms have been documenting whale deaths since before there were offshore wind activities. 

“The science is really clear that there’s no evidence whatsoever that any of these whales are being killed by any activity associated with offshore wind turbines,” he said. 

But Faircloth said he doubts some people performing necropsies “check for the right stuff.” 

While he understands the Dec. 27 whale that washed ashore in Kitty Hawk faced a ship strike, he questions whether its eardrums or communication abilities were affected by the Kitty Hawk Wind offshore turbine being built 27 miles off the coast.

People have linked whale deaths to offshore wind, Read said, to advance a political agenda against the development of green energy sources.

On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Faircloth said people “are all in on green energy” and don’t want to hear about the harm facilities are doing to the environment. 

Besides Kitty Hawk Wind, another offshore wind project has been proposed 22 miles from Bald Head Island — Carolina Long Bay. The project and location is still being assessed and construction has not started.

Hemilright, who works as a fishery representative to Kitty Hawk Wind, said people who are anti-wind “would do anything that would stop a wind turbine from being built.”

The Kitty Hawk Wind project is in a dead zone, a “pass-through” for fishermen, Faircloth said, but Carolina Long Bay would be encroaching on a bustling fishing area. 

“So you’re going to build this wind farm on one of our best fishing grounds, most productive reefs, habitats that are millions of years old, and you’re going to build a wind farm on it where there’s 13 endangered species — that doesn’t make any sense,” he added. 

Both sides of the offshore wind debate are loud, Hemilright said, and there is an incredible amount of complexity and a wide array of parties involved. 

“If I thought there was a smoking gun, then it’d be easy,” he said. 

Update March 18: The post has been updated to include the correct email address. The previously published email address was provided to Coastal Review in error.

Got a kayak, smart phone and basic math skills?

If the answer is yes, you’re eligible to participate in this year’s Terrapin Tally.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal management Coastal Reserve program and partners from the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, N.C. State Parks, Bald Head Island Conservancy, N.C. Audubon, N.C. Aquariums and National Park Service are seeking volunteers to count the elusive diamondback terrapin in their coastal habitat from Carteret County to Brunswick County.

This year marks the 11th Terrapin Tally, a community science project created to collect a snapshot of the diamondback terrapin population numbers in the state. Literal headcounts are conducted from volunteers on kayaks during specific times and predetermined routes.

These surveys, over time, will provide wildlife biologists with population statistics and trends of diamondback terrapins. Tallies collected have contributed to new research projects and management programs for terrapin populations at Masonboro island Reserve and other coastal sites.

“Many NC Coastal Reserve sites provide ideal habitat for diamondback terrapins, and we are excited to continue these efforts for the 11th year alongside the NC Wildlife Resources Commission,” Elizabeth Pinnix, Coastal Reserve southern sites manager, said in a release. “These data are important in understanding terrapin population trends and contribute to informed management decisions to protect this estuarine turtle.”  

Diamondback terrapins are the only reptile that can tolerate brackish waters, where salinity levels constantly change as freshwater runs off land and mixes with ocean saltwater.

The turtles were once abundant in salt marshes, estuaries and mangrove swamps along the country’s East and Gulf Coasts. But coastal development, habitat loss, commercial harvest and fishing interactions have contributed to a population decline.

Diamondback terrapins are a species of special concern in North Carolina.

“Data from the past ten years of Terrapin Tally events has helped point us to areas where further study is needed and has supported management actions that provide additional protection in specific coastal areas,” Wildlife Resources Commission Eastern Wildlife Diversity Supervisor Hope Sutton said in the release. “We hope to continue to contribute to broader conservation goals related to this special little turtle. It will take time and substantial effort, considering the extensive area of its potential habitat here in N.C.”

Volunteers must register to attend one training session in which they will learn how to use a smartphone application and sign up for at least one field collection session scheduled sometime between April 25 and June 15.

Training sessions will be held in-person 10 a.m.-noon April 12 at Carolina Beach State Park visitor center, Hammocks Beach State Park visitor center and via Zoom.

Collection sessions will be conducted in two-hour blocks on the following dates:

• April 25-27.
• May 10-11 and May 15-18.
• June 12-15.

Times may vary by site depending on the tide. Volunteers may choose the dates and number of sessions they would like to complete.

Tally sites this year include Cape Lookout National Seashore, Rachel Carson Reserve, Calico Creek, Hammocks Beach State Park, Lea Hutaff Island, Masonboro Island Reserve, Fort Fisher State Recreation Area, Zeke’s Island Reserve, Bald head Island and Bird Island Reserve.

For questions, email terrapintallync@ncwildlife.org.

What is the link between greentail shrimp and green energy? Dr. Lela Schlenker is set to explain why both are critical to North Carolina’s future.

Schlenker will be the speaker for this month’s “Science on the Sound” lecture at the Coastal Studies Institute on the ECU Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese.

The fisheries liaison for Kitty Hawk Wind, Schlenker’s presentation “What do greentails have to do with green energy? An update on the Kitty Hawk offshore wind project served with a side of shrimp” is set for 6 p.m. Thursday, March 20, at the campus. Offered at no charge, the program will also be livestreamed on the CSI YouTube channel.

Schlenker plans to discuss her research on shrimp populations in the Pamlico Sound that she completed while a postdoctoral researcher at the Coastal Studies Institute, as well as give a project update on Kitty Hawk Wind, an offshore wind project being planned by Avangrid Renewables more than 32 miles off of the Outer Banks.

Schlenker holds a master’s in fisheries science from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and a doctorate in marine ecology from the University of Miami.

As the fisheries liaison for Kitty Hawk Wind since 2023, Schlenker leads outreach for the project to fishermen, state, regional, and federal fisheries managers, and the North Carolina research community. She has worked with stakeholders to develop a fisheries monitoring plan for the project and she works in developing policy and advising on fisheries issues across Avangrid’s global portfolio.

The monthly, in-person lecture series at the Coastal Studies Institute “brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina,” organizers said.

You have probably seen someone do a little happy dance when they spot their waiter heading to the table, entrée in hand. Turns out, sea turtles have the same reaction to the promise of a full belly.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill researchers found that captive loggerheads could be conditioned to “dance” by associating certain magnetic fields with being fed food. This test allowed the researchers to test if they use the magnetic fields like GPS, a compass or both.

The study, “Learned magnetic map cues and two mechanisms of magnetoreception in turtles,” was published Feb. 12 in the science journal, Nature. Magnetoreception means that an animal can perceive the Earth’s magnetic fields.

Lead author Kayla Goforth is a recent doctoral graduate from UNC and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the biology department at Texas A&M University.

For the study, the team conditioned different groups of 2-month-old turtles over the course of two months to differentiate between magnetic fields. The team replicated in the lab magnetic fields that exist along the Atlantic coast, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.  

“Every other day they would experience one specific magnetic field in which they were fed. On the days they were not fed, they would experience a second magnetic field, but they did not receive any reward in this field. Eventually turtles begin to exhibit the ‘turtle dance’ in the field in which they were fed,” she said.

“The turtle dance is a food-seeking behavior that is characterized by the turtle lifting its head out of the water, opening its mouth, alternating its flippers and spinning,” Goforth said. “It’s super adorable.”

To produce the different magnetic fields, the team used magnetic coil systems. A magnetic coil is a large frame with wire wrapped around it, horizontally and vertically. When an electric current runs through the wires, a magnetic field is created inside the coil system, and “by increasing or decreasing the amps running through the wire, we can change the magnetic field.”

At the end of the conditioning period, the team tested the turtles in both magnetic fields and found that turtles danced more in the field in which they were fed.

“You can think of it like training a dog,” Goforth explained. “If you always ring a bell when a dog is given food, eventually they will begin to expect food when the bell is rung, and salivate or beg.”

The team then investigated the mechanisms underlying the turtle’s magnetic senses.

“Turtles have both a magnetic map and a magnetic compass. A magnetic map is a positional sense, like a GPS, while a compass provides directional information,” she said, and both are required for navigation. A map tells you where you are or where you want to be and a compass helps guide you.

For this part of the study, the team tested both the turtle’s magnetic map sense and magnetic compass. Meaning, the turtles had to recognize a magnetic field and had to orient in a specific direction.

“We tested whether these two senses were disrupted by radiofrequency fields,” she said, because these fields are expected to disrupt chemical magnetoreception, which is a theory that suggests complex chemical reactions enable animals to detect magnetic fields.

The team found that the compass sense likely relies on chemical magnetoreception.

“The map sense, however, does not seem to rely on chemical magnetoreception. This means these two magnetic senses, while similar, are distinct. Just like seeing and hearing are two distinct senses,” she said.

Goforth explained that the idea for the study sparked from the well-known fact that sea turtles return to where they were born to reproduce, “but what is less well known is that turtles also display really strong fidelity to their feeding sites, meaning they consistently return again and again.”

How turtles learn the locations of those feeding sites is unknown but the team thought that they likely use magnetic fields.

“A missing piece of this idea though was that we did not know whether turtles could learn magnetic fields, so I decided to try conditioning, or training them to do so,” Goforth said. “We were really excited when it worked, and that assay then opened the door for studies into the mechanisms underlying the magnetic sense.” An assay is a procedure in a lab.

The findings answered two questions: if sea turtles can learn magnetic fields, and if the magnetic map and magnetic compass senses of turtles rely on the same underlying mechanism.

And while the findings answered those two questions – yes and no, respectively — it brought up another: “How sensitive are turtles to magnetic map information, i.e., what is the smallest difference in magnetic fields they could distinguish between? And,” Goforth said, “the next big question is, if the map sense does not rely on chemical magnetoreception, then what is the underlying mechanism?”

Goforth conducted her doctoral research in Chapel Hill’s the Lohmann Lab, run by married couple and biology professors, Kenneth and Catherine Lohmann.

“Kayla began to wonder if we could get the turtles to associate the magnetic signature of a geographic area with food — and therefore act out this turtle dance behavior,” Kenneth Lohmann said in a press release from the university. “She really took the lead in this. I wasn’t at all sure in the beginning whether it would work, but we were happy to have her try, and it turned out remarkably well.”

Goforth said she began researching sea turtles while working on her undergraduate degree at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

“I’ve loved the ocean since I was young, and from the time I was about 5 years old, I was determined to become a biologist,” Goforth explained. “In high school I attended a sea turtle camp in North Carolina and that is what led me to pursue sea turtle research in college. I found them fascinating, and wanted to know how they were returning to the same nesting beaches every year, which is what drew me to Ken’s lab at UNC-Chapel Hill.”

Dana Lim is another doctoral student in the Lohmann Lab studying the function and mechanisms of magnetic sensing in sea turtles.

She assisted Goforth with the study by helping test the effect of radiofrequency fields on the orientation of hatchling sea turtles and with conditioning the turtles to “dance” in the lab.

“Something worth noting about all of these experiments is just the immense amount of work and time that went into them,” Lim said, adding that conditioning the turtles was not easy. For each set of turtles, the team had to commit several hours per day, every day, including weekends, for two months.

Lim continued that the behavioral test used for this research “has been a mainstay in studying sea turtle magnetoreception for decades. However, it requires turtles to use both their magnetic map and compass simultaneously and is carried out at a field site with wild sea turtles. Being able to create a behavioral assay that isolates use of the turtle’s magnetic map in a laboratory setting is a huge step forward in studying the different parts of this key sensory system.”

The payoff is evident “in this very paper,” she said, since it allowed Goforth to test and find evidence for two different mechanisms underlying the map versus the compass in sea turtles.

“This has been a major question in the field of magnetoreception and evidence for multiple magnetoreception mechanisms in a single animal has only been shown a couple of times before this,” Lim explained.

Tara Hinton, an environmental Studies student in her last semester at Chapel Hill, collaborated with Goforth on the research during summer 2022 in Melbourne, Florida.

“Our days began early with beach patrols for loggerhead sea turtle nests, followed by outdoor work in the Florida elements to construct a magnetic coil for our study. When the sun set, we transitioned to night experiments, fueled by Oreos and plenty of coffee,” Hinton said. “It was a rewarding experience to work with some of Earth’s most remarkable magnetic navigators, alongside a team of passionate and dedicated researchers.”

A wild bird rescue organization in Brunswick County is offering a reward for information leading to the culprits who’ve been mangling brown pelicans.

The $10,000 reward, a first in Sea Biscuit Wildlife Shelter’s nearly 20-year history, signifies a breaking point for shelter founder and Oak Island resident Mary Ellen Rogers.

“What I want to do is make them stop,” she said.

No one has been able to pinpoint exactly who “them” is behind what has become a common winter occurrence of dead and severely injured brown pelicans washing ashore on North Carolina’s predominately southernly beaches.

Over the course of a decade, a noticeable number of dead and injured pelicans have been found on shores from Emerald Isle to Topsail Island and down to Brunswick County beaches.

“We get them every year and it’s very depressing,” Rogers said.

The uptick is usually within the same two-month timeframe of each year, January through February, when trawling is closed off other states’ coasts, but remains open off of North Carolina’s beaches. This gives out-of-state commercial fishers two extra months of work they would not have otherwise working off their state shores.

Pelicans are attracted to catch being scooped up in nets from commercial fishing boat trawlers.

Rogers said you can see a “cloud” of these birds gliding overhead of a trawler earning a day’s catch. The problem comes in when a pelican wants in on the catch being hoisted from the sea because this is when it likely becomes caught in the net.

A fisherman, or several for that matter, might use a tool to puncture a hole in the birds’ wing or grab it by the end of its wing, swing it in a circular pattern until the wing breaks, then toss it overboard.

The latter is indicative of an overwhelming majority of injuries dozens of brown pelicans suffered last year, when 60 washed up dead on the shores of the island Rogers calls home.

All but two of the 15 pelicans she sheltered last year had the same injuries to their left wings, just above the elbow.

Rogers describes the visibly graphic injuries as torsion fractures, which occurs when a bone is broken by a twisting motion that leaves it looking like a corkscrew.

A Florida-based wildlife pathologist confirmed one of the critically injured pelicans that washed ashore in Oak Island last year suffered such a fracture, Rogers said.

Though an adult pelican can have a wing span of more than 6 feet, they typically weigh no more than 8 pounds because their bones are hollow, which means, when broken, the bone cannot be pinned.

In other words, there’s no fix to this type of injury in a pelican. So, injured birds that wash ashore alive have to be euthanized.

“We have to do something,” Rogers said. “I can’t just keep complaining about it every year. I just want the injuries to stop.”

She told Coastal Review Monday in a telephone interview that only one dead pelican has been found on Oak Island’s beach since Jan. 1. But she suspects she’ll be getting more calls of reports of dead and injured pelicans as February temperatures steadily hold at those warmer from the previous month.

Rogers hopes the pot of money filled by private donors will entice someone to come forward with evidence needed to nab those responsible for the injuries.

The reward is advertised on posters Rogers tacked up at Oak Island marinas on Oak Island and in Holden Beach fish stores, places where out-of-state commercial fishers might stop to gas up and pick up odds and ends.

The signs were posted in mid-December, shortly after Rogers organized a meeting with local law enforcement, wildlife officials and representatives with the U.S. Coast Guard to discuss the ongoing problem.

Pelicans are a migratory species that fly south in winter and return in late February to nesting areas in North Carolina, including on small islands in the Cape Fear River, and Pamlico and Bogue sounds. They can also be found in the state throughout the year.

Pelicans are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which prohibits people from injuring, killing, possessing or harassing these birds without a permit, Miranda Turner, a wildlife health biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s Game and Furbearer Program, said in an email.

“Penalties for breaking the (act) can vary widely depending on whether the person knew that what they were doing was illegal, how many birds were taken, and more,” she wrote.

Those include misdemeanor charges, fines up to several thousand dollars, and prison.

The reward Sea Biscuit Wildlife Shelter has posted will remain in effect through March 1.

Anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of those intentionally harming pelicans in the waters off Brunswick County may report so by visiting NC Wild TIP (Turn In Poachers). Witnesses may dial 911 as a secondary reporting measure.

This is a developing story.

Residents and visitors in kitty Hawk are being asked to steer clear of a dead whale found washed ashore on the town’s beach Friday morning.

Oceana scientist Nora Ives has confirmed to Coastal Review that the marine mammal is a humpback whale.

The whale was found near the Bennett Street Beach Access. Kitty Hawk Police have contacted wildlife authorities for assistance, according to the department’s social media.

WAVY TV 10 out of Portsmouth, Virginia, reports that National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said the female whale is about 27 feet long and has signs of shark scavenging, which is when sharks eat an animal that is already dead.

NOAA officials told the television news station that whale strandings on the North Carolina coast are common this time of year as whales migrate south.

The hundreds of cold-stunned sea turtles that washed ashore after temperatures fell earlier this month on the Outer Banks have been given a second chance.

Over the last few weeks, staff at the Sea Turtle Assistance and Rehabilitation, or STAR, Center at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island have been caring for close to 600 sea turtles that were cold stunned, which happens when water temperatures quickly drop before sea turtles can migrate to warmer water. Cold stunning can lead to death if not treated. 

The Roanoke aquarium’s Animal Husbandry Curator Leslie Vegas told Coastal Review Thursday that most of the sea turtles are rescued in the Pamlico Sound. They enter the sound through inlets because they are foraging for food in the subaquatic vegetation, or seagrass, beds. A few wash up on the ocean side, but the vast majority are rescued from the sound.

Vegas is among the more than 135 aquarium staff and volunteers to care for the 553 cold-stunned sea turtles delivered to the aquarium between Dec. 1 and Dec. 7.

As of Dec. 17, the aquarium had received 576 sea turtles including the state’s most common species, the loggerhead, green and Kemp’s ridley, according to the aquarium.

“Because we are still ensuring our numbers are accurate, we don’t have exact species counts yet — and because the event is not technically over — but for this event so far, we have received approximately 580 turtles, with the most being 163 in one day,” Vegas said. So far, 399 turtles have been released as part of this event, some are being cared for at other facilities and about 50 arrived dead or died shortly after arrival.

As of Friday afternoon, the STAR Center was caring for 60 animals, and more releases were expected to take place in the coming weeks, Vegas said subsequently. With temperatures expected to drop again, aquarium staff are preparing for more cold-stunned turtles. 

The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission manages the state’s sea turtles, which are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.

“The great success in returning these turtles quickly to the wild is due to the combined efforts of many different volunteers and collaborators with the NCWRC Sea Turtle Project,” Commission biologist Matthew Godfrey said.

More than 20 different sea turtle project groups along the coast help monitor sea turtle nesting and stranding activities along the coast, including the Network for Endangered Sea Turtles, or N.E.S.T, the National Park Service, North Carolina Aquariums, the College of Veterinary Medicine at N.C. State University, the Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center.

For this recent cold-stunned event, aquarium staff, the STAR Center, and N.E.S.T. volunteers worked with Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the Wildlife Resources Commission, the Outer Banks SPCA, area veterinarian clinics, Phideaux fishing vessel, and the U.S. Coast Guard Stations at Hatteras Inlet and Fort Macon worked together to care for and release the sea turtles.

“Sea turtles are important to coastal ecosystems,” and because sea turtles are endangered species, any efforts to protect them are important, Vegas said.

Green sea turtles use sea grass beds as feeding grounds and they eat the subaquatic vegetation itself. “Just like plants on land, the SAVs and sea grass beds require ‘maintenance’ and ‘pruning,’ which the sea turtles provide. Without that maintenance, it’s possible that those beds would suffer enough damage to not thrive,” Vegas said.

Sea turtles use oceanic coastal shorelines to nest and lay eggs and these nests provide stabilization and nutrients to an ecosystem that is often nutrient depleted. These nutrients support the minimal plant life that exists on dunes, which also aid in shoreline stabilization, she continued.

Vegas explained that cold stuns occur naturally.

 “If the decrease in temperature is gradual, the turtles will naturally migrate to southern waters, but if there’s a rapid decrease, the turtles miss the environmental cue to migrate, and the stunning event occurs,” she said.

Sea turtles are exothermic and they cannot regulate their own body temperatures. When the temperature drops, typically below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, the sea turtles become weak and lethargic, sometimes appearing deceased due to their extreme inactivity and lethargy. The turtles usually float to the water’s surface and from there, winds, tides or both can wash the turtles onto the shore, she added. Cold-stun events have been documented since the 1800s, and because it is not preventable, the response to these events is human intervention and rehabilitation to rescue as many as possible.

When temperatures drop, “our partners with the Network for Endangered Sea Turtles, the National Park Service, and N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission scout the soundside shore for turtles and transport them to us at the aquarium,” Vegas said.

NEST Director Jerrica Rea told Coastal Review that the volunteer-run nonprofit organization is thankful for partners in the NPS, ferry system and aquarium.

“Without the collective work from everyone, managing an event like this would not be possible,’ Rea said.

During the cold-stun season that takes place from December to around March, NEST volunteers patrol the soundside waters of Hatteras Island looking for sea turtles.

“We monitor different things like wind direction and water temperature to determine when the turtles may start to struggle. Sea turtles will generally migrate to warmer waters as our water cools in winter but occasionally we will have a perfect storm like this event,” Rea said, referring to the cold-stunning from earlier this month.

The sea turtles are typically juveniles who are content to feed in sound waters and don’t get the cue to leave when the temperature goes from warm to cold quickly. The sudden drop in temperature and the prolonged nature of it led to NEST finding over 560 sea turtles in one week.

Those turtles are taken to a staging site in Buxton where NEST volunteers take measurements, photos and document them, Rea said. They are then transported to STAR center at the aquarium, a more than 100-mile round trip ride.

“As an all volunteer organization, we are extremely proud of the efforts from our cold stun team. They work in the worst conditions-rain, snow, wind and freezing temperatures. We have over 20 patrol responders, 50 staging site volunteers and many more transporters,” Rea said. “The dedication our volunteers have to rescuing sea turtles is indescribable. It’s an honor to be part of such an incredible team and to see the community come together to help this endangered species.”

Turtle triage, treatment

Once the turtle arrives at the aquarium, staff administer fluid therapy since the turtles have likely been exposed and may have become dehydrated while stunned.

The length, width and weight of each sea turtle is recorded as well as any abnormalities or injuries. Blood work determines if there are nutritional or other deficiencies, like organ impairment. Because their organs are not functioning optimally while stunned, additional medication is not typically dispensed until they are gradually brought to healthy, warm temperatures, Vegas explained.

Bringing sea turtles up to the right temperature cannot happen fast, either. For this process, the turtles are moved to different sections of the aquarium, each set at a slightly warmer temperature, to ensure that the warming is gradual.

The Roanoke Island aquarium uses an incident command system and emergency response in the form of triage, like how humans are triaged in emergency care, to rehabilitate the sea turtles.

“We split the turtles up based on the level of care necessary to release them, as well as by species and size. Some species can be housed together and some cannot. In an event this large, those that are most likely to survive are prioritized to maximize our number of turtles released,” Vegas said. “We provide supportive care to those with more complicated medical issues until we can devote more time to them, after healthier turtles are released.”

The sea turtles that only needed to be warmed up were released within two to four days of rescue. “The more complicated medical cases could be here for weeks or months depending on their rate of progress and the care they may require,” Vegas said.

“If the individual turtle has additional medical needs, we keep the turtle in house for treatment, to go through the full rehabilitation process that addresses their specific medical needs,” Vegas added, but if no other health issues are identified beyond cold stunning, the turtles are released to the Gulf Stream as quickly as possible after they are at temperature, their bloodwork is cleared by veterinary staff, and they exhibit normal sea turtle behaviors.

“The releases are made possible through our relationship with the U.S. Coast Guard at Cape Hatteras, who are kind enough to transport our turtles to the Gulf Stream,” Vegas said.

The incident command system ensures that all departments within the aquarium are engaged to provide excellent turtle care and supportive care for humans,” Vegas said.

“This event involved many partners and staff, and that has been the highlight of it all for me. Seeing the dedication and teamwork that was fostered, along with the animals that were saved, are the things we are most proud to share,” Vegas said.

Sea turtles that appear still or sluggish in the sound water or on a beach during winter months should not be pushed back into the water or moved. Report any turtles under duress to the Sea Turtle Stranding Hotline via N.E.S.T. at 252-441-8622.

The N.C. Aquarium on Roanoke Island operates under the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s Sea Turtle Permit No. 24ST46.

Coastal Review will not publish Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in observance of the Christmas holiday.

MOREHEAD CITY – The state Artificial Reef Program sank a 55-foot trawler at the artificial reef site, AR-305, off Cape Lookout, last week.

The program is part of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Marine Fisheries.

The fishing vessel Alexandria Dawn, the latest addition to the artificial reef, was built in 1984, but has been out of use for around a decade, division officials announced Monday. Before sinking, the vessel was cleaned extensively in accordance with Environmental Protection Agency requirements, officials said.

The vessel was purchased and its sinking funded by state Coastal Recreational Fishing License revenues. The Alexandria Dawn is located at 34 degrees 16.653 minutes north, 76 degrees 38.651 minutes west.

The Alexandria Dawn joins three other vessels at AR-305: the 183-foot Spar, the 439-foot Aeolus and the 105-foot Thomas Dann. The site also contains 1,700 tons of donated recycled concrete, deployed in July 2023. The site is approximately 28 nautical miles south of Beaufort Inlet, in 105 feet of water, and is a popular site for fishermen and divers.

An artificial reef is a manmade underwater structure, typically built to promote marine life in areas with a generally featureless bottom. In North Carolina, artificial reefs serve as crucial spawning and foraging habitat for many commercially and recreationally important fish species.

Nearly two dozen organizations have filed a petition seeking federal protection for the only coastal estuarine-dependent turtle species in the world.

Diamondback terrapins, living mostly in coastal marshes from Massachusetts to Texas, have been killed off by the tens of thousands over the past few decades, making it one of the most endangered species on the planet, according to a 130-page petition filed last month with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries.

The nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity and 20 other organizations have partnered to petition NOAA Fisheries to list diamondback terrapins as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, a move supported by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a global environmental network of scientists, environmental experts, governments and civil organizations.

“We talked with every diamondback terrapin biologist out there, dozens across a 15-state range, from Massachusetts to Louisiana,” said Will Harlan, Southeast director and senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It was clear from talking with all the biologists that they are very concerned about this species. We’ve seen 75% declines across most of their range and several complete extirpations of populations in certain places, so they’re declining and not recovering.”

That’s despite efforts to bring attention to the plight of these elusive turtles, identifiable by the diamond-shaped patterns on their shells, in coastal states along the Eastern Seaboard and across the Gulf of Mexico.

While development and rising seas are depleting the diamondback terrapins’ habitat — up to 60% of their coastal marsh habitat is expected to be wiped out by the end of this century — their greatest threat today is the crab pot.

Each year, an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 terrapins drown in crab traps, Harlan said.

Terrapins are air-breathing reptiles that may climb through a crab pot’s funnel-like entrance to get to bait or simply because they are inquisitive animals. Once inside, a terrapin, like a crab, cannot get out of a trap.

“Their natural curiosity can cause a domino effect, whereby Terrapins may follow each other into the pots, particularly during the breeding season,” according to the petition.

Commercial and recreational crabbers drop an estimated 3 million crab pots each year into inland coastal waters. Each year an estimated 25-50% of all crab traps are lost or abandoned.

There are an estimated 150,000 of these “ghost traps” in Chesapeake Bay alone, Harlan said. An estimated 250,000 derelict traps are left in the Gulf of Mexico each year, he added.

“We’ve got to get the bycatch reduction devices on crab traps,” Harlan said. “That’s priority number one. It’s a very inexpensive and easy solution that won’t affect crab harvests, but will save a very threatened species.”

The Center for Biological Diversity has been working at the grassroots level up to the state level to advocate that crabbers install bycatch reduction devices on their traps.

These little, plastic devices typically cost no more than $1 each. They keep out turtles, reducing terrapin deaths by 94%, according to biologists.

Harlan said there has been some success in getting bycatch reduction device requirements implemented in Florida and “a few other states.”

“But it’s clearly not enough and not the scale needed to save these turtles,” he said.

The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries a few years ago created two terrapin management areas – one in the area of the Masonboro Island Reserve and the other around the Zeke’s Island Reserve and Bald Head State Natural Area. Fishers who crab in these designated areas have to use state-approved terrapin bycatch reduction devices on their pots between March 1 and Oct. 31.

Hope Sutton, eastern wildlife diversity supervisor with the state Wildlife Resources Commission, said in an email that there have been “a number of studies” in the state examining different types of bycatch reduction devices and the potential impacts of these devices to crab harvests.

Diamondback terrapins are listed as a species of concern in the state. Terrapins are included as a species of greatest conservation need in the state’s Wildlife Action Plan.

But the lack of a federal listing status makes it difficult for states to take measures to protect both the species and its habitat.

Diamondback terrapins have different status and different rules “across the states that comprise the species’ range,” Sutton continued. “The mix of statuses and protective measures across the states this species occurs in contributes to confusion for fishers as well as making collaboration across state lines more challenging for researchers and resource managers. It also makes communicating with the public about the species more challenging. Federal status could make some of these activities easier by reducing this confusion and allowing collaborative efforts to be simplified and efforts to be more efficient.”

When a species is listed, funding sources are available to cover the costs of developing and implementing conservation programs for that species.

“If the diamondback terrapin became listed, these funding sources could be pursued by individual states or cooperatively by a group of states,” Sutton said.

NOAA is required to issue a preliminary decision within 90 days of the petition filing.

“If it gets a negative finding then that’s the end of the process,” Harlan explained. “But a positive 90-day finding kicks off a 12-month status review. During that one year they will conduct a much deeper dive into the population status of this species. They will fund additional research for assessing the threats and getting stronger population estimates in certain areas.”

After the one-year review, NOAA fisheries will release its final decision on whether to list the species.

If the agency declines to list the diamondback terrapin endangered, Harlan said organizations will continue advocating for state-level enacted bycatch reduction rules.

Storms largely drive sand movement along the Bald Head Island beachfront and sand is being lapped away at the east end, where village officials are considering building a terminal groin to keep erosion at bay.

The unpredictability in the frequency and strength of those storms were among several points of concern raised by the Bald Head Island Conservancy last week over the prospect of additional hardened erosion control structures on the Brunswick County island’s shores.

“So, we’re going to try and control something, which we don’t even know how to predict the future of, and we’re going to try and put something there that says we know what it’s going to do?” Chris Shank, executive director of the Bald Head Island Conservancy, recently asked the village council. “It’s not an easy system to understand. To think, if we put something in the way, can you block sand in that area for a little while? You probably can for a little while. How long will it last? We don’t know that.”

Shank was invited to make a presentation to the village council during its meeting Friday, wrapping up a week when legislation was introduced that would allow the village the option to add a second terminal groin to its shoreline and replace a series of fabric sand tubes with a field of rock structures.

Related: Bald Head Island seeks to change hardened shorelines law

The proposed revision to a statute that lays out the rules for the construction, funding and number of terminal groins permitted on the North Carolina coast bumps the total of allowable hardened erosion control structures from six to seven.

Language added to the law went last week before the Senate judiciary committee, which is expected to take it up for further discussion this week. That language defines a terminal groin as one or more structures constructed at the terminus of an island or on the side of an inlet, or where the ocean shoreline converges with Frying Pan Shoals.

This would give the village the option of building what it describes as a field of rock structures that would replace fabric sand tubes installed along the west end of south beach and a terminal groin at the east end of south beach. The sand tubes have to be replaced every few years.

A state-permitted sandbag revetment installed by a private country club known as The Shoals Club protects it from the encroaching ocean at the east end of the south-facing beach.

Shank played a video of a female sea turtle lumbering under the cover of night along the beach to the sandbag wall. With no place to dig a nest, she eventually turned around and headed back to sea, he said.

“We don’t want something like that to be a long-term measure, especially not in this area,” Shank said, adding that the sandbags are analogy for how rock structures might affect nesting sea turtles.

“We’re sharing the island with our wildlife and, look, I’m not unrealistic about the fact that we have massive erosion in that area. I get that. But we have to be smart about the future.”

Bald Head Island’s beach is federally designated critical sea turtle habitat.

The soft tube groin field rests on the opposite end of the south beach from the 1,300-foot-long terminal groin the village had constructed nearly 10 years ago. The groin, a wall-like structure built perpendicular to the ocean shoreline, is designed to stop the movement of sand.

Bald Head Island was the first to build a terminal groin after the North Carolina General Assembly repealed a 30-year ban on such hardened erosion control structures on the state’s ocean shores.

Bald Head Island Mayor Peter Quinn made clear last week that village officials have not determined whether they want to go the route of having additional hardened structures on the island’s beachfront.

“It needs to be studied before anything is acted on, and this is a step toward making sure that it’s even a possibility before we do anything,” he said. “We’re working with the conservancy. This isn’t something we’re trying to steamroll or anything.”

Shank cautioned council members that, should they decide against building groins at the east end of south beach and the bill amendment passes in Raleigh, the door is opened for a future council to do so.

“I know that there’s a process involved, but it’s complicated,” he said. “By having this legislation passed you have created a pathway for somebody else to walk through and that is a major concern,” he said. “Once that pathway’s open, then what?”

The conservancy is a nonprofit organization that sponsors and facilitates coastal scientific research and offers recreational and educational activities to the public.

Shortly after Shank’s presentation, village council members approved a contract with Marinex Construction of North Carolina Inc. to place more than 1 million cubic yards of sand onto shore at the terminal groin fillet and the east end of south beach. That project is expected to begin later this year.

The village is sending out another round of bids for a project to replace the soft groin tubes on the east end.

The anglers have spoken.

And they apparently did not spare using colorful language to express their thoughts on proposed temporary mandatory harvest reporting rules state regulatory agencies must enforce later this year.

The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries and North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission received a combined more than 3,700 public comments on the proposed rules at the close of the comment period May 20, fisheries Director Kathy Rawls said Thursday morning during the fisheries commission’s quarterly business meeting in Beaufort.

“All I’ll say about them right now is that Catherine (Blum) has a long list of cuss words that she had to redact from the information so that’s kind of where we are,” Rawls said, referring to the division’s rulemaking coordinator.

The comments will be presented to the Marine Fisheries Commission on June 6 during a special-called meeting in which the commissioners are expected to adopt the temporary rules. The Wildlife Resources Commission, or WRC, is scheduled to meet that same day and is also expected to adopt the proposed rules.

In a move likely to draw even more ire from recreational anglers, the state is axing flounder season this year. The fisheries commission declined during its meeting Thursday to hold a special meeting to discuss alternatives to shuttering the already-short season altogether for 2024.

The division issued a release Thursday afternoon stating that the season will not open for recreational harvest this year because 2023 estimates indicate catch surpassed the quota allowed under the commission’s Southern Flounder Fishery Management Plan.

Under the proposed rules on mandatory harvest reporting, which are the result of a provision tucked into a controversial law the General Assembly enacted last year, recreational coastal anglers will be required to report harvests of flounder, red drum, speckled trout, striped bass and weakfish.

Related: No 2024 recreational flounder season

The law also requires commercial fishers to list all catch, including finfish, shellfish and crustaceans, that they do not sell to a dealer on their trip-ticket forms. Dealers submit those forms each month to the state, and uses the information reported on the tickets as a means to help manage fisheries resources.

The law dictates that the rules will be enforced in phases over three years. The reporting requirement is set to go into effect Dec. 1, after which time a fisher caught not complying with the law will receive a verbal warning.

Full enforcement of the law is set to kick in Dec. 1, 2026, after which time offenders will face a $35 fine violation. Repeat offenders will face the threat of license and permit suspensions.

Rawls said that division officials hope the General Assembly will push back by one year when the rules go into effect.

A draft special provision that would grant the agencies an extra year is “out there,” she said. 

“That was, from our seat, something that we really wanted to better inform the public because I just don’t think folks are aware that this is coming and it is going to be a huge change for people that are fishing these species,” Rawls said. “The division is doing its best to work through this and the timeframe that we’ve been allowed. We’re still hoping for that extension, but we are working as if that will not happen.”

The law was not requested by either agency, but rather a fledgling nonprofit called North Carolina Marine & Estuary Foundation.

Foundation Executive Director Chad Thomas in an interview with Coastal Review earlier this month said the idea behind the law was to bring together two state agencies that have a history of conflict over their shared management of joint fishing waters, fill gaps left by federal reporting surveys, and make North Carolina a pioneer in coastal fish data management.

Upward of 1 million recreational anglers fish in state waters any given year, Rawls said.

“And we’re talking about a recreational harvest with these five fish (species) totaling around 2.5 million fish,” she said.

Rawls reiterated that the new reporting mandate will not replace the Marine Recreational Information Program, or MRIP.

That multi-governmental program uses recreational fishing surveys to estimate total recreational catch.

The new mandatory reporting rule “will just provide another data set that we will have,” Rawls said.

Division and wildlife officials are hashing out the finer details of a reporting system for recreational anglers. 

Legislators gave the agencies a one-time, $5 million allocation to set up a reporting system.

During a public hearing last month, officials said anglers will be given the option to report their harvest by scanning a QR code or by going directly to the division’s website. Printed report cards will be placed in bait and tackle shops and other areas for anglers who do not have smartphones or are in areas that do not have cell phone service.

Anglers will be required to provide their fishing license number or first and last name, ZIP code, the types and numbers of species harvested, length of each fish, the area in which those fish were harvested and the gear used to harvest them.

Fishers must report their harvests when they have finished fishing for the day. Those who use printed report cards to record their catch must submit the information electronically by midnight the following day.

Related

• Hearing set on new fishing catch reporting requirement published April 24
• Anglers: Reporting law puts burden on them, unenforceable published May 6
• Fisheries Division seeks to delay mandatory catch reporting published May 8

State fisheries officials are asking lawmakers for another year to roll out a new harvest reporting requirement for coastal recreational anglers and commercial fishermen.

“This will allow us more time to get the word out to the fishing public about the new law and to help them understand the importance of compliance,” North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries Public Information Officer Patricia Smith said in an email earlier this week.

The reporting requirement is set to go into effect Dec. 1, after which time a fisher caught not complying with the law will receive a verbal warning.

Related: Anglers say reporting law puts burden on them, unenforceable

As it stands, full enforcement of the law, which will carry a $35 fine for each violation and the threat of license and permit suspensions for repeat offenders, is set to kick in Dec. 1, 2026. Chad Thomas, executive director of the North Carolina Marine & Estuary Foundation, the relatively new nonprofit that initiated a plan to get the harvest reporting requirement into law, said that the group supports the division’s request.

He said the idea behind the law was to bring together the two state agencies that have a history of conflict over their shared management of joint fishing waters, fill in gaps left by federal reporting surveys, and thrust North Carolina into the spotlight as a pioneer in coastal fish data management.

Under the law, coastal recreational anglers will be required to report harvests of five species: flounder, red drum, spotted seatrout (speckled trout), striped bass and weakfish (gray trout). Thomas said those are the most high-profile recreational fish on the coast.

The division and state Wildlife Resources Commission are accepting public comments on a set of proposed temporary rules the agencies presented during a hearing last week, one in which anglers questioned why the law was created and argued it puts an unfair burden on recreational fishers.

Commercial fishers will for the first time have to include on trip-ticket forms catch they do not sell to a dealer. Dealers submit trip-tickets each month to the state, which uses the information reported on the tickets as a means to help manage fisheries resources.

Thomas, a retired fisheries scientist who worked at the state wildlife agency for 30 years and is a member of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, pointed out that the legislation the North Carolina General Assembly passed last year does not dictate what the division should do with the data that will be collected under the new reporting requirement.

“But the information that would be gained is extremely valuable,” he said.

The federal survey known as the Marine Recreational Information Program, or MRIP, fails to capture a solid statistical account of certain fisheries in some states, Thomas said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is looking at ways to improve its fishing effort survey. Last August, NOAA Fisheries released the results of a pilot study that suggested reporting in some fisheries and in some states was inflated by as much as 40%.

Data collected through a state reporting requirement will provide information that, over time, will allow fisheries officials to determine the percentage being reported for a species and allow them to follow trends in those species, Thomas said.

“So, if you’re seeing your red drum populations are going up, trending up by way of harvest, and then the federal data is showing something different than that, scientists have an opportunity to ground check both of those data sets,” he said. “If your data is trending up, that’s a good thing. If it starts to drop down, then that can recognize that perhaps another management action needs to happen. It’s a way to backcheck the data the division is already using without putting any undo expectations on the division to use.”

He likened the reporting system to that required of hunters, who must report seasonal kills of wild game including deer and bear to the state wildlife office.

“That’s the only way they can survey to see how many of those animals are harvested every year,” Thomas said. “Without that information, how else do they sample? That’s the idea here behind just the five recreational fish. Those five support a billion-dollar fishery on our coast.”

Smith with the division said in her email that the division does not have an economic impact estimate for the five species that have to be reported.

“Once we move to the permanent rulemaking process, a fiscal analysis will be required,” she said.

Neither the division nor Wildlife Resources requested the new reporting program, which comes with a one-time $5 million allocation from the General Assembly.

Some anglers who spoke during last week’s public hearing argued the new reporting law will simply not be enforceable.

The division’s Marine Patrol and the commission’s law enforcement division have a combined force of a little more than 100 enforcement personnel charged with overseeing an area that includes more than 300 miles of ocean shoreline, nearly two dozen inlets and thousands or estuarine coastlines.

House Bill 949, introduced in the House May 1, aims to inject $600,000 in recurring funds and a one-time $10,000 allocation to the Division of Marine Fisheries for five full-time Marine Patrol officer positions.

That’s not enough, Thomas said, but it’s a start.

“Will (officers) be able to capture everything? Absolutely not,” he said.

Still, he argued, most recreational license holders are going to “do what’s right” and adhere to the rules. And, he said, enforcement officers can ramp up patrols during seasons, which, like that of flounder season, have a relatively small window.

Thomas also addressed concerns that the new reporting requirement will not include fish anglers catch and release.

“Harvest is the only thing that you could enforce because how many I caught and how long I went out there is nothing that I can provide proof of if I’m stopped and checked,” he said. “I think down the line the division, if they find the data to be necessary, then they can add those fields.”

Thomas said additional funds will be needed to keep the reporting program going.

“That’s part of what our group wants to do down the road with the state,” he said. “We want to see this program be successful. North Carolina’s trip ticket information is some of the best in the country. Why not have something like that on the recreational side?”

Note: This report features images of a whale necropsy.

CURRITUCK COUNTY — In the morning hours, Carova Beach is quiet. In a few months it will be packed with visitors. The popular spot in the Outer Banks is known for its wild horses and remote location, but it’s early March, and the scene is empty apart from seabirds diving, shorebirds scurrying, and the occasional truck passing by on the offroad path.

Eventually, an unusual sight emerges from the deserted shoreline: a 26-foot-long dead minke whale.

Soon the team arrives. Researchers from North Carolina State University, North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, University of North Carolina Wilmington, North Carolina Aquarium and its Jennette’s Pier, and volunteers have come from across the state to perform a necropsy.

When a whale dies offshore, the carcass eventually sinks and becomes a whale fall, providing vital food and habitat for deep sea scavengers, invertebrates, and microbes for years or even decades. When a whale carcass washes ashore, its body is used in a different way.

The main purpose of a necropsy is to investigate the cause of death, but samples are also taken to support a myriad of research. Tissue was collected to study diet and dive physiology. The eyes will be used in research about marine mammal vision. Feces were collected for parasitology analysis. The dorsal fin was radiographed to map out blood vessels and inform future biological sampling on live animals, just to name a few. Additionally, a variety of samples were gathered to archive for future research or share with collaborators.

This female, who died from a bacterial disease called brucellosis was the third dead whale found in the region in just as many days.

Earlier that week a humpback whale washed ashore in Virginia Beach, followed by another at nearby False Cape State Park. The same day this necropsy was performed, a pregnant and a juvenile dwarf sperm whale washed ashore in Nags Head. The following day, a bottlenose dolphin was found at Nags Head and a common dolphin at Southern Shores. In April, a nursing North Atlantic right whale was found off Virginia Beach, a victim of a vessel strike, and a humpback whale was found off the coast of Rodanthe entangled in fishing gear.

While it’s unusual to find strandings so close together in space and time, Dr. Craig Harms, a researcher from the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine and Center for Marine Sciences and Technology, or CMAST, says that may just be an unfortunate statistical anomaly.

That blip is because of storms that create strong currents and waves that bring ashore carcasses that may have otherwise remained at sea.

Further, spring marks migration season in the area, when larger numbers of whales are making the journey back north from their wintering grounds. The swelling population also means that more whales die here.

Even so, this minke whale is part of a broader trend.

Since 2017, elevated minke whale mortalities have occurred along the Atlantic Coast from Maine through South Carolina, totaling 166 thus far, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records.

Minke whales aren’t alone in this predicament. Unusual mortality events, or UMEs, are also active for the North Atlantic right whale and humpback whale. Causes include vessel strikes, fishing entanglements and disease.

Climate change also plays a role.

“Warming waters are bringing fish into areas they haven’t gone before and it’s bringing whales closer to shore,” said Blair Mase-Guthrie, NOAA’s Southeast Region marine mammal stranding coordinator. “So, the effect of that, because they’re closer to shore they’re being impacted by human-related events such as getting entangled in fishing gear and getting hit by ships and boats.”

According to NOAA, about 40% of humpback whales necropsied have died from either vessel strikes or fishing entanglements.

Some have tried to place blame for the mammal deaths on offshore wind development, but such claims are unsupported by research. Additionally, many proponents of this idea are far-right groups and fossil fuel interests attempting to block clean energy projects.

For example, three right-wing groups — The Heartland Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and the National Legal and Policy Center — recently filed a lawsuit against Dominion Energy, citing a Virginia wind project as a threat to endangered right whales.

Arguments against offshore wind liken noise from surveys, construction and operation of turbines to seismic air guns used in oil and gas surveys or tactical military sonar.

Wind energy advocates, however, contend that noise from offshore wind activities have a smaller impact zone because they produce lower noise at a higher frequency and narrower beamwidth than those related to fossil fuel exploration.

Further, precautions are put into place to minimize impact. For example, pile-driving has been halted during months when endangered right whales are likely to be present, and observers are required to be present to search for marine animals nearby and stop pile-driving if whales are seen.

Marine biologist Dr. Andrew Read, director of the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, studies marine vertebrates, particularly longer-lived species such as whales. He also is a commissioner of the Federal Marine Mammal Commission.

One area Read says needs more study is the effect turbines could have on the distribution of zooplankton near wind farms, but thus far, studies have not been conclusive.

“Let me say clearly as a scientist to you, there is absolutely no evidence, not a single dead animal has ever been examined on the U.S. East Coast that we can tie to mortality associated with offshore wind. Not one,” Read said. “And yet, there’s this whole ecosystem of people and organizations out there that, because of politics and economics and how those two are intertwined, that will tell you, ‘Of course, it’s offshore wind.’”

Even though the scientific consensus is that vessel strikes and fishing entanglements, not offshore wind, are the biggest contributors to whale deaths, interests acting under the guise of conservation continue to make gains in turning public opinion against offshore wind.

While the debate is unlikely to go away anytime soon, Read said that, in the meantime, researchers must keep cutting through the disinformation noise.

“I think we have to be true to our science and say what we know,” he said. “But we also have to not let people get away with mischaracterizing what we say.”

To report an injured, entangled or dead marine mammal, call the NOAA Fisheries 24-hour Stranding Hotline at 866-755-6622.

Coastal recreational and commercial fishermen will have to report certain fish harvests under a new North Carolina law that takes effect later this year.

Preliminary details are scant as to how the two state agencies tasked with overseeing the reporting requirements will implement the program, one that is slated to be discussed during a combined virtual public hearing next week.

The N.C. Marine Fisheries and N.C. Wildlife Resources commissions have opened a public comment period ending May 20 on the temporary rules, which were established under the North Carolina General Assembly’s Regulatory Reform Act of 2023.

The mandatory harvest reporting requirements were tucked into the controversial law, one environmental advocates referred to as a “pro-polluter” bill for cutting favors to industries that control hog and poultry farming, discharge per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and build fracked gas pipelines.

Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill last October, but legislators overrode that veto, setting into motion this requirement that was not sought out by the regulatory agencies and that must now enforce it.

“We do recognize that there are data gaps, particularly in the area of recreational fishing and we do have hopes that this is something that may take a while, but that can be built into a system that can fill those data gaps,” said Patricia Smith, N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries public affairs officer.

Under the law, recreational fishermen must report harvests of red drum, flounder, spotted seatrout (speckled trout), striped bass and weakfish (gray trout), to the division. Reports will most likely have to be submitted electronically through a smartphone app or computer.

Commercial fishers will have to report all fish harvested, including catch that is not sold to a dealer. This means commercial fishermen will have to include fish caught and used for bait, and fish caught and kept for personal consumption.

Commercial fishermen record the catch they sell to dealers on trip-ticket forms. The dealers then submit those forms each month to the state fisheries division.

The Division of Marine Fisheries uses the data gathered from the trip tickets as a means to help manage fisheries resources.

Doug Todd, a member of the North Carolina Fisheries Association’s Board of Directors and part-time commercial fisherman, has been including all of the harvest he keeps for the past few years.

“If I get 5 pounds of fish I record 5 pounds of fish just so there’s a record of what’s being caught,” Todd said. “That just gives a better record of what’s being caught and used out of the ocean and around the waterways. There’s no true numbers on what’s being caught in the recreational zone. It’s at least a start to try to get some more accurate data.”

Smith said that commercial fishermen will not be required to obtain a dealer’s license to comply with the new harvest reporting mandate.

“We’re still working on a lot of details,” she said. “We’re just trying to get the word out now because this requires some temporary rules.”

The law does not require fishermen to report their discarded catch, or fish that are caught and released, information some argue would help provide a more complete picture of the impacts to species through recreational fishing.

Tom Roller, a member of the state Marine Fisheries Commission and owner of WaterDog Guide Service in Beaufort, said that while the new law may seem like a burden in the short term, the hope is that the new reporting requirements will help produce better data.

“It’s very clear that we need better data,” he said. “Recreational fishermen want better data. Commercial fishermen want better data. It’s very important that we find new ways to address some of our data deficiencies. The question is whether or not this is the better way to do it.”

Enforcement of the new law will be phased in over the next three years.

Fishermen must report their harvest beginning Dec. 1, after which time anyone found in violation of the law will receive a verbal warning.

The division’s Marine Patrol and the Wildlife Resources Commission’s law enforcement division will start issuing warning tickets to violators of the new law Dec. 1, 2025. One year after that, violators will incur a $35 fine and face suspension of their fishing licenses and permits.

While the system the state will use to collect harvest reports is being funded through a one-time, $5 million allocation, there is not funding at present to pay for additional enforcement staff in either of the state agencies.

Combined, those agencies have a little more than 100 enforcement personnel, forces stretched thin by a coverage area that includes more than 300 miles of ocean shoreline, nearly two dozen inlets and thousands of estuarine coastlines, including bays, sounds and wetlands.

The agencies will host the virtual public hearing at 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 1. Pre-register for the public hearing online. Pre-registration is required. To join by phone call 833-568-8864. The webinar ID is 160 805 6277.

Comments on the Marine Fisheries Commission rules may be submitted through an online form or by mail to:

Comments on the Wildlife Resources Commission rule may be submitted through an online form, emailing regulations@ncwildlife.org (include name, county and state or residence) or by mailing:

The public comment period on the temporary rules closes at 5 p.m. May 20.

Nearly two dozen organizations have petitioned the federal government to list the American horseshoe crab as an endangered species.

Overharvesting and habitat loss has caused a sharp decline of horseshoe crab populations in recent decades, prompting the call for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to list the marine animal under the Endangered Species Act.

“We’re wiping out one of the world’s oldest and toughest creatures,” stated Will Harlan, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “These living fossils urgently need Endangered Species Act protection. Horseshoe crabs have saved countless human lives, and now we should return the favor.”

Horseshoe crabs are harvested for their blood, which is used to detect toxins in drugs and medical devices, the center said.

Nearly 1 million were harvested for their blood in 2022, according to the center.

“The continued reliance on horseshoe crab blood by pharmaceutical manufacturers has led to a rapid decrease in the population of this important species,” said Kathleen Conlee, vice president for animal research issues at the Humane Society of the United States. “Fortunately, there are non-animal alternatives that can replace the use of horseshoe crab blood and help protect these amazing animals from further overharvest.”

Synthetic alternatives are being used in Europe, the group said.

The center and 22 partner organizations petitioned NOAA to list the prehistoric creatures – a species that has been around for more than 450 million years – that are also harvested for bait by commercial whelk and eel fisheries.

Their largest populations, which are found in the Delaware Bay, have declined by two-thirds in the last 30 years, the groups said.

These brown, body-armored animals have also lost spawning grounds up and down the Atlantic and Gulf coasts where they lay their eggs. The petitioning groups attributed the habitat loss to development, shoreline hardening and sea-level rise.

Horseshoe crabs’ decline has impacted other species, including the rufa red knot, a shorebird that eats horseshoe crab eggs to pack on calories as it flies 19,000 miles from South America to the Arctic. The rufa red knot was listed as threatened in 2015.

“Horseshoe crab eggs are incredibly nutrient dense, sustaining the federally threatened red knot on their long migratory journey,” stated Steve Holmer, vice president of policy at American Bird Conservancy. “Greater protection of the horseshoe crab is needed to fully recover the red knot, as well as conserve other shorebird species, such as the ruddy turnstone and semipalmated sandpiper.”

Asia’s tri-spine horseshoe crab, a sister species to the American horseshoe crab, is nearly extinct.

“It is clear from the available science that the current fisheries management policies are failing to protect and sustain these ancient mariners,” said Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society. “We must do more to keep them and the red knots and other life that depend on them from disappearing from this Earth.”

Other organizations that joined in on the petition include: Humane Society of the United States, American Bird Conservancy, American Littoral Society, New Jersey Audubon, Delaware Audubon, Delaware Ornithological Society, Healthy Gulf, Humane Society Legislative Fund, League of Women Voters of New Jersey, Maryland Ornithological Society, Revive & Restore, One Hundred Miles, The Safina Center, Wild Cumberland, Forest Keeper, Coastal Expeditions Foundation, Mobile Baykeeper, Shark River Cleanup Coalition, Southeastern Massachusetts Pine Barrens Alliance, Save Coastal Wildlife, New Jersey League of Conservation Voters and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network.

During any given summer on North Carolina beaches, volunteers comb the shores for evidence of freshly laid sea turtle nests.

As the height of tourism season goes on, beachgoers are likely to see brightly colored ribbon tied between stakes used to cordon off carefully buried nests.

Few are likely to witness darling hatchlings emerge to the sandy surface, flipper paddle their way to the waves and disappear in the ocean, taking with them secrets researchers have yet to unlock.

Take, for example, endangered loggerhead sea turtles. We don’t know their average life span, the typical number of nests a female will lay over her lifetime, or how many years she will nest once she reaches maturity.

Nesting females usually lay their eggs under the cover of night, leaving nest scouters, at best, a trail of flipper prints between the stretch of beach that expands and retracts with the tide.

This elusive nighttime nesting ritual usually means volunteers are not out to see females on the beach, much less tag them. Even if a turtle is tagged, that tag may come off.

All of this makes it particularly difficult for researchers to get a good idea of how the loggerhead population is faring in the wild.

For decades now, researchers have counted nests as a way to measure female sea turtle populations.

This is pretty much the worldwide, standard practice, one that leaves more questions than answers, including what’s been happening on beaches from North Carolina to Georgia where loggerhead nest counts are up.

“One of the challenges is when there’s an increase in nests, does that mean that there’s an increase of females or maybe they’ve just had a super foraging year and they’ve got tons of energy and they’re able to lay more nests,” said Matthew Godfrey, sea turtle biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

Now researchers believe they have an answer.

“We confirmed that there’s a pretty strong correlation between the nest counts and the actual female population size,” said Brian Shamblin, an associate research scientist with the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.

Shamblin heads a multistate study that uses genetic tagging to track female loggerheads in the northern recovery unit, an area that spans from the southernmost beach in Georgia up the East Coast to the North Carolina-Virginia state line.

Loggerheads in the northern recovery unit are genetically distinct from those that nest in Florida and other areas of the world.

To better understand how loggerheads in this unit are doing in the wild, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission in 2010 partnered with the South Carolina and Georgia departments of natural resources and the University of Georgia for the Northern Recovery Unit Loggerhead DNA Project.

That partnership was formed after Shamblin in 2006 discovered he could extract DNA from the shells of nonviable sea turtle eggs and use that DNA fingerprint to identify a mother with her nest.

“Because we know each female for each nest we’re able to look at some of the patterns and it does look like the majority of females prefer to stay say within 25 miles or so (between nests) so usually the same island or maybe two islands adjacent to each other,” Godfrey said. “But there are other females that are less faithful and they tend to wander more and they tend to move 200 to 300 miles between nests.”

For example, one loggerhead laid a nest north of Nags Head, swam down to northern Florida to nest there, then headed back up north to Cape Lookout to lay another nest in one season.

“We don’t know why some animals take these extended periods further away,” Godfrey said. “Females don’t tend to nest every year. They nest every second or third or fourth year so you need a long-term dataset to uncover these behavioral trends.”

Through this study, researchers have found that some turtles take as many as seven to nine years off between nesting seasons.

“Which again, is really interesting and we’re not quite sure why,” Godfrey said. “We don’t know if they’re truly taking off that time or maybe those are the ones that went really far south outside of our study area and maybe they’re nesting in southern Florida and that’s why we don’t have a record of them.”

Why the numbers matter

The hope is that the female loggerhead population increase is a result of conservation measures put in place over the last 40 years.

After loggerheads were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1978, the push to save them began.

Volunteer conservation programs began popping up on beach nesting grounds.

Government protections were put into place water and onshore. Environmental windows were created to prohibit things like beach nourishment projects during nesting season.

Shrimpers who initially faced severe restrictions and closures to protect sea turtles now use turtle excluder devices designed to let sea turtles escape from trawl nets.

By the mid-1990s, Godfrey said, nest monitoring and protection was standardized statewide and volunteer groups regularly patrolled nesting beaches between May 1 and Aug. 31.

“Because of this infrastructure of people checking every day for nests we have a built-in sampling opportunity so we rely entirely on our collaborators and volunteers in the state to be collecting these samples for us because they’re the ones out there every day,” Godfrey said.

Each year, thousands of samples are shipped to Shamblin’s lab for DNA testing.

It’s an operation that costs between $100,000 and $150,000 each year in North Carolina, which has received for the past 12 years federal grants through the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Godfrey said state fisheries has also received funds from various sea turtle volunteer organization fundraising efforts.

The Wildlife Resources Commission also receives funding for the sea turtle program and other wildlife research and conservation management projects through the North Carolina Nongame and Endangered Wildlife Fund. North Carolinians who file state tax returns can donate all or a portion of their refund to this fund.

Godfrey said it is crucial the state remain part of the regional loggerhead study.

“To have a better understanding of numbers of females in the population had bene one of the key knowledge gaps in loggerhead natural history,” he said. “The whole goal of management and conservation of loggerheads is to try to get them off the Endangered Specials Act, to try to get them to a place where their population is robust enough that they aren’t considered under threat of extinction anymore.”

Shamblin and other researchers are forging new ways to study loggerheads in order to be able to answer questions about how long they typically live, whether warming seas are affecting the number of males in the population, and various nesting habits.

“I think we’re on the cusp of having some great additional tools to add in so that makes keeping up with this sort of demographic stuff that we’re doing with the genetic tagging really important to try to maintain until those come online,” he said.

Dozens of sea turtles pulled from frigid waters in the recent cold snap that sent temperatures plummeting along the East Coast are being treated at North Carolina Aquariums.

The N.C. Aquarium at Roanoke Island as of Tuesday had 111 cold-stunned sea turtles in its care and more are reported to arrive, according to a release. And, the aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores is caring for 42 sea turtles that lost their ability to swim as water temperatures quickly and drastically dipped, causing the turtles to suffer a hypothermia-like state.

This winter so far has resulted in more than 200 sea turtles requiring treatment at the state’s aquariums.

Juvenile green, loggerhead, and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles feed in shallow sounds throughout the summer and fall, after which time these cold-blooded animals typically head for warmer waters.

But rapidly plummeting temperatures can catch sea turtles off guard, leaving them little time to make it into warmer waters.

Their heart rate and other functions slow, leaving them lethargic and unable to swim,” Michele Lamping, Pine Knoll Shores aquarist and sea turtle specialist said in a release “Prolonged exposure can result in paralysis, and the turtles float on the surface or wash up on beaches.”

So far, 63 cold-stunned sea turtles have been rehabilitated at the state’s aquariums and released back into the wild.

Cold-stunned turtles being treated at the aquariums have been recovered from Cape Lookout National Seashore, Core Sound, and areas spanning between Ocracoke to the Virginia state line.

Biologists with Cape Lookout National Seashore, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, or WRC, and sea turtle conservation volunteers find, record and transport cold-stunned sea turtles to regional facilities.

Turtles found stranded in the southern part of the state are taken to North Carolina State University’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology, or CMAST, to be assessed and initially treated. The turtles are then sent to various rehabilitation centers, including the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center in Surf City and the state aquariums in Pine Knoll Shores and Fort Fisher.

Cold-stunned turtles rescued from Ocracoke north are moved to a staging site on Hatteras Island then transported to the STAR Center for initial assessment and treatment under the supervision of a veterinary team.

Rehabilitation can take anywhere from two weeks to several months, according to Amber Hitt, Sea Turtle and Rehabilitation Center, or STAR, coordinator at the Roanoke Island aquarium.

“We work closely with our veterinary team (to) administer individual care to be sure that they are ready for release,” Hitt said in the release.

During rehabilitation, sea turtles are provided nutritional care and various treatments, including fluids, antibiotics, eye drops and wound care. Each turtle must receive a final health check by a veterinarian and microchipped, which allows researchers to trace the turtle’s locations and growth.

Once turtles receive a clean bill of health they are usually released near the Gulf Stream, where waters temperatures are at least 70 degrees. The turtles are returned to the wild by various crews, including those from Duke Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, U.S. Coast Guard Stations at Cape Hatteras and Fort Macon, and private fishing vessels.

The WRC heads sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation efforts and collaborates with several federal, state and private organizations, including the aquariums, CMAST, N.C. State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, Cape Lookout National Seashore, Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, Network for Endangered Sea Turtles, or N.E.S.T., Cape Hatteras National Seashore, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

What to do if you see a struggling turtle

Sea turtles spotted not moving or seemingly sluggish in the water or on a beach during winter months should not be pushed back into the water or moved. 

Anyone who sees a sea turtle that appears to be in distress should call the Sea Turtle Stranding Hotline, which will dispatch a response team to transport the turtle for triage.

For turtles found south of Ocracoke Island, call 252-241-7367.

Turtles stranded on Ocracoke and Hatteras Island may be called into the Cape Hatteras National Seashore at 252-216-6892. 

Sea turtles found along Oregon Inlet and north should be reported to N.E.S.T. at 252-441-8622.

Reprinted from SamWalkerOBXNews.com.

A decades-long battle to restore navigable access on the Currituck Sound off Corolla appears to have taken a more upbeat tone at a recent meeting between representatives from Currituck County and Army Corps of Engineers staff.

County Manager Ike McRee and state Sen. Bobby Hanig, R-Currituck, met with Corps officials Jan. 12 in Wilmington to discuss allowing dredging of a channel in the sound from the Whalehead Club public docks and ramp, and inside the Historic Corolla Park boat basin.

“Going down there and spending time with them had a big impact on them,” Hanig said. “It was a very good meeting.”

A channel has existed in various forms through the shallow waters off Corolla since before the Currituck Beach Light Station was built in the 1870s.

Efforts to dredge a channel since the 1990s have been blocked by state regulators on the grounds that it would harm submerged aquatic vegetation, and the Corps has used various other regulatory and technical reasons to turn it down.

Attempted illegal dredging of the channel using the propellers of three boats led to the conviction of two NC Ferry Division employees and guilty pleas by two others to federal charges in the early 2000s.

Prior to January, the last meeting between the county and the Corps on the Whalehead channel was in 2018, when the county was essentially told it would ever happen.

McRee shared with the Currituck Board of Commissioners at its Jan. 16 meeting some of the details that came out of the gathering with the Corps.

“I thought (it was) a positive meeting, partially because they have a new team there,” McRee said. “(A) new colonel, new regulatory affairs director… their attorney was also there as well as the deputy for the Corps and the Wilmington district.”

“They did not say no, they didn’t say yes, but they said there’s a possible path forward,” McRee said. “They would like us to put together again a more defined statement of purpose.”

Hanig noted that they were very prepared heading into the meeting, with detailed information about the history of not only the channel and the Whalehead Club itself, but also the millions of dollars invested in the mansion and grounds that have been owned by the county since 1991.

“Jenny Kelvin from the (state) Senate President Pro Tem’s office did a remarkable job,” Hanig said. “Her research was spot on; we had all the information from previous attempts.”

McRee and Hanig also noted that staff from the office of state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, were also very helpful, spending the week prior to the meeting gathering information and making contacts at both the federal and state level on behalf of the county.

“I think we have an opening that will allow us to attempt to move forward again to (with an) application to hopefully be successful this time,” McRee said.

Local officials and residents are hopeful that the dredging would not only allow boats to access Historic Corolla Park, but also improve waterflow and help address invasive submerged aquatic vegetation that choked the boat basin this past summer.

Low oxygen levels caused by high temperatures led to at least one fish kill in the boat basin, while decaying mats of Eurasian watermilfoil and alligator weed were responsible for a noxious smell across the Currituck Outer Banks on strong southwest winds.

Following Hanig’s comments to the board, County Commissioner Paul Beaumont noted that the state senator, who was previously a Currituck commissioner, having direct involvement at the meeting made an impact on Corps officials.

“It adds credibility that the state is very interested in this as well,” Beaumont said. “You’re about as busy right now as you could possibly get … taking the time and going down there. Thank you so much.”

“(The Corps was) very forthcoming with how … to make it a good application to get it across the finish line,” Hanig said. “We do have our challenges — it’s going to be a process.”

Hanig expressed that everyone needs to have patience with the process, estimating it may be up to two years before a final decision is made.

This story was provided courtesy of SamWalkerOBXNews.com, a membership-supported news service covering the Outer Banks. Coastal Review has partnered with Sam Walker to help expand our coverage of news relevant to the North Carolina coast.

Disclosure: Coastal Review correspondent Kip Tabb also serves on an informal citizens advisory board for the Outer Banks Field Site.

WANCHESE — Artificial light at night did not adversely affect sea turtle nesting north of Oregon Inlet from 2014 to 2022, undergraduate students found this fall during a four-month study.

A University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute for the Environment program, the semester-long Outer Banks Field Site combines environmental research and community engagement into the collaborative capstone research project. Coastal Studies Institute, a multi-institutional research partnership, and the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus, host the program.

In addition to measuring the affect of artificial light, which they call ALAN, on sea turtle nesting, the students examined what the public thinks about artificial light at night.

The students presented their findings Dec. 12 during the monthly “Science on the Sound” program on campus.

Senior Drew Huffman, in introducing the study, noted that artificial light at night studies are often focused on inland areas, rather than shorelines.

“There’s a scarcity of existing literature on artificial light at night and coastal systems, as opposed to what we know about more terrestrial systems,” he said. Adding that’s another aim of their research, “to try to expand that knowledge so that we have of a grasp of what things are like for coastal systems and artificial light at night.”

Numerous studies show a repeated pattern of sea turtle hatchlings crawling toward artificial light, such as a street light, rather than toward the ocean.

The students wanted to gauge the effects of artificial light on nesting.

“Is there a relationship between sea turtle nesting and artificial light at night across the Outer Banks over the last nine years? And if so, what is it?” Those were the questions senior Laura Montague posed in describing the study.

The study area extended north from the north side of Oregon Inlet to the north end of Corolla, but did not include Carova, because, as one student explained, no one had a four-wheel-drive vehicle able to navigate the oceanfront area with no paved roads.

Reported sea turtle nesting data from 2014 to 2022 shows a trend of increasing nesting activity, although overall activity, including false crawls and nests laid, fluctuated during that period, the students found.

During that period, activity hit a low point in 2017 where only about 35 active sites were reported, comparted to 100 active sites in 2022.

“False crawls refer to instances when a female sea turtle comes ashore on a beach but instead of nesting, turns back around to re-enter the ocean,” according to the paper.

Although there was no clear reason for the trend toward more activity, junior Kenza Hessini-Arandel told the audience that she and the other students felt conservation efforts could account for the increase in activity.

“(The) Endangered Species Act that protected a lot of these species and also management efforts that organizations like (the Network for Endangered Sea Turtles) and the National Park Service perhaps helped increase the number of turtles that we’re seeing along the coast,” she said.

There was at least one anomaly in sea turtle activity that the students could not explain.

The Outer Banks is at the north end of the range where sea turtles nest, and Corolla, at the north end of the study area, saw significantly less nesting activity than sites at the south end near Oregon Inlet, which is considered to be a more compatible nesting area for turtles.

Though the number of Corolla nesting sites was significantly less than those on the south end of the study area, the number of false crawls was the same there as areas where activity was greater, representing a much higher percentage of false crawls compared to nests.

“However, we do not see the same pattern when looking at false crawls; there seem to be more false crawls in the northernmost and southernmost areas compared with areas in between,” the paper noted.

“There are a lot of variables that come into play with false crawls and we don’t know exactly why we are seeing this trend,” Hessini-Arandel said.

The students included environmental research in the study, as well. They explored the social science of artificial light, whether people attach significance to artificial light, and their perception of how it affects the environment.

The public perception survey included about 500 responses, with respondents divided into residents, seasonal residents and visitors.

The students found a strong indication that the public perception is that artificial light has a significant impact on the environment, and regardless of age or sex, or even where people lived, they were concerned about the effect.

Although there were small variations in the degree of concern among the groups, the overall response showed a clear level of unease with the amount of artificial light on the Outer Banks.

Junior Julie Yakaboski noted that a significant majority of people said they were either concerned or very concerned.

“Taking these two together, that’s about 70% of our responses,” she said.

Significantly, almost no one – fewer than 5% — said they were “not concerned about it at all.”

That attitude appears to correlate closely with whether respondents felt artificial light should be reduced. Asked whether they felt artificial light on the Outer Banks should be reduced, 90% of respondents said they either agreed or agreed strongly. More than 60% said they “agreed strongly.”

Because of the timing of the recent survey, answers were somewhat skewed by the number of full-time and seasonal residents, students said. However, the results would seem to indicate there is support for local governments to implement regulations or ordinances controlling artificial light.

“Public perceptions of ALAN have the power to affect the development of policies that regulate it,” according to the paper.

This story has been updated to include omitted partners in the effort.

A whale calf that washed ashore last week on Emerald Isle’s ocean shoreline died from ingesting a plastic balloon.

Scientists who performed a necropsy on the Gervais’ beaked whale removed a crumpled-up plastic balloon that had obstructed the calf’s gastrointestinal tract, ultimately causing its death, according to a University of North Carolina Wilmington release.

The whale, a nursing, female calf just under 11 feet long, was first spotted by beachgoers in shallow waters, before eventually washing onto the beach and shortly dying thereafter on Oct. 30.

Gervais’ beaked whales typically live several hundred miles offshore at the edge of the continental shelf and beyond.

Marine mammal experts, including those with the UNCW Marine Mammal Stranding Program, veterinarians, and students from various state educational institutions and agencies studied the deceased whale.

UNCW Marine Mammal Stranding Program Director Michael Tift said in a statement that there are a many reasons why marine mammals strand on beaches, including diseases, wounds from other animals, ship or boat strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and ingestion of human-manufactured products such as plastic.

“Unfortunately, it is common for us to identify plastic ingestion as the cause of death in these rare deep-diving marine mammals,” Tift said. “Ingestion of these balloons can cause pain, suffering and ultimately the death of many wild animals. It is terribly similar to the ingestion or encounter with plastic straws and other plastic products many have seen cause injury or death in sea turtles and sea birds. I have seen Mylar® balloons in some of the most remote places on the planet and have witnessed their devastating effects on wildlife.”

About 125 marine mammals, including whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals and manatees strand on North Carolina’s beaches every year, according to Tift. The only way to determine a cause of death in these cases is to investigate each one, he stated.

Tift, an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Biology and Marine Biology, encourages lawmakers to consider banning plastic products. He and other members of the network also encourage consumers to consider using biodegradable alternatives to balloons, including paper decorations, flowers or candles.

Consumers who use balloons are asked to deflate them and remove all gases before throwing them away.

The necropsy of the whale was performed at North Carolina State University’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology, or CMAST and included teams of marine mammal scientists, veterinarians and students from UNCW, NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, NC Aquariums, Duke University Marine Laboratory, North Carolina Maritime Museum Bonehenge Whale Center, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences and the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries.

Marine mammal strandings may be reported by calling the following numbers:

• Outer Banks: 252-455-9654.
• Central coast: 252-241-5119. 
• Southern coast: 910-515-7354.

Featured Image

A humpback whale navigates the tide May 4 in Beaufort Inlet, as photographed from Fort Macon State Park. Humpback whales’ flukes can be up to 18 feet wide, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says their markings are unique enough to identify individuals. Photo: Doug Waters

Ten loggerhead sea turtles touched down at Michael J. Smith Field in Beaufort Monday, May 1, ahead of their release back into the Atlantic Ocean.

The loggerheads were rehabilitating at the Johnny Morris’ Wonders of Wildlife National Museum and Aquarium in Springfield, Missouri, after being cold-stunned in early January near Cape Cod. The New England Aquarium in Boston transported the turtles to the nonprofit aquarium in Missouri.

“It’s not often we have loggerheads in Missouri,” Wonders of Wildlife Director of Animal Care Mike Daniel said.

A private company named Turtles Fly Too transported the loggerheads from Boston to Springfield and then from Springfield to Beaufort. Upon arriving at Smith Field, turtle biologist Matthew Godfrey with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission organized the offloading and transport to Fort Macon State Park in Atlantic BEach with the assistance of Wonders of Wildlife aquarists Holly Blackwood and Jacquelyn Denney.

“We are super excited to help out with the rehabilitation,” Blackwood said. “We have 30-foot-long tanks at our aquarium that can accommodate these larger sea turtles.”

After a few minutes’ ride across the three bridges linking Beaufort, Morehead City and and Atlantic Beach, the loggerheads arrived at Fort Macon State Park at the eastern end of Bogue Banks. There, Ranger Ben Fleming led the procession of off-road-vehicles down to the shore for unloading and release.

The crates were placed on the sand, tags were removed and a last goodbye from staff and volunteers was given before the loggerheads hit the waves.

“It’s bittersweet,” aquarist Jaquelyn Denney said. “These guys have been with us for four months!”

As the loggerheads hit the sand they charged for the waves.

“It’s amazing how fast they move once they hit the water!” Blackwood said.

A series of several feverish paddles and the loggerheads were headed out to the Atlantic Ocean.

“I started to cry when they went under the waves,” Blackwood said. “Now they are where they belong.”

When it comes to saving cold-stunned sea turtles, pardon the cliché, but it really does take a village.

There are those at the front end of the process, like the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission authorities who follow water conditions to pinpoint temperature dips, the volunteers and professionals with the National Park Service who help go out looking for turtles during cold snaps, the veterinarians who perform triage, those who work in places that house and nurse the turtles back to health, and those who get healthy turtles back to the sea.

“Whenever we have a mass stranding even the people that have to come together to get the sea turtles, transport the turtles and then do the triage on the turtles before we even get them is a huge undertaking,” said Michele Lamping, aquarist and sea turtle specialist with the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores.

The state’s three aquariums recently released 107 loggerhead, green and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles – the most common sea turtle species to North Carolina – back to Atlantic Ocean, where they hitched a ride from a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the crew of which got the turtles back to warmer water.

Cold-stunned turtle strandings are typical this time of year. Sudden, overnight drops in temperatures in sounds, which are feeding grounds and refuge areas for sea turtles, can equate to hefty patient loads at the aquariums and Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center in Surf City.

The typical chilled-to-the-core patients are juveniles tend to overwinter in shallow waters that, when get too cold too fast, cause the turtles to become inactive, float and bob on the surface where they’re at the mercy of winds and currents.

“It’s just simply that the land masses, the way they are between the sound and the ocean, you have these winds and they kind of block the turtles from being able to leave the sound and get back to the ocean in time before they’re cold stunned,” Lamping said. “So, the warm water’s not far away, but they have to swim around the whole island to get there sometimes and those are the ones that get stuck.”

Sea turtles thrive best in waters where temperatures are in the 70s.

“That’s when everything metabolically is working the best,” Lamping said. “And then when it gets to the 60s they’re still functioning fine, but once you get in the 50s that’s when they start shutting down.”

Sea turtles can actually freeze to death.

Larger turtles tend to handle the cold better, but even they are susceptible to cold snaps. Lamping said finding larger, cold-stunned turtles is uncommon, but it does happen.

The cold-stun season usually begins in December and January and slows down by March in North Carolina. Rehabilitation facilities here take turtles stranded in areas further north as early as November.

The time it takes a turtle to recover and be returned to the wild depends on everything from timing to the extent of the turtle’s injuries.

Though rare, some turtles are found within a day of being cold-stunned and can be immediately taken to the ocean and released.

Those that have suffered in the cold for more than a day may take anywhere from one to three months to recover. Sea turtles that have suffered severe frostbite and bone deterioration due to cold exposure may be in rehabilitation for more than a year.

“Most of them go through maybe about a month,” Lamping said.

Once a turtle is transported to a rehabilitation center, the general recovery process goes like this: it’s likely too weak to lift its head so it spends the first day or two out of water where it is kept hydrated with subcutaneous fluids, then the turtle is placed in shallow water so that it may begin drinking.

Those suffering from pneumonia or various infections are typically administered injectable antibiotics. Most turtles are not given oral antibiotics because they do not feel well enough to eat.

The sea turtles released earlier this month out of Coast Guard Fort Macon were rehabilitated from December and January strandings. Only six turtles brought in during that timeframe did not pass their physicals. Lamping said those turtles will probably be cleared for release within the next two weeks.

Most of the turtles released were rehabilitated at the Sea Turtle Assistance & Rehabilitation Center, or STAR, at the Roanoke Island aquarium.

STAR still has nearly 80 cold-stunned patients. Collectively, the aquariums at Pine Knoll Shores and Fort Fisher are caring for fewer than 20.

Stranded sea turtles may be reported by calling 252-241-7367 or your local stranding response team.

A new political campaign in one northeastern state is pitting whale against wind.

A dozen New Jersey beach town mayors and a congressman from the state are calling for a moratorium on all offshore wind activity in the wake of several whale deaths.

The mayors and Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., in a Jan. 23 letter expressed concerns that acoustic surveys may have contributed to the deaths of seven whales along the New Jersey and New York coasts over a 38-day period. The letter was signed after a Jan. 9 press conference by Clean Ocean Action and Protect Our Coast New Jersey, groups that blame the deaths on geophysical surveys that use sonar to map the ocean’s floor.

It’s a correlation whale experts and scientists say is a stretch.

“This notion of a moratorium because of these whale fatalities, there’s no evidence for that yet,” said William McLellan, one of the world’s leading experts on large whale necropsy. “I can say there’s no single case that’s been directly connected to any acoustic or seismic testing. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be investigated or that there shouldn’t be concern.”

How thousands of wind turbines in the mid-Atlantic, habitat for critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, may affect the species has become a routine topic of discussion as North Carolina gears up to become a potential source of offshore wind energy.

Gov. Roy Cooper has set a goal for offshore wind to generate 2.8 gigawatts of electricity by 2030 and 8 GW by 2040, which would power some 2 million homes.

Plans are underway for a 2.5-gigawatt wind farm off the coast of Kitty Hawk. Avangrid, the company that has leased the wind energy area, or WEA, has indicated construction could start in 2026 and power as many as 700,000 homes.

Duke Energy and French company TotalEnergies won leases last May for offshore wind areas south of Bald Head Island. Energy produced at those sites could eventually power up to 500,000 homes.

Last fall, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and the Bureau of Ocean Management released a draft strategy to minimize the impacts of offshore wind development on right whales and their habitat.

Right whales and humpback whales have both been included in what is referred to an unusual mortality event for the past several years.

An unusual mortality event is defined under the Marine Mammal Protection Act as unexpected stranding events that involve significant die-off of any marine mammal population and demands federal attention.

McLellan, a retired research associate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and former co-leader of the university’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program, said the unusual mortality event for humpback whales started in 2016.

“The population has increased quite steadily,” he said. “I won’t say dramatically, but it certainly has been a positive increase, which has been very good to see for humpback whales.”

As the population has increased so too have humpback whale strandings, McLellan said.

“It isn’t something that just lit up in the last couple of years,” he said. “I’ll only comment that Congress showed great interest in it a couple of weeks ago, but humpback mortalities have been going on for decades in the mid-Atlantic.”

NOAA Fisheries issued a release last month stating that there no links between the recent whale mortalities and ongoing sonar surveys for wind farms.

“At this point, there is no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales,” the agency states. “We will continue to gather data to help us determine the cause of death for these mortality events.”

About 40% of partial or full necropsies conducted on humpback whales since January 2016 showed evidence of either being struck by a ship or entanglement, according to NOAA.

McLellan said vessel strikes, either sharp or blunt trauma, “is a really common finding in humpback whales.”

McLellan has conducted more than 100 necropsies, or post-mortem examinations, on large whales since 1995. He sits on various take reduction teams, which develop plans to reduce risks of fishing gear to marine mammals, and teams leading the charge in aiding in the recovery of North Atlantic right whales.

“Any right whale, no matter where, we try and tow it in and do a necropsy,” he said. “We’re getting to the point now where every possible effort that can be done to investigate right whales is being done.”

McLellan was part of the team that examined the body of a right whale calf found near the N.C. Port of Morehead City in early January. The calf, only a day or two old, likely suffocated after panicking under a pier near the port, McLellan said.

Researchers are continuing to search for the calf’s mother.

An unusual mortality event was declared in 2017 for North Atlantic right whales. Since that year, 95 whales have either been found dead, seriously injured, or sublethally injured or sick, according to NOAA.

The primary causes of death are vessel strikes and entanglements in fishing gear, “which are long-standing threats to the recovery of the species,” according to NOAA.

Acoustic ecologist Michelle Fournet heads the Marine Bioacoustics and Behavior Lab at the University of New Hampshire.

Fournet said in an email to Coastal Review that she was not available for an interview, but referenced a NJ Spotlight News story in which she was quoted saying there is no known science that seismic sound causes toothless whales, which include humpback and North Atlantic right whales, to strand.

Still, toothless whales can be injured by seismic, sonar and other anthropogenic noise, she said.

“But in order to be taken seriously as conservationists, we need to make sure that we are addressing the right problems at the right time, and right now, we are still trying to figure out how big a problem it is and what the issue is,” Fournet told the news outlet. “That doesn’t discount the fact that noise almost without a doubt is impacting these animals, and that the animals that stranded were probably exposed to high levels of noise over the course of their life. But it’s a complicated problem. One thing that without a doubt is true, is we are never going to take people out of the ocean. So, we have got to figure out a way to come up with solutions that honor the ecology, and also acknowledge the reality of human society.”

It took a lot of collaboration to get an 800-pound manatee carcass that washed up on a beach in Kill Devil Hills in early December 2021 to Lisa Gatens, the mammalogy collection manager at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

The carcass was delivered in mid-December 2021 and buried in manure to decompose, leaving just the bones. After about a year, the bones were dug up, cleaned, put in a freezer to get rid of any critters, cleaned again and, as of last week, each bone was being entered into the mammalogy collections catalog.

With around 20,000 specimens, the collection is one of the largest regional mammal collections in the Southeast and contains study skins, tanned hides, skulls, complete skeletons, and fluid-preserved samples. This is one of numerous research collections at the museum. In addition to the mammalogy, the museum has research collections for geology, amphibians and reptiles, fish, fossils, meteorites, mollusks, non-molluscan invertebrates and birds.

Vicky Thayer, Marine Mammal Stranding Network coordinator for the state Division of Marine Fisheries and adjunct for the College of Veterinary Medicine at N.C State University, said in an interview last week that she and partners at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Jennette’s Pier and the University of North Carolina Wilmington were notified by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission about the manatee, which was still alive when it stranded.

Thayer contacted Terri Calleson, Florida manatee recovery lead for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, about saving the manatee. Calleson got together a team from Fish and Wildlife Service and Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge to go to the manatee to transport it live to Florida.

“Manatees do quite well when they strand alive if they’re transported to rehabilitation,” she said but this animal died before it could be transported.

Since the animal died, the Alligator Refuge transported the manatee to the NC State Center for Marine Sciences and Technology, or CMAST, in Morehead City, for a necropsy performed by Thayer and veterinarian Dr. Craig Harms, professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences at CMAST.

Thayer said the manatee, a female, was emaciated and stranded alive north of the typical winter range for manatees, which do not do well when it’s cold. They suspected the death was caused by pneumonia.

After the necropsy, Keith Rittmaster, natural science curator with the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, stepped in to help transport the remains from Morehead City to Raleigh.

He told Coastal Review last week that when he had learned that Gatens might want the skeletal remains of the manatee and that Thayer was trying arrange the storage and transportation, he offered to drive it from the CMAST to Raleigh in a pickup truck donated to the nonprofit Friends of the N.C. Maritime Museum for use at the Beaufort-based Bonehenge Whale Center. The center focuses on research and education on cetaceans, or whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Rittmaster noted the enormous amount of collaboration that took place to move the manatee, which he said is common and necessary in much of the work they do.

Gatens and Jonathan Pishney, museum head of communications, arranged to meet Rittmaster on a Sunday in mid-December 2021.

Upon Rittmaster’s delivery, they placed parts of the manatee in large boxes made of hardware cloth, which is a small-weave wire-mesh, covered them with horse manure from N.C. State’s veterinary program, and then covered the box. The hardware cloth is to prevent losing any of the smaller bones, and the boxes are fenced off to keep away scavengers and predators. “We make every effort we can to protect it,” she added.

“I’ll go out every so often, especially after a good storm to make sure that if it rains really hard, not too much manure has washed off,” Gatens explained, adding, “We left it out there for almost a year. When we got it out of the manure, it came out super clean, which sounds kind of funny that you can bury a carcass of a large marine mammal in horse manure and it comes out clean. It’s a fantastic process.”

Next, they meticulously photograph and remove the bones from the manure before hosing down the bones to get off any residual horse manure, which has a lot of sawdust in it, at the museum’s research lab near Prairie Ridge EcoStation.

Then the bones get a little scrub with soap and water, Gatens said. The bones dry outside before the being transferred downtown to the Natural Sciences Museum second basement level, “where the specimens are housed and where this manatee will spend eternity.”

Gatens said they spread the bones out on tables in their lab to finish drying before putting them in a freezer to kill anything that might be hiding in little crevices or holes. After a week in the freezer, they give the bones another thorough cleaning, making sure the bones are “beautifully, beautifully clean.”

Gatens, as of last week, was still working on cataloguing the bones. Each specimen in the collection has its own catalog number. The manatee will have its own unique number that will be written on every single bone and document to connect everything to the specimen that will be stored in boxes.

That number is also recorded by hand with indelible ink in a leatherbound book with cotton rag paper. The handwritten catalog is stored in a fireproof filing cabinet.

“We literally make a written record of everything that enters our collection,” Gatens said, adding this is the third volume of the catalog. She takes the first step of recording the data by hand before logging it in the database to keep the information secure. The handwritten information will then be entered into the online database.

“We want it in the database because the database will be searchable by people from outside. Any researcher that wants to know about our holdings of manatees or whatever can then search our online database once we get everything entered and uploaded to the website,” she said.

She reiterated that many people, organizations, agencies and volunteers are involved in the process of getting the manatee entered into the collections, from the beginning when it’s first reported after being found until it’s put away in the cases in the collection. Such as the necropsy, which is done to learn as much about the health of the animal as possible, “that’s just valuable, valuable information for them and us” Gatens said.

Gatens explained that her job is to maintain the research collection, a charge she takes quite seriously.

“My job is to maintain the research collection. And in doing so, providing care for each specimen that comes in,” and they’re not always manatees, sometimes it’s mice. “I take quite seriously my charge to make sure it’s protected properly, because we know that if researched collections are properly cared for, they’re going to last and be in really good shape for at least a few hundred years because that’s how old the oldest collections are. Darwin specimens are still in the Museum in London,” she said.

Some specimens in the mammalogy collection date back to the late 1800s.

When these were collected, it served more as evidence that this specimen existed at a certain place and time. When those earlier specimens were collected, the researchers did that for documenting biodiversity.

“When I first started doing this work a few decades ago, we didn’t keep tissues,” she said. Researchers realized they could use the specimen to answer questions about functional morphology, or function and structure of the organism, such as how does a limb work? How does a limb on one animal compare to another animal?

“With the interest in functional morphology, we started saving postcranial skeletons and so that’s our standard now. We save skins, skulls, and the postcranial skeletons. And who knows how they might be used,” Gatens said.

Pishney added that the museum has so many specimens and collections that can be used to answer the millions of questions out there. For example, they have on staff a bryozoan expert, one of the few worldwide who studies tiny aquatic invertebrates. She’s able to find these bryozoans in specimen collections like crabs, fish and shrimp, basically bycatch, that have been used for entirely different research up to this point.

“(Bryozoans) haven’t been studied because nobody really looked for them, nobody thought to ask that question before she came on board,” he explained. “With the new people, new questions, new, technology, it’s (the collections) just sort of a never-ending resource of a discovery. Research in itself is constantly evolving. And it’s important to have these specimens.”

In addition to preserving thousands of mammalian specimens, her department works to help living mammals.

She and Michael Cove, research curator for the mammalogy collection, serve on the Scientific Council on Mammals in the state. The group of professionals, each with a different specialty, meet periodically to review the status of every species of mammal in the state and present their information to the Wildlife Resources Commission. Gatens said they sometimes recommend a species be considered for listing as threatened or endangered at the state level and whether it is at the federal level. If it’s listed at the federal level, it’s automatically listed at the state level. However, the state could have a declining population of one species that might be OK elsewhere in its range, which means North Carolina can have species listed that aren’t listed federally.

“We can look at collections and say, for instance, this one species of jumping mouse, based on some of the Brimley specimens, we know occurred in Wake County in the late 1800s,” she said, adding she would be shocked if the jumping mouse was found here now, because they’re they occur in old fields.

The Brimley specimens are acquisitions made by Herbert H. Brimley and Clement S. Brimley, the museum’s cofounders and first curators, starting in the 1880s, according to the museum. Herbert H. Brimley between 1890 and 1899, articulated and exhibited the skeleton of Mayflower, a 50-foot right whale taken near Shackleford Banks, beginning the museum’s mammal collection.

“We can look at our collections and say we know that they occurred in this region once upon a time,” Gatens said, which “helps direct where we might want to consider looking for research that’s conservation based. The collections help direct that, too.”

The mammalogy collection will not go on display. It is only available for research. Gatens said that people can access the collection by scheduling a visit with her or contacting her to borrow specimens for research.

Seagrasses clean the water around them, are vital to marine life, reduce erosion and help fight climate change by capturing carbon, storing it and burying it on the seafloor.

And, no thanks to warming water temperatures, these jacks of many trades are dying off along North Carolina’s coast.

A pair of University of North Carolina Wilmington researchers aims to pinpoint which seagrass populations are more resilient in an effort to try and reverse the course of declining underwater meadows.

Associate professors Jessie Jarvis and Stephanie Kamel, both with the university’s Department of Biology and Marine Biology and Center for Marine Science, recently received a nearly $400,000 National Estuarine Research Reserve Science Collaborative Grant to enter a new phase of their studies on seagrasses.

Their project, “Evaluating and Enhancing Eelgrass Resiliency and Restoration Potential in a Changing Climate,” aims to find out why some species of seagrasses appear to be adapting to rising water temperatures and how those grasses may be used to help restore declining meadows.

“In the past, a lot of the research that we’ve done with seagrasses, especially in North Carolina, is to figure out the trends in seagrasses, if they’re healthy, if they’re increasing or decreasing,” Jarvis said.

That research has led them to find that some populations of eelgrass, or Zostera marina, are declining in the state’s salt waters, particularly in the past decade, but that’s not the case across the board.

“In North Carolina, we’re finding pockets of eelgrass and Zostera that are able to resist the high temperatures that they’re experiencing and so the question really is why,” Kamel said. “Can we figure out what exactly these mechanisms of resilience are and then can we use that information to inform restoration.”

One of the places where eelgrass populations appear to be adapting to warming waters is in Back Sound, which spans more than 8 miles from the southern part of Cape Lookout National Seashore to Beaufort Inlet.

That’s not the case farther north in Virginia’s lower Chesapeake Bay, where the warming sea is being attributed to a decline in the bay’s meadows.

Researchers plan to take a trial-and-error approach by planting seeds of eelgrass from North Carolina that appear to be adapting to the warming waters in areas of the Chesapeake Bay.

Jarvis and Kamel are working with stakeholder groups, including state employees in North Carolina and Virginia, the National Park Service, and Smithsonian, to identify meadows where there is evidence they are adapting to warming water temperatures.

In all, 10 spots will be selected in North Carolina and 10 in Virginia.

In May, researchers will collect seeds from those areas and test the genetics of those seeds, then plant them in the fall. Seeds from Virginia will be planted in North Carolina and seeds from North Carolina will be planted in Virginia.

Once the seeds are planted, their growth will be monitored. The idea is to use the information collected from that monitoring to help with future restoration plans.

The uniqueness of the project is twofold. It brings two very different scientific fields together. Jarvis is a physiological ecologist and Kamel is a population geneticist.

“We’re approaching this really important problem from two pretty different perspectives and that just makes for a really complementary science and we’re just learning a lot of new and different things in two different fields and I think that’s really important going forward to think about how to do restoration,” Kamel said.

This project is one of the first to take a step toward creating resilient seagrass meadows.

“We’re hoping to make existing meadows even more resilient and the idea that it is really a lot easier to protect them than it is to restore them,” she said. “The impacts of their loss are felt years beyond their loss so it’s really important to try to get ahead and be more proactive.”

Their hope is to create one of the first in a series of reciprocal transplant sites along the entire East Coast.

“There’s no formal plans for that at this point in time but we have been talking with some other folks in places like New York and one of our stakeholders is in Massachusetts where they don’t currently have the high temperature stress that we have, but they see the water temperatures increasing and they want to get ahead of the game,” Jarvis said. “It’s a lot easier to conserve seagrasses and protect it than it is to restore them. With bringing in these more temperature resistant plants from North Carolina we can maybe help give them a head start.”

Featured Image

Low tide exposes clusters of oysters clinging to the piles supporting the Morehead City-Beaufort high-rise bridge over the Newport River and near the Radio Island Fishing Pier. Photo: Dylan Ray

The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council meets in-person Jan. 26 in Newport News, Virginia.

The public is invited to attend the meeting 10 a.m.-3 p.m. at The Mariners’ Museum and Park, 100 Museum Drive.

An agenda is available for download from the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary website, monitor.noaa.gov.

The advisory council was established in 2005 to assure continuous public participation in the management of the sanctuary and to provide advice to the sanctuary superintendent on cultural resource protection, critical issues involving sanctuary use or resources, sanctuary research objectives, and education and outreach programs. The council represents a variety of local user groups, the public and state and federal government agencies.

Managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary was designated in 1975 to protect the wreck of the famed Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, which sank in 1862 during a storm 16 miles off Cape Hatteras.

Ever mosey through a museum and pass by a display of those little ethanol-filled jars holding spineless creatures and think “big deal” as you head to check out the dinosaur exhibit?

Turns out, the contents of those jars are rife with clues that may help researchers unlock some of the mysteries of our coastal environment and help them better gauge the effects of climate change and pollution.

“The power of museum collections is that they’re a combination of donations from a variety of different sources, each with their own stories and usefulness, but when you put them together that really provides something that can be used in ways that we may not comprehend quite yet,” said Bronwyn Williams, research curator of non-molluscan invertebrates at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

Williams and Megan McCuller, collections manager of non-molluscan invertebrates, oversee what is ostensibly the largest research collection at the museum.

Non-molluscan invertebrate is a fancy term for animals that don’t have spines — think shrimp, worms and crabs.

Since its creation in 2017, this collection has grown to include tens of thousands of specimens collected as far back as the mid-1800s from freshwater, land, and near and offshore marine habitats of the Carolinas, mid-Atlantic region, and the Southeast.

It is a separate collection from the museum’s mollusk collection, including mussels, clams, snails, octopuses and squids.

Specimens preserved in ethanol-filled jars, vials and, for the larger critters, buckets or tanks, are housed in a building suitable for storing thousands of containers filled with flammable liquid a few miles away from the Museum of Natural Sciences main building in downtown Raleigh.

This means the collection is primarily out of view day to day, barring the occasional display of a small fraction of non-molluscan invertebrate, at what is said to be the state’s most-visited museum.

Williams’ and McCuller’s work is more of a behind-the-scenes job, one that entails cataloging information that can include details about who got a specimen, where and when it was collected, and why it was collected.

And the specimens have come through a variety of means, whether from someone fishing off a pier stretching out from the ocean shore, a research vessel, orphaned collections donated to the museum, employees of the museum, even a World War II American airman who collected specimens from the shores of Australia during a stint overseas.

In many cases, the more Williams and McCuller dive into that history, the more they discover, and they want to share that with the public and with researchers.

“We want to teach and tell other people about what is back here,” Williams said. “We want everybody to know what we have here and why it’s so important. This collection is invaluable from a biological standpoint. It can be used to address questions about changes in distribution or connectivity. It can be used to monitor for invasive species. People have used it to dig in and identify diversity that we didn’t know we have.”

McCuller is one of only a few researchers who study bryozoans, small invertebrates found in most marine communities that can grow on everything from barnacles to coral skeletons.

When she first took her job at the museum a few years ago, she looked inside a jar of hard skeleton corals and spotted what looked like bryozoans. She has identified up to 19 different species of bryozoan in a single jar.

To date, McCuller has identified more than 1,200 colonies of bryozoans in more than 200 lots from the museum’s non-molluscan invertebrate collection.

The museum’s collection of saltwater crayfish has helped researchers understand the impacts of invasive species to some of North Carolina’s coastal habitats.

Red swamp crayfish, native to many Gulf states, is one of several crayfish species shipped live for human consumption. These delectable edibles were introduced into North Carolina waters decades ago, taking over habitats once abundant with crayfish native to the state.

“It’s actually very rare to find the native crayfishes now and we can document that in the collections,” Williams said. “Invasive red swamp crayfish were not being collected in these areas frequently prior to 2000. After 2000 we’ve seen the red swamp crayfish really explode in terms of its geographic coverage in portions of eastern North Carolina.”

A collection acquired from Charleston, South Carolina, tells the story of an invasion of Asian tiger shrimp off the South Carolina coast after a batch of the species reportedly escaped from an offshore research lab.

Sometime between 2015 and 2016, a father and his young son brought to the museum an Asian tiger shrimp they collected while pier fishing off the North Carolina coast.

“That’s, I think, one critical story of how museum collections can be used to look at changes in the distribution of things,” Williams said. “Our ultimate goal for this collection is to have it be well known and well respected.”

McCuller, armed with a list of “fun facts,” shared a few in a recent telephone interview with Coastal Review.

The oldest specimen in the non-molluscan invertebrate collection is two jars, also referred to as lots, of white shrimp, gathered in 1855.

The largest specimen is a horseshoe crab, roughly 24-28 inches in diameter, collected in 1975 from Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina.

One of the most popular among museum guests is a giant isopod, a distant cousin of crabs found in deep, cold waters of the sea. It looks, as McCuller describes it, like a “really large roly-poly.”

There are also a couple of deep-sea tube worms collected in 1966 by the Duke Marine Lab at a depth of more than 5,000 meters below the ocean’s surface.

Anyone interested in touring the museum’s fluid collections may contact Williams at bronwyn.williams@naturalsciences.org or McCuller at megan.mcculler@naturalsciences.org.

You may also follow them on Twitter at @mccullermi and @bwwilliamslab.

RALEIGH – Jean Beasley, founding director of the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, recently received the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission’s Thomas L. Quay Wildlife Diversity Award for her outstanding contributions to wildlife diversity in North Carolina.

Beasley is the 17th Quay Award recipient, the Wildlife Commission announced this week. She received the recognition during the commission’s October business meeting in Cherokee.

“Since opening the Beasley Center in 1996, over 1,000 sick and injured sea turtles have been rehabilitated and returned to the wild. That incredible work, along with establishing the volunteer-based Topsail Turtle Project and improving conservation measures benefitting sea turtles, makes her most deserving of this distinguished conservationist award,” said Wildlife Commission Executive Director Cameron Ingram.

Beasley, a native North Carolinian and 1958 graduate of Duke University, first encountered a nesting loggerhead sea turtle while vacationing with her family in Topsail Beach. That experience led to the inception of the Topsail Turtle Project, formed in the 1980s to monitor and protect nesting turtles, incubating eggs and emergent hatchling on Topsail Island.

Following her daughter Karen’s death in 1991, Beasley and her family followed Karen’s wishes to “do something good for the sea turtles” with her life insurance money. Knowing the Beasleys were already protecting sea turtle nests, people soon began bringing sick and injured sea turtles to the family. It quickly became apparent that a facility dedicated to the turtles’ care, rehabilitation and release was needed, prompting the creation of the Beasley Center.

The commission said the Beasley Center has served as a model for grassroots sea turtle rescue programs. Beasley was the first volunteer-based program leader elected to the board of directors of the International Sea Turtle Society. She fostered advances in sea turtle medicine and biology and has overseen a community of hundreds of volunteers in the Topsail Island Nest Protection Program and the Sea Turtle Hospital. She managed the growth of the Beasley Center from a 900 square foot facility that opened in 1996 to a 13,000 square foot facility in 2013 that treats over 100 turtles per year. Beasley headed the center until her retirement at the end of 2021.

Wildlife Commission Chairman Monty Crump had introduced the resolution to recognize Beasley with the Quay Award. The award is named after Thomas Quay, who died in 2012 and was a professor in the North Carolina State University Department of Zoology for 32 years. A self-described “full-time volunteer and unpaid environmental activist,” Quay was the first recipient of the award in honor of his passion for wildlife, ornithology and teaching.

For more about the Quay Award, visit the agency’s website.

Dr. David Shiffman’s favorite thing to talk about are sharks, and has been since he was very young. 

“I’ve loved sharks for a really, really long time, since I was younger than anyone in this room,” Shiffman said to a few dozen last month at North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.

Shiffman, an interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist who specializes in the ecology and conservation of sharks, stopped in the Carteret County town as part of the tour for his book, “Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator.” His book is available at the museum’s gift shop.

The talk in Beaufort Sept. 20 was the 27^th stop of his 40-day “Reading Frenzy” international tour. A resident of the Washington, D.C., area, he also spoke at his alma mater Duke University in Durham and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. 

As a student at Duke, he spent 2005 in Beaufort at the university’s marine lab, graduating in 2007. He earned his master’s in marine biology from the College of Charleston in 2011, and his doctorate in 2016 from the University of Miami in ecosystem science and policy.

Shiffman told Coastal Review in a follow-up interview that he wrote the book, “Why Sharks Matter,” because sharks are some of the most misunderstood animals on the planet, and they’re also ecologically important and threatened.

“Sharks are so ecologically important that we’re better off with healthy shark populations off our coasts than we are without them, but due to unsustainable overfishing practices, we’re in danger of losing many species forever,” he said, adding there’s growing recognition that we need to save sharks, but there’s lots of confusion, and even misinformation, about the best ways to do that. 

His book features detailed descriptions of dozens of different conservation policies and management regulations that can be used to help protect sharks, including a description of what policies work in what situations and how people can help with each, he said.

Being from Pittsburgh, Shiffman explained to the audience in Beaufort that he fell in love with the ocean through zoos and science museums. The first shark he ever saw was in the Pittsburgh Zoo when he was a child. 

“One of the things that I love about sharks is that they’re absolutely weird. They’re fascinating. They’re different than any other living thing in so many ways,” Shiffman said, and one way is their skeleton, which is made of cartilage. “They don’t have any bones.”

There are 536 known species of shark, he continued, having to repeat himself after a voice piped up from the crowd, in disbelief, “How many?” 

And, there’s a new species discovered somewhere in the world every two weeks and that’s been true for the last 12 years.

Shiffman, during both his talk and in his book, explains that much of the fear people have toward sharks comes from “inflammatory, inaccurate popular press coverage in general, the movie ‘Jaws’ and the dumpster fire of nonsense that is Shark Week,” he wrote.

Shiffman cites in his book a 2013 paper by Robert Hueter and Dr. Christopher Pepin-Neff that suggested new terms for shark-human interactions such as “shark sighting” or “shark bite,” which is the terminology Shiffman uses.

Whenever there’s a shark bite anywhere in the world, it’s headline news, he said during the presentation. Adding his favorite statistic about this, which came from the Pepin-Neff and Hueter paper, is that for something like 38% of all reported shark attacks in Australia, “the shark did not physically touch the human at all. It swam near them.”

Pepin-Neff released just this week a new study in the journal Biology on how The New York Times is changing its coverage on shark encounters. 

Pepin-Neff analyzed 10 years of articles that cover human-shark interactions and found that there had been a shift in the newspaper’s reporting style since about 2018.

A comparison of the number of articles that include shark “attack” and shark “bite” mentions between 2012 and 2021 shows that from 2012 to 2017 there was a clear dominance of the phrase “shark attack,” but parity began to emerge in 2018 with increased use of “shark bite.”

“Sometimes rare but terrible and tragic fatal shark bites occur,” Pepin-Neff said in a statement, “The data collected show that 32-39% of all reported shark ‘attacks’ have no injury. This may constitute a game-changer for how the public thinks about sharks and how the media reports on shark ‘attacks.’ The findings of The New York Times illustrate that a change is happening, and the public supports this change.”

This type of research is important because there are direct connections between public attitudes toward shark bites and support for shark conservation, according to the report. 

Shiffman said during his talk that a big reason most people are afraid of sharks is the movie “Jaws.” Before the movie was released 47 years ago, a lot of people didn’t really think about sharks – fishermen and surfers did – but people who went to the beach to swim didn’t really think about sharks, but this movie changed the world, and not in a good way for the ocean.

“There is actually something called the ‘Jaws effect,’ in the peer-reviewed published literature, which describes how a fictional portrayal of a real-world issue affects what real world people really think about that issue, ” he said. Adding, the author of “Jaws,” Peter Benchley, “was so horrified by what this book and movie did to public perception of sharks that he dedicated most of the rest of his life and a lot of the proceeds from ‘Jaws’ to shark conservation.”

As for Shark Week, Shiffman writes in his book that the Discovery Channel, though improvements are being made, had fostered “nonsense and fear over facts,” rather than use its platform to promote science, conservation and public understanding.

Shiffman told the audience in Beaufort that the risk of being injured by a shark is small. More people in a typical year are killed falling off cliffs while taking selfies with the scenery behind them than the number killed by a shark.  

“I don’t want to minimize real concern,” Shiffman continued, but there’s a very small risk you’ll come in contact with a shark and that relative risk should be kept in mind when considering policy solutions.

“They’re not a threat to you, but they’re actively important. We’re better off with shark populations off our coast than we are without them. But unfortunately, many species face very, very serious conservation challenges,” he said. 

“The number one threat by far is us, is humans, is unsustainable overfishing practices,” which includes targeted fishing, bycatch and for shark fin and shark meat trades.

He noted that while over the last 20 years, the trade in shark fins has been dramatically declining, things have gotten a lot worse in the last 10 years for sharks because of the shark meat trade, which is a major element that has not been given attention in the media.

“The problem is unsustainable overfishing, too many sharks are being killed,” Shiffman said. He explained that one set of solutions is to make the fishing more sustainable, such as size limits or quotas. There’s also a newer suite of policies in recent years that say there’s no such thing as sustainable fishing. You need to ban all fishing.

“It’s worth noting here that 90% Oof all the shark scientists in the world agree that the goal here should be making fisheries more sustainable, not banning all fishing,” he said.

Shiffman explained that one thing he’s learned in his career is that while this is bad news, “it is not hopeless, it’s not a lost cause.”

Scientists know what policy solutions work and that they need more help. 

“This is a big part of the reason why I wanted to write the book “Why Sharks Matter,” because there is not – before my book – an accessible to the public guide with the different policy solutions that are out there,” he said. 

After a lot of the talks he gives, people ask for reading recommendations to learn about policy solutions and shark conservation that they don’t need a law degree to understand. He said he’s had to tell those who want to read more that there’s no book out there, that was until May of this year when his book was published.

“This is the first shark book to comprehensively address this topic for a nonexpert audience,” Shiffman said in the follow-up interview. “I’ve found that when I attend conferences where experts discuss these issues, the conversations are very different from what I see among enthusiastic nonexperts on social media. So, my goal for the book was to make the technical and confusing world of shark conservation policy accessible to the interested public.”

Shiffman said he’s been blown away by the reception of his book while he’s been traveling the world talking about it.

“I’m so grateful for everyone who has come out to hear me speak, and for everyone who has bought a copy of my book,” he said. 

Folks can follow Shiffman on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @Whysharksmatter, where he said he’s always happy to answer any questions anyone has about sharks. 

Skeptics blamed the wind.

It was particularly windy during a series of days last month on the Crystal Coast when stakes marking off sea turtle nests were plucked out of the sand and the tape to them torn down.

But the evidence, according to Dale Baquer, Emerald Isle Sea Turtle Patrol program coordinator, proved otherwise.

Four nights in a row at four different nests, a single stake had been pulled from the sand. Tape used to mark off the nesting sites was ripped down. On the two nights that immediately followed, signs at two other nests were plucked up and tossed onto the shore.

“The first night there were actually foot prints and a beer can left there,” Baquer said. “That’s why I was sure someone had done it.”

Be it curiosity, juvenile antics, or flat out malicious intent, sea turtle nests at beaches on North Carolina’s coastal islands are subject to human interference each nesting season.

The season, which begins in May and ends in October, falls within the three busiest beach tourism months, heightening the odds of human-to-nest encounters.

“It’s inevitable when you have so many visitors coming to North Carolina to visit the beaches here,” said Matthew Godfrey, a sea turtle biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. “We do have turtle nests pretty much everywhere in the state on all islands.”

There’s no indication of an uptick this season in nest tampering, Godfrey said, but incidents where it’s apparent humans are purposefully messing with nests, like those in Emerald Isle, have been reported to his office this year.

Sea turtle nest monitoring is mostly done through volunteer-based programs. Monitoring includes identifying nest locations, marking them off, and tracking when eggs at each nest hatch.

Sea turtle monitoring programs are largely volunteer-based on all but one of the state’s coastal islands where turtles nest.

Federally owned Browns Island of the coast of Camp Lejeune is strictly off-limits to people because of unexploded ordnance on the property and live-firing training exercises conducted in the area.

The only option for tracking the numbers of nests on the island are through aerial surveys.

Godfrey said monitoring efforts generally work well protecting turtle eggs during incubation. Eggs typically take anywhere from 50 to 80 days to hatch.

But without a set of eyes on each nest 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it’s practically impossible to prevent even the occasional human disturbance.

“Sometimes it’s unclear why people interfere or mess with the areas that have been marked off, whether they rip down the tape or pull up the stakes,” Godfrey said. “It could be just curiosity. Sometimes people accidentally walk into them at night. There’s definitely some accidental or curiosity-based incidents, not malicious. In general, people are pretty respectful.”

Over a decade ago, there were a few instances where eggs were removed from nests.

Sea turtles are federally protected. Anyone caught disturbing them or their nests face the possibility of hefty fines and possible jail time.

Last year, a group of teenagers were caught after tampering with a series of nest areas on Emerald Isle’s shore where they yanked stakes from the sand.

Baquer said the teens were turned over to local police. The outcome of that case was not released to the public because the teenagers were minors.

“People breaking our stakes and pulling the tape down doesn’t seem harmful, but the thing is we set up the stakes and measure where the eggs are and use (the stakes) as a reference point as to how to find our eggs,” she said.

When it became evident someone — it’s unknown whether more than one person was involved — was tampering with nests there last month, Baquer took to social media, asking for the community’s help.

“After I put that post out it stopped,” she said. “I think my post says it all. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it could be a very costly game for them. Sea turtles are protected and there is up to a $50,000 fine and a year in jail. None of our eggs were harmed, but you can still get yourself in trouble tampering with sea turtle nests. Not everybody has to be a sea turtle lover, but just do no harm.”

That said, a majority of people who live in and visit Emerald Isle respect the nests and turtles, Baquer said.

“They come to our excavations. We talk to them and let them know what the rules are. Usually they’re really good at helping us,” she said.

So far this season, more than 1,900 nests have been documented on North Carolina beaches.

Thirty nests had been documented on Emerald Isle this season. That’s not a record, but it is a larger-than-average number, Baquer said. Roughly 10 nests there have hatched.

Farther south at Oak Island in Brunswick County, more than half of the 136 nests hatched.

Suzan Bell, co-coordinator of the Oak Island Sea Turtle Protection Program, declined to go into details about nests there that were vandalized, saying the issue appears to have been resolved since getting the word out on social media.

“I think we addressed it and we’ve only had a couple of issues this season, it’s not been an uptick for us,” she said.

This year’s nests are the second highest number on record.

“We are one of the top numbers in the state,” Bell said. “There are so many more people on the beach. It is critical for us to have folks follow the rules.”

Essentially all marine life is vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

To develop adaptation strategies, a thorough understanding of how climate change impacts individual species and ecosystems is necessary. That’s why a group of researchers led by Dr. Daniel G. Boyce of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography developed an extensive index for evaluating the risks that climate change poses to marine life.

Their work, published Monday in Nature, looks at climate risk for marine life through two possible emissions trajectories, called shared socioeconomic pathways.

“These are basically scenarios for how human development will continue into the future — how our activities will affect our greenhouse gas emissions,” Boyce said.

Under the high-emissions future, wherein emissions continue to increase and raise the global temperature by about 5 degrees from preindustrial levels, the outlook is dire. Nearly 90% of the 24,975 studied are classified as at high or critical risk by the year 2100. However, the extreme mitigation pathway, a negative emissions scenario, reduces the risk across the board for 98.2% of species.

“We used the two most extreme scenarios to paint the two most extreme pictures of how climate risk for species would vary,” Boyce said.

When it comes to marine conservation and climate change management, the researchers hope this index can help prioritize vulnerable species and ecosystems.

Climate change spurs environmental changes and the loss of biodiversity. This, in turn, affects things like species health and food security for humans. Climate change vulnerability assessments are one of the ways in which humans can plan to adapt.

In the past, said Boyce, vulnerability assessments have not been thoroughly incorporated into policy and management. The researchers here attempted to create an index that was comprehensive and flexible enough to be applied to different conservation scenarios over time.

“I think that there’s been a limited uptake of the knowledge produced in those studies to conservation and management decision making,” Boyce said. “And that was sort of the gap that we were trying to remedy with this study.”

The researchers evaluated 24,975 marine species and ecosystems across the world. They focused primarily on what can be found in the upper 100 meters – roughly 330 feet — of the water column, since temperature changes will be felt most severely here. They assessed mostly animals, but also other marine life such as plants and bacteria.

The researchers used 12 climate change-related indices to calculate present-day risk, future exposure and future potential adaptability. This helped them generate an absolute risk score for each species.

Climate vulnerability varies substantially, both across species and from location to location. The highest vulnerability score that the researchers found belonged to the Chinese puffer, at a highly impacted nearshore site under the high emissions pathway. The Chinese puffer is already a species at risk because of high demand for it.

Higher risk areas for ecosystems include the tropics, some polar regions, and nearshore areas. They also found that top predators were at a greater risk because of climate change than those at the bottom of the food web. This suggests that climate change will destabilize ecosystem function and energy transfer. The data implies that the mitigation pathway will reduce the need for ecosystem restructuring.

“There are factors other than the projected future climate which contribute to the overall climate risk for species,” Boyce said. “If you have a species that has a very small geographic range, and its range is very fragmented, it’ll be much more susceptible or at risk to climate impacts, because it just can’t go anywhere else. It has to live in its narrow, small environment.”

The researchers took their framework a step further, and applied their index to commonly fished species to evaluate the relationship between climate risk and socioeconomic equity.

They found that low-income countries, with lower levels of food security and a high dependence on fisheries, will experience a systematically higher climate risk to their fisheries in the high-emissions pathway.

However, under the mitigation pathway, they also experience the greatest risk reduction. These are generally countries that contribute the least to global emissions, but are also among those impacted the most by climate change. Therefore, climate change threatens to deepen an already existing socioeconomic divide.

Low-income countries are already very poorly positioned to adapt to climate change, Boyce said. “And this is another stressor on top of that.”

These results show that the climate risk for marine life strongly corresponds to the level of future emissions. As the effects of climate change get worse, this index can help inform priority areas for conservation and other evidence-based policy. The researchers hope that the index can help reduce the number of extinctions, increase adaptability to climate change and thereby build resilience.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is asking for public comment on proposed changes that would expand mandatory speed restrictions for vessels to reduce the likelihood of collisions with north Atlantic right whales.

Ship collisions are a leading cause of North Atlantic right whale injury and death.

The proposed changes would expand mandatory speed restrictions of 10 knots or less to include most vessels 35 to 65 feet in length and broaden the areas and timing of seasonal speed restriction zones along the East Coast.

Comments on the changes are due by Sept. 30, and webinars have been scheduled in August to detail the proposed changes and answer questions. The webinars are set for 2-3 p.m. Aug. 10, 6-7:30 p.m. Aug. 16, and 6-7:30 p.m. Aug. 24. Register and provide written questions in advance.

“Collisions with vessels continue to impede North Atlantic right whale recovery. This proposed action is necessary to stabilize the ongoing right whale population decline, in combination with other efforts to address right whale entanglement and vessel strikes in the U.S. and Canada,” said NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator Janet Coit in a statement.

Conservation group Oceana applauded the move, but said the proposed rule could go even further by removing the exemptions for federal vessels along with a commitment from NOAA to effectively enforce the regulations.

“There is a glimmer of hope for critically endangered North Atlantic right whales today — the government is proposing strong new measures to reduce the deadly threat of vessel strikes. Today’s proposed rule shows that the National Marine Fisheries Service is serious about addressing a top threat to North Atlantic right whales, which are constantly at risk from speeding vessels,” said Gib Brogan, campaign director at Oceana, in a statement. “It’s no secret that speeding vessels are rampant throughout North Atlantic right whales’ migration route, all along the East Coast. Oceana welcomes the proposed rule and urges the agency to remove dangerous exemptions, and commit to enforcing the rule to make waters safer for North Atlantic right whales.”

Oceana has an online tool for tracking vessel speeds in active speed zones called Ship Speed Watch.

NOAA said the proposed changes to the current speed rule address two key problems impacting right whale recovery, misalignment between areas and times of high vessel strike risk and current Seasonal Management Areas spatial and temporal bounds and the lack of mandatory speed restriction on vessels between 35 and 65 feet in length that present a lethal threat to right whales.

During the past two and a half years, NOAA Fisheries has documented four lethal (death and serious injury) right whale vessel strikes in U.S. waters, a problem that is impeding the species’ recovery and contributing to the population’s decline.

North Atlantic right whales are approaching extinction with fewer than 350 individuals and fewer than 100 reproductively active females remaining. There have been 51 right whale serious injuries and deaths in U.S. and Canadian waters since 2017. Climate-related impacts and prey availability have also contributed to the population’s reduced fitness.

However, vessel strikes and entanglements continue to drive the population’s decline and are the primary cause of serious injuries and mortalities, according to NOAA. North Atlantic right whales are especially vulnerable to vessel strikes due to their coastal distribution and frequent occurrence at near-surface depths. This is particularly true for females with calves.

Information on the rule and how comments may be submitted electronically at https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/action/amendments-north-atlantic-right-whale-vessel-strike-reduction-rule.

Monday, May 23, is World Turtle Day, established in 1990 by the American Tortoise Rescue based in California to “shellebrate” and protect all species of turtles and tortoises.

For Deb Allen, who moved to Ocean Isle Beach more than a decade ago, every day is turtle day. 

She and her husband Fulton work as island coordinators for the Ocean Isle Beach Sea Turtle Protection Organization and are licensed by the North Carolina Wildlife Commission to handle sea turtles, as required by the Endangered Species Act.

A division of the Museum of Coastal Carolina, a natural history museum on Ocean Isle Beach in Brunswick County, the all-volunteer nonprofit works year-round to protect sea turtles, especially during nesting season, which began this month. Ocean Isle Beach had its first nest of the 2022 season Friday morning. 

Volunteers, which are trained by the Wildlife Commission, also transport cold-stunned, sick or injured sea turtles to the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center in Surf City.

Allen told Coastal Review that when she and her husband moved to Ocean Isle Beach in 2010, she became a volunteer and has been volunteering ever since. Beginning as a volunteer, she advanced to become assistant coordinator and is now island coordinator.

“During my time doing this, I was exposed to every aspect,” Allen explained, from rescue to nest certification to watching a turtle lay her eggs to making sure the hatchlings get safely to the water.

 “We get to spend time on the beach in the mornings for nest verification and the beautiful summer evenings under the stars, chatting with other volunteers and waiting for babies to emerge from a nest,” she said. 

Allen has about 150 volunteers and everybody helps as much as they want in whatever capacity they can. “We have volunteers that do a little bit of everything.” 

Nesting season

Allen said Ocean Isle Beach has mostly identified loggerhead turtles, but Kemp’s ridleys, greens and leatherbacks nest along the North Carolina coast. 

There were 44 nests with a total of 4,950 eggs on Ocean Isle Beach in summer 2021, but 161 were lost to predators or were submerged. Of those, 3,531 hatched and 287 did not make it. One nest last year was entirely submerged and another nest with 121 hatchlings was killed by foxes. 

Every morning during nesting season, volunteers head out on the beach to look for evidence of turtles nesting. Signs of a new nest are flipper tracks in the sand that look like tractor tire marks leading to a body pit in the sand, Allen explained.

If a new nest is discovered, the verification team gently shifts through the sand to find the egg chamber. If the nest is in a safe spot, meaning it will not likely be underwater, it’s left in place, but if it’s in danger of being submerged, volunteers relocate the nest to a safer location. 

Each egg is carefully moved one at a time, making sure not to rotate the egg at all. “We don’t want to detach the embryo from the inside of the egg,” she said. The nest is measured after the eggs are removed and volunteers will dig another chamber to the exact measurements. “We’ll relocate the eggs there and then.”  

While waiting for the nests to hatch, the nests are marked and protected with mesh. 

Kevin Stetson has been the nest verification coordinator with the organization going on four years. 

Stetson told Coastal Review Friday that he moved to Ocean Isle Beach from the Midwest after retiring about eight years ago.

He learned about the turtle protection group during a community event and decided to give it a shot. Coming from the Midwest, Stetson never had contact at all with turtles, he said. However, this volunteer effort evolved, for him, from something he thought would be interesting to do during the summer to being more concerned with the health and well-being of sea turtles.

Like Allen, before becoming nest verification coordinator four years ago, Stetson began as a volunteer. First as nest parent and watching the turtles hatch. After seeing the end of the cycle, he decided to see the beginning of the cycle by volunteering to verify nests. Verification involves digging in the sand to find the eggs. 

Stetson got back in the groove Friday morning with this season’s first nest. Four volunteers came out to help with the nest, which was in the dune area, and they didn’t have to relocate the nest — their preference. 

“For me it’s always a thrill anytime I get a call,” he said. “It was great getting the cobwebs shaken out this first one and get back into the groove of everything.” 

He finds it rewarding to know he has a small part in protecting sea turtles.  “You’re a small cog in this big wheel, if you will, of helping turtles since they were an endangered species.”

Light pollution

Allen told Coastal Review that it’s important to protect sea turtles to maintain the natural balance in the ocean. “Because sea turtles eat a lot of jellyfish, we want to make sure that there’s a good amount of turtles eating the jellyfish. If there’s an overpopulation of anything in the ocean, it disrupts the balance.”

The biggest challenge for sea turtles in Ocean Isle Beach, or any island beach, is light pollution, she said. 

“Last summer we had to classify 287 baby sea turtles as dead just because of light pollution,” Allen said.

The baby sea turtles will move toward lights from a house, the street or even a bright flashlight because that bright light looks like the moon, stars or waves and that’s where they think home is, they’re hard-wired to go back home to the ocean. 

If baby turtles end up in the dunes instead of the ocean, they get eaten by predators like crabs or foxes, get stepped on or run over if they’re in the street, or die from the chlorine if they end up in a swimming pool, which she said happened last year to every hatchling in a nest. They went toward a house and ended up in the pool and in the streets.  

“It’s a huge problem,” Allen said. The last hurricane wiped out our dunes from Caswell Beach to the South Carolina border, making streetlights, headlights, everything very visible on the street from the beach. “So these hatchlings see all that light and they go right to it.”

Allen said the volunteers do their best to block the light when nests are hatching. 

“Sometimes it can’t be done and unfortunately, in rare instances, we have to pick the hatchlings up, put them in a container and take them to a darker area on the beach,” to get them in the water. They’ve had instances where a house a fair distance away was so bright, the hatchlings would get in the water and start swimming but when they see that beach house, they make a U-turn, come back on the beach and go toward that house.

Beachfront residents can take measures to prevent their house from contributing to light pollution.

Allen recommends using sea turtle friendly bulbs, which are an amber color. The turtles don’t see the amber color but they do see the white. Residents can also cover their windows and turn off exterior lights at night if they’re not needed. 

“If you’re on the beach, don’t use a bright white flashlight because sea turtles will go toward the white light,” she said. 

The organization has a “Lights Out Sea Turtles Dig the Dark” initiative to reduce the amount bright lights that can be seen from the beach. Homeowners, condo owners and associations, property owners associations, hotels and businesses can participate by replacing light fixtures and light bulbs with a sea turtle safer option. The organization has a fundraising program to purchase sea turtle safe light bulbs and light fixtures.

Lights Out sponsorships are $100 are nonrefundable and immediately used to reduce light pollution on Ocean Isle Beach. Checks can be mailed to OIBSTPO, P.O. Box 6524, Ocean Isle Beach, NC 28469.

Public outreach

Allen said there have been changes in the group’s public outreach because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We love sharing information about sea turtles, but the North Carolina Wildlife Commission has kind of pulled back the reins since COVID started,” she said, adding that the commission takes measures to keep crowd sizes down to protect the public and the volunteers. But the beach is a good place to learn about sea turtles and the organization’s work.

“If you happen to walk by one of our teams and they’re at a nest, we absolutely encouraged you to go up and ask them any questions you want to ask and they’re going to share any information about that specific nest with you that they can,” she said. Sometimes there won’t be any changes with the nest or the volunteers will say they’re expecting the babies to emerge that night or in a few days. 

If babies are emerging from the nest at the time, “we encourage people to respectfully observe all that we’re doing to get the baby safely to the water,” she said.

Sometimes, while the turtles are hatching, Allen said volunteers helping with the nest will ask the public to help, especially with crowd control.

“I have to say our strongest advocates are the kids,” she said. When the hatchlings are about to emerge, volunteers tell the crowd gathered the rules, such as no flash photography or video. The kids “will correct their parents in a heartbeat if they accidentally have a flash on their camera and it’s really quite cool.”

Because the goal is to get the hatchlings to the water, volunteers clear a path for the turtles from the nest to the water, often putting up rope or drawing a line for the public not to cross. They sometimes will ask a 10-year-old to help ask everybody not to cross that line. “They are just excellent advocates. They don’t mind telling people that you’re not supposed to do that, don’t hurt a baby turtle.”

Beginning June 6, volunteers will lead family friendly educational programs about sea turtles nesting on Ocean Isle Beach.

The “Turtle Talk” programs will be at the Ocean Isle Beach Community Center every Monday at 5:30 p.m. and again at 6:30 p.m.

The community center can only accommodate 85 at a time. She encourages people to come early for a seat. “We really love sharing our information about sea turtles,” Allen said. 

When visitors come to Ocean Isle Beach, sometimes the only locals they meet are volunteers at a turtle nest, so Allen said they want to make sure to provide educational information and welcome them to the beach.

“Because if we love our sea turtles, then we can get them to love and understand sea turtles. We’ve created another conservationist and that’s our goal,” she said. 

Fundraising efforts

To support the all-volunteer organization, there’s the opportunity to Adopt A Sea Turtle Nest on a first-come, first-serve basis. The sponsor will be able to name the nest. 

As of last mid-May, 44 nests were already sponsored with the standard sponsorship of $125, Allen said. 

The organization is also raising money for the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Hospital, which are $100. The nonrefundable donation will go directly to the turtle hospital. 

CAPE HATTERAS — This year is the 50th anniversary of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Sanctuary Systems, an occasion that by definition makes the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary extra special because it was the very first one.

The problem is that most Americans may be thinking: “What’s a marine sanctuary system?” And even if the public is aware that they exist, do they understand their purpose?

“Not nearly enough,” John Armor, director of NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, said in a recent interview. “We have a lot of work to do on that.”

Next week, the public can see for themselves the value a sanctuary offers. From Sunday, May 15, through Wednesday, May 25, people will have a golden opportunity to watch groundbreaking science livestreamed during a new expedition at the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.

According to a NOAA press release, a team of scientists and divers working off NOAA Ship Nancy Foster as a research platform will employ state-of-the-art technologies, including underwater drones, to explore the Monitor Civil War ironclad and other shipwrecks in the surrounding area as part of a study on their value as fish reefs.

Described by NOAA on its website as a “network of underwater parks,” the sanctuary system totals more than 620,000 square miles and includes 15 national marine sanctuaries on Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts, American Samoa and the Great Lakes, as well as the Papahānaumokuākea and Rose Atoll marine national monuments.

The National Marine Sanctuary System turns 50 on Oct. 23.

“I think the 50th anniversary is really an opportunity for us to sort of expand the tent and bring a lot more awareness to and frankly appreciation for them and love of the National Marine Sanctuaries system more broadly,” Armor said.

Armor, who has been at the helm since 2016, said that current efforts are focused on connecting local communities more to the sanctuary’s work. Sanctuaries also need to be more accessible, including engagement with tribal and indigenous communities, he said. And its workforce needs to be more diverse.

When the sanctuary system was created in 1972 with passage of The Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act, it was one of a series of landmark coastal protection bills enacted around that time, which also included the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the Clean Water Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act Amendments, according to NOAA’s online history of the system.

But it took three years for the first sanctuary to come to fruition, and it was fortuitous timing that the Monitor was discovered about 20 miles off Cape Hatteras by Duke University researchers the year after the system was created.

A centerpiece

From the moment the USS Monitor steamed into Hampton Roads in early 1862, the Union Navy’s first ironclad dazzled as a wartime engineering phenomenon. Its nearly four-hour battle less than two months later in a Norfolk harbor with the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia ultimately came to a draw but sealed its heroic legacy.

Even after the famed battleship and its 16 officers and crew went down that same year during a vicious New Year’s Eve gale, the Monitor remained a centerpiece of scientific and cultural interest.

Situated in the notorious “Graveyard of the Atlantic” — feared by mariners for its shifting, shallow shoals — the sunken vessel sits on the ocean floor 230 feet deep in a column of water a nautical mile in diameter. The site was designated as the nation’s first marine sanctuary Jan. 30, 1975.

Thousands of artifacts have been recovered from the Monitor, most of which are housed at The Mariners Museum in Newport News, Virginia. In 2001, NOAA, the U.S. Navy and The Mariners Museum, among others, partnered in five expeditions to retrieve numerous artifacts, including its steam engine and a section of the hull. The next year, the Monitor’s revolving turret was brought up from the ocean floor in a 42-day expedition. 

When the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras, part of the North Carolina Maritime Museum system, completes its exhibit installation in the coming months, it anticipates including artifacts from the Monitor.

The original impetus for the Hatteras museum was spurred by the discovery of the Monitor wreck, but planning and funding difficulties delayed the project until long after the artifacts had gone to Virginia.

In 2008, the Monitor Sanctuary proposed expanding its parameters to include some sunken war wrecks in the vicinity, including World War II U-boats. But after a series of public meetings in which local divers and fishers expressed concerns about increased restrictions, the proposed plan was tabled.

NOAA, meanwhile, says that Navy regulations provide protections for the sunken vessels.

But Armor said that the expansion plan could be restarted, with more public input. Currently, NOAA is working to establish new sanctuaries off Hawaii and the south-central coast of California.

Once those planning processes are finalized, which could happen within 18 months or so, then the proposed expansion of the Monitor Sanctuary could potentially be reconsidered, he said.

Open process

Armor said he understands community suspicion or skepticism about restrictions, but he assured that each sanctuary has its own specific plan, with its own set of regulations and permitted activities that are developed by, with and for the community.

“That’s the thing that we love about the sanctuary process, is it is so open and collaborative,” he said. “We really go a long ways to making sure that we’re engaging all sectors of potentially affected communities in the decision and really benefit from guidance and perspective that communities have to offer. So, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to any of these topics that would come from the national office.”

Enforcement, also, is done on a site-by-site basis by the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement, which works closely with the Coast Guard and state wildlife agencies.

While activities such as diving and fishing are permitted in most areas of marine sanctuaries, Armor said, they also provide refuge to fish and other sea life, foster resilience and allow for almost real-time scientific monitoring to protect habitat and water quality.

And marine sanctuaries help in addressing an issue, he said, “that can be too big for people to even wrap their minds around.”

“I think the impacts of climate change and how they’re being felt in communities across the country has really highlighted the value that National Marine Sanctuaries can bring to the problem,” he said. “And so, sanctuaries and other protected areas on land and in the ocean help us focus our attention and help us focus our messaging on what we can do as average citizens to help address these challenges.”

Armor said that NOAA is planning a series of events leading up to the October anniversary celebration, which are detailed on a newly updated website.

It’s all part of getting the word out to the public, so they can celebrate what most didn’t even know they had. 

“And again, using the 50th anniversary not to look backwards and pat ourselves on the back for all the great things we’ve done,” he said, “but to challenge ourselves and to look forward to how we can do better down the road.”

Tiny, glowing shrimp that live in oceans’ darkest depths are shedding light on how life operates in one of the final frontiers, the deep sea.

Research examining the eye size of more than 16 species of planktonic, almost transparent shrimp called sergestid shrimps, is revealing how animals of the deep have adapted to surviving in low light.

“We don’t know very much about the deep sea because it’s incredibly difficult to study,” said Lorian Schweikert, an assistant professor of biology and marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “A really good place to start is by looking at vision, light and vision and that’s because, from what we understand, vision and the detection of light is critical to deep sea survival.”

Schweikert was part of a three-week research expedition funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research in June 2019 that afforded groups of researchers to focus on their particular areas of deep-sea study in the Gulf of Mexico. Coincidentally, this was the same expedition where one of those groups of researchers captured a giant squid on video, a sighting that made national news.

Schweikert’s team, which included marine biologists from the University of Texas and Florida International University, were there to study patterns of the eye size of sergestid shrimp pulled from varying depths off the Louisiana coast.

Animals of the deep have evolved the ability to glow and they use bioluminescent signals to communicate with each other.

This means that their vision is crucial to their survival. It’s how they find food and one another in the deep.

“That really is the basis of why we were looking at patterns of eyesight,” Schweikert said.

The research team targeted sergestid shrimp because they swim in large numbers in the water column throughout the world’s oceans.

They’re found in various deep-sea habitats – on the sea floor, in the open deep, and more shallow areas – which makes them particularly ideal to study when comparing patterns of survival in the deep-sea environment.

Sergestid shrimp take part in a nightly phenomenon called diel vertical migration, the largest mass migration of animals on Earth, when creatures of the deep leave the safety of the cold, darkest depths of the ocean to avoid predators and rise closer to the surface to feed in better light conditions.

“These shrimps, like all the animals down there, differ in how much they do this migration behavior, how far they migrate every night,” Schweikert explained.

Researchers used giant trawl container nets, which seal as animals are bought to the surface to keep them in a light-tight environment, to pull shrimp from depths ranging from 200 meters, about 660 feet, at night to between 1,000 meters, or about 3,300 feet, and 2,000 meters during the day.

Captured shrimp were taken to a wet lab aboard the research vessel and released in tanks where they lit up like a constellation, Schweikert said.

In all, the research team examined more than 450 shrimp.

“We looked at eye sight patterns across these shrimps and compared that to different aspects of their life, different aspects of ecology, because we wanted to know what was it about life in the deep sea that drives the importance of vision,” she said.

They compared eye size of shrimp pulled from different depths of the ocean and compared how much they migrated through the water column.

“We found that, above all other aspects of light that we compared, that the light organ patterns on their bodies was the best predictor of how their eyes are going to be,” Schweikert said. “In other words, it told us that the glowing signals that they may send each other is, by far, the most important aspect of their life for determining their visual mobility.”

Shrimp that have larger bioluminescent organs have smaller eyes.

This makes the case, Schweikert said, that species with smaller, and therefore potentially dimmer organs, had to evolve larger eyes to detect subtle glimmers of light at a distance.

“The size of the light organs was, by far, the greatest predictor of how the eyes were going to differ in these animals,” she said. “But, we did we did see weaker relationships for depth and for migration range.”

Researchers found that, overall, species that lived at greater depths – 1,000 meters or so – had larger eyes.

Their findings now give biologists an understanding, because these crustaceans’ eyes match the brightness emitted from their organs, they use their bioluminescence to communicate with one another.

Still, this is a mere glimpse into the mysterious world of the deep sea, the tip of the iceberg.

“We know more about the surface of the moon than the topography of the sea floor,” Schweikert said.

Next up, researchers are set to study how deep-sea creatures produce bioluminescence and how they communicate using the light from their bodies.

Schweikert said continuing research will ultimately help people better manage plans for how humans tap resources of the deep sea, including fish, gas and oil, and rare minerals.

“These are having an impact on the environment that we don’t fully understand,” she said.

The weakfish is a beautiful marine species, but is it really a “weak fish?”

According to fishers up and down the East Coast, that is the furthest thing from the truth.

Weakfish are known as strong fighters and give the most advanced fishers a challenge in hooking and landing them. The most challenging part of catching them is not to rip the hook out of their soft mouths.

They resemble and are often confused with the spotted sea trout. In North Carolina, this species is also known as either a gray trout, or just plain trout because of the similarity to the spotted sea trout, which is a completely different fish.

“Weakfish are most common along the Atlantic Coast from North Carolina to New York. The fish migrate seasonally, moving generally south and more offshore in the fall and winter months, and inshore and north in the spring and summertime,” said Tracey Bauer, North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries weakfish biologist.

Weakfish have a dark olive-green coloration on top and are silvery on the bottom half of their bodies. Their backs and sides may have purple, lavender, green, blue, golden or copper colors mixed in. The sides are reflective with dark blotches that look like wavy lines running down the side of the fish, but not into the fins, which are yellow. They have two large canine-like teeth in the upper jaw.

“The spotted pattern is how you tell the weakfish apart from the spotted sea trout because the spots do not appear on the tail or second dorsal fins,” said Bauer.

The weakfish can grow to be 36 inches in length, but most specimens range between 12 and 16 inches long.

This species is an omnivore that has adapted to whatever food is available throughout its range. They will eat other smaller fish, crabs, shrimp, butterfish, small clams and herring.

Weakfish are considered adults when they are a year old. In northern reaches, females mature at 10 inches in length and males just slightly smaller at 9.9 inches long. Weakfish in North Carolina waters tend to reproduce when females reach 6.9 inches in length and males reach 6.5 inches.

“Weakfish spawn in the estuarine and nearshore reaches of the coast after they migrate inshore during the spring. Weakfish in North Carolina spawn over a longer period of time and begin spawning earlier than areas to the north,” Bauer said.

Spawning season runs from March to September, with peak activity from April to June. By comparison, in New York Bight, which includes the Delaware Bay through New York, the season runs from May to mid-July.

Weakfish are described as batch spawners, meaning they spawn multiple times over a single spawning season. Weakfish have been estimated to spawn anywhere between once every two days to once every 22 days, for a total of anywhere between four and 66 spawns per season. These multiple spawns mean weakfish have been estimated to release up to 11.8 million eggs per year, though the number can be as low as only 740,000.

Younger weakfish spawn less frequently than older weakfish.

Weakfish larvae range from 1/16 to 1/14 inch in length when they hatch. This species larvae have been collected in nearshore waters to offshore in coastal studies.

Weakfish prefer to use estuaries as their nursery grounds. Sampling of North Carolina sounds showed that juvenile weakfish were at their highest numbers in areas the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries has designated as a secondary nursery habitat regions, such as shallow bays or navigation channels characterized by moderate depths, moderately high salinities with sand or sand-grass bottoms, rather than the main nursery areas made up of shallow tributaries with low salinity and mud or mud-grass habitat. In the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, juvenile weakfish usually move from high- to low-salinity areas during summer and return to high-salinity waters in the fall and leave the estuaries typically by December.

Young weakfish can be found along the Atlantic Coast from Long Island to North Carolina at depths of 29.5 to 85 feet, usually during the late summer and fall. Researchers discovered that weakfish younger than a year old were caught in ocean trawl surveys along the coast of North Carolina at depths of 29.5-59 feet during the fall and winter, and from North Carolina to Florida at depths of 29.5-36 feet during the winter and early spring, Bauer said.

Adult weakfish seasonally migrate between offshore and inshore waters. The warming of coastal waters in spring usually triggers an inshore and northerly migration route of adult fish from their wintering grounds to estuaries, sounds, and bays. Larger fish tend to be the first to move and congregate in the northern part of their range.

Catch records from the pound net and haul seine fisheries in Pamlico Sound, Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay tell researchers that larger fish are then followed by a second group of smaller fish during summer. Just after they arrive, weakfish return to the larger bays and maybe to the ocean to spawn. In northern areas, large numbers of adults spend the summer in ocean waters instead of in estuaries.

As water temperatures drop during the fall, weakfish form into schools and move offshore and typically south along the coast. It appears that the continental shelf from Chesapeake Bay to Cape Lookout is the primary wintering ground for weakfish.

“The growth rate of weakfish is very fast during their first year,” said Bauer.

In Delaware Bay, juveniles may grow from 0.83 to 1.18 inches per month from June to September and can grow to lengths between 3.94 to 6.9 inches in length throughout the range by the end of their first year.

“The size of the young fish will be determined by where they have been collected and the food and available to eat,” she said.

Movements of weakfish show geographic variations in growth, with their size increasing the farther north they are collected along the Atlantic Coast.

Northern weakfish collected between Cape Cod and Ocean City, Maryland, were largest, while those caught Virginia Beach and Cape Fear were smaller. The size of fish caught between Chesapeake Bay to Virginia Beach were intermediate and were similar to Delaware Bay. Growth of weakfish of southern half of their range may also be limited by food availability or by their DNA makeup, she concluded.

 “Weakfish have been one of the most important components of a mixed-stock commercial fishery on the Atlantic coast since the 1800s. with several periods of high and low landings. Commercial landings peaked in 1980 at about 36 million pounds coast wide and a little over 20 million pounds in North Carolina. Commercial landings remained relatively high through the 1980s and generally declined since then,” said Chris Batsavage, special assistant for councils and the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries representative on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

In 2020, coastwide and North Carolina commercial weakfish landings were 232,684 pounds and 87,784 pounds, respectively. Batsavage noted that commercial weakfish landings since 2010 had been limited by the commercial trip and bycatch limits of no greater than 100 pounds that are required by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Weakfish Fishery Management Plan.

“Weakfish have historically been landed in haul seines, pound nets, trawls and gill nets, with gill nets the predominant gear since the 1990s. North Carolina, Virginia and New York account for the majority of the commercial landings. Discarding of weakfish by commercial fishermen is known to occur, and the discard mortality is assumed to be 100%,” Batsavage added.

Recreational weakfish harvest has shown a similar trend as commercial landings with a peak in the early to mid-1980s and a marked decline since the early 2000s. In 2020, the coastwide recreational harvest was 481,418 pounds with 105,729 pounds landed in North Carolina. Since 2010, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Weakfish Fishery Management Plan required a one-fish bag limit and a minimum size limit of at least 12 inches total length, which has contributed to the low harvest over the last decade or so.

North Carolina, South Carolina and New York account for the majority of the recreational harvest. Virginia hasn’t been among the top states for recreational harvest in recent years.

It is assumed that 10% of weakfish released alive by recreational anglers die. Although the total number of weakfish released follows a similar trend as recreational harvest, the proportion of weakfish released has increased since 2010, Batsavage said. 

A 2019 stock assessment update shows weakfish still showed signs of being depleted as they have been since 2003. The fish stock is considered depleted when it is below the spawning stock biomass, or SSB, threshold of 30% or 13.6 million pounds. In 2017, the SSB was only 4.24 million pounds. While the assessment shows some good signs in the weakfish population recently, with a slight increase in SSB and total abundance, the stock is still well below the self-sustainable threshold.

“The assessment also shows natural mortality, or the rate at which fish die because of natural causes such as starvation, disease, predation, has been going up since the early 2000s. The assessment therefore uses total mortality, which includes fishing mortality and natural mortality, as benchmarks to prevent an increase in fishing pressure during times of high natural mortality and low fishing mortality. Although total mortality has decreased since 2010, it is still too high for the stock to recover,” Batsavage said.

North Carolina gives awards for the catch and keep of a weakfish that is 5 pounds and larger. They also give out awards for the live release of a weakfish measuring 24 inches or longer. A total of 10 weight citations and three release citations were issued for weakfish in 2020, the most recent totals available.

Anglers catch weakfish with natural or artificial baits by a variety of techniques including bottom fishing and jigging. They commonly use sting silvers and spec rigs. The weakfish have soft mouths. Anglers should keep the line tight, yet not pull too hard because the hook could rip through the lip and permanently injure the fish.

Years ago, I was slowly boating out to go scuba diving during the summer when we came upon a large swirling motion of water at the surface — a massive school of Atlantic menhaden being attacked from the underneath by hungry bluefish.

I quickly donned my drysuit and hopped into the water with my video camera. The footage revealed just how viciously the bluefish struck the menhaden from below, and just as quickly they were gone. Only later I found out that you really don’t want to be in the water when bluefish are blitz-feeding like I observed, as they are known to bite their way through a diver’s wetsuit. I was glad I didn’t know this when in the water with both species!

Atlantic menhaden can be found in the estuaries and coastal waters from as far north as Nova Scotia south to the northern portion Florida and are thought to be all from the same stock.

This species is also referred to as pogy or fatback, depending upon where in the country you find it.

Atlantic menhaden are small, blue-black fish with shiny, metallic-like sides and a deeply forked tail. They have an obvious dark spot on the shoulder just behind the gill plate, often followed by two or three mixed, or irregular rows of smaller spots. They spawn in the ocean then enter the estuaries for food. They swim in large schools and provide an important role in marine ecosystems as a forage fish for larger predators.

Biology

“Both adult and juvenile menhaden form large, near-surface schools of fish that are so thick in numbers that they look like an oil slick when viewed from the air,” said Holly White, fisheries biologist with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. “This takes place mainly in nearshore waters and estuaries from early spring right through until early winter. By summertime, the schools of fish will separate by age and size along the coast, with larger and older menhaden found farther north and youngsters further to the south.”

From the fall to early winter, all menhaden, regardless of age or size, move south off of the North Carolina capes to spawn, White said.

The fish become sexually mature as young as a year old, up to 3 years of age. They spawn from New Jersey south to the Carolinas and most spawning occurs between 20 and 30 miles offshore during the winter, according to information White provided.

Their eggs are buoyant and when they hatch, the larvae are carried into estuarine nursery areas by prevailing ocean currents. Juveniles spend most of their first year in estuaries, moving out into the ocean during late fall.

Research indicates that the number of new fish that enter the fishery annually — the year-class strength — is likely determined by environmental factors, including currents, temperature and predation, acting on larvae as they approach and enter inlets and nursery areas, she said.

Atlantic menhaden can live up to 10 years. They grow to about 15 inches in length, on average, and weigh up to a pound.

Menhaden are highly effective filter feeders that feed primarily on microscopic plankton. Water is pushed through specialized gill rakes that are shaped into a basket which allows them to capture and eat plankton.

Menhaden are an important prey species in food webs, providing a link between primary production and higher organisms by consuming plankton and providing forage for species such as striped bass, bluefish and weakfish, to name just a few.

Commercial fishery

The Atlantic menhaden commercial fishery is made up of a reduction fishery, in which the industry “reduces” the whole fish into fishmeal, fish oil and fish solubles, and a bait fishery.

“The reduction fishery first began in New England during the early 1800s and spread south after the Civil War,” said Special Assistant to Councils Chris Batsavage with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries.

He said the reduction fishery grew with the advent of purse seines in the mid-1800s and reached peak landings in 1956 at 712,100 metric tons.

“At the time, over 20 menhaden reduction factories ranged from southern Maine to northern Florida. In the 1960s, the Atlantic menhaden stock contracted geographically, and many of the reduction factories north of the Chesapeake Bay closed due to a scarcity of fish,” said Batsavage.

Consequently, reduction landings dropped to 161,000 tons in 1969.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the menhaden population began to expand primarily due to a series of above-average year-classes entering the fishery, and then reduction landings rose to around 300,000-400,000 metric tons.

At that time, adult menhaden were abundant in the northern half of their range in the United States and, because of this, the reduction factories in Canada and New England began rapidly expanding and processing menhaden again by the early to mid-1970s. By 1989, all New England-based shoreside reduction plants had closed, mainly because of regulations put in place to do away with odors, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

“During the 1990s, the Atlantic menhaden stock contracted again, largely due to a series of poor to average year-classes. Over the next decade, several reduction plants consolidated or closed, resulting in a significant reduction in fleet size and fishing capacity. By 2006, there was only one remaining reduction plant in operation on the Atlantic coast processing menhaden into fishmeal and oil. This is the Omega Protein plant located in Reedville, Virginia, which is still operational today,” said Batsavage.

In 2019, roughly 150,000 tons were landed for reduction purposes. Commercial landings in 2019, including reduction, bait, bycatch and episodic event landings, were 208,837 tons, or 96% of the total allowable catch.

“This represents a 9% decrease in landings from 2018,” said Batsavage. “However, the trend in total landings for bait purposes has increased in recent years, especially in the New England states.”

Menhaden landings in North Carolina ranged from around 100 million to over 300 million pounds per year from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s, with the highest landings occurring in 1981 at over 309 million pounds.

Landings decreased from the late 1990s to 2004 ranging from just over 40 million pounds to around 110 million pounds per year. 

“The last reduction plant in North Carolina closed in 2005. Since then, menhaden landings in North Carolina have been for bait purposes only and have ranged from around 400,000 to 3.5 million pounds per year,” said Batsavage.

Atlantic menhaden remains a popular baitfish for those targeting spotted seatrout, bluefish, king mackerel, tuna and sharks. Anglers can purchase live menhaden from floating “bait barges” along coastal waterways. Contact a tackle shop for availability and locations.

The red lionfish is a beautiful animal to display in a home aquarium, and although they are found here, they are not native to the waters off North Carolina.

Native to the Indo-Pacific Ocean, they are believed to have been introduced first off the coast of Florida in the mid-1990s and are now found throughout the entire Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea and the southwestern Atlantic Ocean, with breeding populations as far north as North Carolina and juveniles showing up in the thousands every year off the coasts of New York and southern New England.

It’s because of invasive species like the lionfish first documented in the Tar Heel State back in 2001 that many in North Carolina observe National Invasive Species Awareness Week, Feb. 28-March 4, as declared by the nonprofit North American Invasive Species Management Association.

“One of the most critical messages of National Invasive Species Awareness Week is that awareness of what invasive species are is not enough,” said Belle Bergner, executive director of the North American Invasive Species Management Association. “Everyone has a role to play in taking action to prevent the devastating impacts of invasive species, and it’s easy. Just don’t dump unwanted aquatic or other pets or plants and clean boots, boats, or other recreational gear before entering and leaving a trail or water body.”

She described the invasive red lionfish as a perfect example of how careless dumping of unwanted aquatic pets can devastate oceanic food webs and other ecosystem dynamics and create “a management nightmare.”

Red lionfish are easy to identify. Basketball-sized, red to brown in color with reddish stripes and similarly colored feather-like fins all around its body, it is the only fish in the Atlantic with these identification traits.

Their popularity in the aquarium trade is believed to have led to their invasion of U.S. coastal waters. But there is debate as to whether the first releases were in Florida or North Carolina waters, said North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries Invasive Species Biologist Janelle Johnson.

Fierce predators that consume a variety of prey items, lionfish have no known natural predators outside of their native range.

“Additionally, lionfish are able to reproduce quickly. These characteristics have allowed lionfish to become highly invasive throughout the coastal waters of the southeastern United States,” Johnson said.

North Carolina does not have a management plan in place for lionfish, nor are there mitigation strategies in place at the state level. “However, targeting of lionfish is highly encouraged. Lionfish have a flaky white meat that many find delicious. Lionfish can be targeted while spearfishing or bottom fishing on shipwrecks or reefs. Additionally, some dive operations offer trips specifically targeting invasive lionfish,” Johnson said.

In the Atlantic, red lionfish behave differently than in their native Pacific. Normally known to be shadowy and secretive, lionfish – free of their natural Pacific predators – become voracious predators in the Atlantic and are responsible for massive reef fish kills, devastating economically important fish including grouper and snapper.

“The red lionfish has a lot going for it in Atlantic waters,” said Martha Burford Reiskind, research assistant professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University and principal investigator of a 2019 study.

“They are found at high densities and in some cases can spawn every four days in the Atlantic; their eggs can travel great distances on ocean currents, exacerbating their spread,” she said. “They are also difficult to handle because of their venomous spines. The population has grown so large that controlling it, not eradicating it, is the primary goal.”

The venom in lionfish spines can cause severe pain and, in extreme cases, respiratory issues or paralysis. They have three sets of spines near the dorsal, anal and pelvic fins. If stung, you should seek medical attention as soon as possible.

Paula Whitfield, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Beaufort Lab, told Coastal Review that numerous unanswered questions remain about their diet and impact on ecosystems.

“And we do not know much about their reproduction, either,” she said. “We have no idea of the total population size of the red lionfish in the Atlantic.”

Report lionfish sightings or catches to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Nonindigenous Aquatic species reporting site, https://nas.er.usgs.gov/SightingReport.aspx, or directly to NOAA at reportlionfish@noaa.gov or 252-728-8714.

Red Lionfish Invasion Chronology

Whitfield provided the following timeline for invasive lionfish in Atlantic waters:

Mid-1990s

Red lionfish first observed and photographed off West Palm Beach Inlet in Florida. Most likely cause was the release from a private aquarium.

2000

Lionfish found in two locations off North Carolina, shipwrecks 60 miles apart. Small numbers seen over a large geographic range. First sightings recorded off South Carolina and Georgia.

2001

Lionfish documented in seven different locations off North Carolina. First juveniles observed off Long Island, New York and off Bermuda.

2004-05

First verified reports of lionfish off Bermuda.

2006

First verified report of a juvenile lionfish off southern New England at Jamestown, Rhode Island.

2022

Lionfish invasion now documented throughout the entire Gulf of Mexico south to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, the entire Caribbean Sea, including Cuba, and southwestern United States breeding as far north as North Carolina in large numbers. Annual reports of large numbers of juvenile lionfish in southern New England.

A new study reports that baleen whales may eat significantly more than previously estimated. This greater understanding of the eating habits of baleen whales helps illustrate a clearer picture of the true impact that baleen whales have on marine ecosystems.

The study, “Baleen whale consumption based on high-resolution foraging measurements,” was published in Nature in November. Lead author Dr. Matthew Savoca was drawn to studying whales because he is fascinated by what marine animals can tell us about marine environments. And considering how much people like whales, he said, it’s surprising how much we still don’t know about them.

“It’s been great fun to work with whales,” Savoca said. “Not just because they’re so awesome and charismatic, but also, because there’s so much mystery around them.”

Savoca works out of the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University, and found that extensive data had already been collected on baleen whale prey consumption. With the help of an international team of researchers, Savoca was able to organize that data in order to better understand baleen whale prey consumption.

Baleen whales include several well-known species of whales such as humpback and blue whales. Many previous estimates of their eating habits depended largely on bioenergetic models based on estimated metabolic rates that were ultimately not backed by direct observations.

Another method for estimating prey consumption rates was to do autopsies on dead whales and measure their stomach contents, though this method also has significant drawbacks. What you might find in a whale’s stomach after their death isn’t necessarily reflective of what they eat every day.

This study drew data from 321 tags deployed on whales of seven baleen species. The tags are about the size of half of a grapefruit, but similar in functionality to smartphones, and attach to the whales using suction cups. In conjunction with the tags, the researchers used acoustic measurements of prey populations in areas where the whales were located.

Dr. David Johnston is an associate professor of the practice of marine conservation ecology at Duke University. He is also the director of the Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab, a part of the university’s marine lab based in Beaufort, and a co-author of this study.

The lab deployed the drones used for this research. The drones measured the altitude of the drone over each whale, which, along with the details of the drone’s camera, allowed the researchers to calculate the length of the whales. The length of the whale is important because it helped the researchers estimate the gulp size of the whales.

A whale’s gulp shows up as a unique physical signature on the tags. This helps the researchers keep track of how many times a whale eats during a day.

“What happens when an animal feeds like that is it accelerates really quickly,” Johnston said. “And then when it opens its mouth, it’s like a big parachute. And that slows the animal down really quickly. And that is a very distinctive signature in the accelerometer data that’s on the tag.”

The gulp size calculations along with the number of gulps and the prey availability assessments allowed the researchers to get a good idea of how much each whale was eating.

They found that median daily prey consumption was between 5-30% of a whale’s body mass. This is ecologically meaningful because of the great numbers of whales that used to swim in our oceans just 100 years ago.

It is estimated that the whaling industry was responsible for the deaths of nearly 3 million whales in the 20th century. Even in the half century since the U.S. banned commercial whaling, whales as a whole have not been able to bounce back to what they once were.

“I think a lot of people — because this happened before any of us were born — don’t realize how common whales were in coastal ecosystems a couple hundred years ago,” Savoca said.

Today, whales are still routinely threatened by ship strikes and the risk of getting tangled in commercial fishing lines.

Often, when a predator’s population decreases, their direct prey sees an increase in population. But that has not been the case with krill, one of baleen whales’ main food sources. In fact, the researchers estimate that krill populations have decreased instead of increasing.

This is indicative of the far-reaching impact that whales have on marine ecosystems. Whales eat large amounts, and then excrete large amounts in turn. In doing so, they deposit huge inputs of iron into the ocean environment. In other words, whale poop gives oceans the nutrients it needs in order to grow things like phytoplankton, the base of the ocean food web.

This means that more whales probably made for a more “productive” ocean environment. There would be more phytoplankton, meaning there would be more krill, and therefore more food for baleen whales.

And that could be why krill numbers have actually gone down instead of up — their biggest predator is also responsible for fertilizing the basis of the food web.

All of this indicates that whales have a huge impact on marine environments, and hints at what is lost when whale populations are low or threatened. But it’s more than that, too, Savoca said. People like whales and want them around.

“I think it’s almost undeniable that these are animals that we want on the planet with us,” Savoca said.

The United States Department of Energy has awarded Duke University a $7.5 million grant to research the impact that offshore wind development can have on wildlife and marine life.

The grant announced Oct. 13 is part of a larger sustainable energy development award package of $13.5 million by the Energy Department. The department distributed the funds among four different projects, all focused on wildlife and offshore wind.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced a goal of creating tens of thousands of jobs while deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by the year 2030. Meeting this goal can put the U.S. on a path to achieve 110 gigawatts by 2050. The ultimate intention is to create jobs while also creating opportunities for renewable energy, without endangering ecosystems as they currently exist.

To put these plans in motion, more offshore wind construction off the Atlantic coast will be beginning in the next several years. But there is uncertainty as to how offshore wind may affect fish, whales, birds and other marine life. Duke University’s project, Wildlife and Offshore Wind, or WOW, aims to answer some of these questions.

“There’s a fair few number of moving parts, and we’re going to try to figure out how to get those moving parts to move in harmony,” said Dr. Douglas Nowacek, a Repass-Rodgers University Distinguished Professor of Conservation Technology at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort. Nowacek will be leading WOW along with other researchers at Duke University. However, the consortium of researchers involved in the project will span 15 different institutions.

One of the first steps, said Nowacek, is to aggregate all the data that already exists in one place. This data comes from academic researchers, government agencies, as well as some of Europe’s experience with offshore wind. They also have letters of commitment from several wind energy developers, stating that they will share wildlife data with WOW.

“The next step then is going to be to create some tools, some models, (and) some frameworks to utilize those data,” Nowacek said.

The first year of this project will be focused on data aggregation, as well as creating frameworks, synthesis tools and data standards. After assessing what’s already out there, the team can identify gaps in knowledge and potential lines of inquiry. The following years will be spent deploying research efforts to address the questions identified in the first year.

Nowacek said that even though coordination across so many contributors is difficult, the collective expertise across institutions is likely the reason that they were selected for the grant in the first place. Formally, WOW has been in the works since January, when Nowacek and others started compiling their grant proposal. However, Nowacek said that the relationship building that goes into an expansive project like this has been in the works for years.

Dr. Patrick Halpin, director of Duke’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, will take the lead on the data synthesis component of the project. Halpin said the timing of the grant is especially important. As offshore wind is in the early stages of development in the region, beginning WOW work now means that they can do critical initial assessments before construction of turbines begins. This will be key later on, in that the researchers will have pre-construction data to refer to. Having pre- and post construction data will make it easier to evaluate how offshore wind interacts with marine wildlife. This project could set the stage for long-term, conscientious management of sustainable energy with regard to marine species.

“A big portion of this project is really to come up with a common framework for assessment, which will allow us to help develop monitoring protocols (and) help us be able to look at the interactions for many different taxa,” Halpin said, referring to biological groupings of species. “And then doing that at a regional scale so that the lessons learned can be applied across this rapidly developing field right now.”

Different wildlife may be affected at different stages of the process, said Halpin. Marine mammals, like the endangered North Atlantic right whale, may be most impacted during the noisy construction stage. Whereas avian interactions or displacement could occur after the turbines are built.

“I think people think about it as interactions are going to be one thing — a monolithic kind of issue,” Halpin said. “But really, interactions for different species are going to be very, very different in space and time.”

In addition to Duke University, the other partners on WOW include the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Rutgers University, the University of St. Andrews, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Syracuse University, the Pacific Northwest National Lab, TetraTech, Scientific Innovations, the New England Aquarium, Florida State University, the Biodiversity Research Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Southall Environmental Associates, and Cornell University.

They swell up, they blow up, they puff up. Their unusual defense against predators makes this blowfish a hoot.

Northern puffers are found on the Atlantic coast of North America from Newfoundland to Flagler County, Florida, over sand bottom near or in and around seagrass in waters ranging from 3 to more than 600 feet deep.

It is the only pufferfish that is abundant along the mid-Atlantic coast. This species uses its strong, beak-like mouth to crush the shells of small mollusks, crustaceans and other invertebrates. I have seen small puffers swimming in the surf zone, near breaking waves, feeding on small animals churned up by the wave action.

In North Carolina waters, the northern puffer is a small to medium-sized fish with a blunt body capable of inflating with water and air. Puffers have grayish-brown backs and upper sides, but are yellowish white on the lower sides and belly. Tiny black spots are scattered over most of the body, particularly near the cheeks, and there is a row of seven to 10 vertical bars along the sides. The head and body are covered with prickles that give the skin a sandpaper-like quality, according to the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries website.

It’s easy to distinguish a northern puffer from its close cousin, the striped burrfish, which is also a frequent visitor to North Carolina coastal waters. First, the puffer is club shaped whereas the burrfish is boxier in shape. Second, the northern puffer has no noticeable spines along its body, while the striped burrfish has large, prominent spines all along the full length of its body. The puffer is small and olive colored, with numerous tiny black spots along its body, while the burrfish lacks the tiny spots.

“The Northern puffer is found in bays and estuaries, as well as offshore waters to depths of at least 180 feet,” Jason Rock, biologist supervisor with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, told Coastal Review. “This species is not a schooling species, but has been observed by scuba divers in large, disorganized congregations on the sand bottom. They will feed on mainly shellfish, but will occasionally eat small finfish. The numbers of fish that are caught throughout their range are negligible, but catches are higher further north in New England waters, they are typically caught using crab pots and with hook-and-line. In supermarkets, the puffer is typically sold as fresh Sea squab.”

Between 1962 and 1970, the annual landings from the Chesapeake Bay region alone were between 1 and 12 million pounds. During this period, commercial landings increased as the fish moved their way north during spring from North Carolina to the Chesapeake Bay. During fall, the catch generally moved southward. This gave fisheries scientists a sense that the northern puffer made an annual migration along the coast, but little is known about its life history.

“In North Carolina, from 2010 to 2019, landings averaged around 4,000 pounds. I looked at some recreational landings and they were a little higher and averaged around 30,000 pounds a year from 2000 to 2009. Landings coastwide now are pretty low for both recreational and commercial fisheries,” Rock said.

“This species is also called swell toad, puffer, blowfish, blow toad, toadfish, and sea squab. They are occasionally confused with oyster toadfish, porcupine fish, and striped burrfish, depending upon where in its’ range you find the species,” said Rock.

Northern puffers are usually seen in North Carolina waters ranging from 8 to 10 inches in length, but have been observed up to 14 inches in length and 1½ pounds. No awards are provided for catching northern puffers.

Chris Batsavage, special assistant to councils with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, told Coastal Review that the northern puffer is not currently managed by the state, the South Atlantic Marine Management Council nor the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

“Pufferfish spawn in the shoal waters close to the shore, from mid-May, in Chesapeake Bay, and from early June through the end of the summer off southern Massachusetts. They are prolific spawners. The ovaries of a Chesapeake Bay female that was 10.5 inches in length had about 176,000 eggs. These eggs are about 1/32 of an inch in diameter, with many small oil globules, that sink and stick quickly to each other, or to whatever they happen to contact on the bottom. Eggs will hatch between three and a half to five days later, depending upon water temperatures in the 67-68 degree Fahrenheit,” Rock said.

According to Henry B. Bigelow and William C. Schroeder’s book, “Fishes of The Gulf of Maine,” first published in 1953, northern puffer larvae are about 3/32 of an inch in length when hatched and are brilliantly colored with orange, red, yellow and black. Within three days, the mouth will form, when they are about 9/32 of an inch in length. At this stage they start to resemble tiny mature northern puffers.  Even at this tender age, they can inflate themselves when threatened.

The fish has four powerful teeth that are used to crush practically any food source they can find including, mussels, clams, crabs, worms, shrimp, sea plants, sea urchins and sea squirts, said Rock.

The northern puffer, unlike species of puffers found elsewhere, is not harmful to eat — it has long been consumed by people. But some scientists believe there may be low-level toxins in the organs and skin of the fish.

“If you want to eat any puffers in North Carolina that you may catch, it is a good idea to remove all of skin and viscera before eating them,” Rock said.

Puffers inflate by placing water or air into a special chamber near their stomachs. A northern puffer that is caught and released while inflated will briefly float upside down at the surface before quickly losing the volume from and swimming away.  And they’re not particularly good swimmers. A northern puffer moves forward in the water column by waving its caudal, or tail, fin back and forth like that of a ping pong paddle.

The best way to catch puffers is to use a hook and line near shore from jetties, piers, small boats and from coastal waters with a double-hook rig that is fished on the bottom and using  bloodworms, shrimp or squid as bait.

“Females are significantly larger than males at each age. Most growth, in terms of length, occurs during the first growing season from June through October,” Rock said.

They become sexually mature between their first and second year of life. Peak spawning occurs in June and July.

Before “Jaws” with its depiction of a giant, vengeful, man-eating creature of the deep; before Shark Week, Discovery Channels’ eight-day ode to all things sharks; and well before the over-the-top gratuitous sci-fi series “Sharknado” films, there was, just off the coast of North Carolina, “shark survey.”

Not as glamorous, perhaps, as the mindless entertainment evoked from creative minds the likes of Steven Spielberg, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City has achieved in the research world a treasure trove of data about shark species caught off the coastal waters of North Carolina.

Think of it as a kind of national archives of sharks — the result of 50 years of information compiled from catching the finned wonders using the same method of baiting in the two same spots in the Onslow Bay area of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Long-term data that has been consistent in methods that do not have gaps is extraordinarily rare,” said Steve Fegley, a retired research associate professor. “A lot of what we do: we can conduct research, we can sample for a couple of years, but then the questions we have about what’s going on, we really should be sampling for decades. What’s remarkable about this dataset is the methods that are used are consistent and the sampling is unbroken.”

The inception of the program goes back to the late 1960s when the late marine zoologist Frank Schwartz followed his curiosity from the lab to the waters outside of Beaufort Inlet.

The first year Schwartz put hooks in the water to catch his research subjects was 1972.

In those early years, the focus was solely on the fish.

Enter Fegley, who, before Schwartz’s death in 2018, came with a background in statistics, decided to take a look at the data researchers had collected over numerous trips.

“I started analyzing the dataset and participating in going out on the shark trips themselves,” Fegley said. “I started analyzing the data in ways it had never been analyzed before.”

Fegley wanted to show that, within that data, there was a host of information, things no one was talking about.

Around this time, Joel Fodrie, now the professor in charge of the institute’s shark survey, joined the ranks.

Fegley said his role in the survey was small, but one that helped bridge the program from Schwartz to Fodrie and a catalyst in showing people aspects of a dataset that had yet to be considered.

Advances in statistics during the prime of Schwartz’s career enabled researchers to begin examining water temperatures, surface salinities and wind and wave conditions, all of which help scientists get a more wholistic picture beyond the fin and what’s happening in the ecological system.

This is one of the hallmarks of the survey.

“I do think that there are lab groups that become very sharkcentric and everything they do primarily revolves around sharks,” Fodrie said. “That’s not really who we are. We like this extra challenge of bringing them back into the larger community of sea life. We think of ourselves as marine or fisheries ecologists first and then sharks are a part of that.”

Schwartz didn’t know it at the time he set out to start collecting information sharks — species, size and gender — but two large-scale events would directly affect sharks and their habitat.

The first is global climate change. The second, marine scientists attribute to the 1975 release of “Jaws,” a cinematic phenomenon that piqued the curiosity of humans the world over and spurred the harvesting of sharks.

The data collected in the early years of the survey allow researchers to ask questions about that critical time, Fegley said.

Over the past half-century, the data has shown broad-stroke patterns.

The first of which is that from 1973-74 through the 1980s more sharks were being caught and surveyed than now.

“Since the early 1990s and continuing up to at least about three or four years ago the overall abundance of shark has continued to decrease,” Fegley said.

Second, the different species of shark being caught in the survey has declined.

“Almost any time you do catch any sharks nowadays you can almost guarantee the Atlantic sharpnose shark,” Fegley said.

One graduate student’s research of the data found a trend in the size of many species of sharks caught within the past couple of decades being smaller than those caught in the late 1980s through the early 1990s.

Why that is remains a question yet to be answered.

Is climate change a factor? Conditions at the locations in which the surveys occur have, in a way, changed, Fegley said.

“It just may be that some of these shark species now prefer other areas that are nearby. We have a very clear picture of a very small spot. The other thing to consider is what these sharks are feeding on. Are we seeing fewer spot? Or, some of the different grunts? Or, some of the other fish that if their abundances are down then maybe it’s not a surprise that the shark abundances are down,” Fegley said. “We’ve got a very interesting, distinctive, significant pattern on several aspects. It would be foolhardy given this stage of analysis to say this is what’s going on, this is what it’s got to be. For us when you get a dataset like this it really does open up more questions than it does answers.”

The survey is amongst the oldest in the world.

Since 1972, from April through November, Institute of Marine Sciences crews travel to two sites 4 kilometers, or about 2.5 miles, offshore and 13 kilometers, or about 8 miles, once every other week.

This equates to 15 trips and 3,0000 baited hooks a year.

Just under 11,000 sharks have been caught, measured and analyzed. They’ve pulled in hammerheads, tiger sharks, bull sharks and a variety of Atlantic sharpnose species.

The program has allowed researchers to conduct a host of analyses.

Savannah Ryburn, a marine ecologist and UNC Chapel Hill student working on a master’s degree, is studying shark diets.

Ryburn was set to head to the university’s Center for Galapagos Studies on San Cristobal Island last summer before the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered travel.

Instead, she headed to Morehead City to begin carrying out her research through the shark survey.

She’s using a new method of testing to learn what sharks eat by taking fecal swabs from sharks, then using DNA analysis to figure out what the sharks are eating.

From June through the beginning of September, Ryburn swabbed sharks.

“Thankfully I was able to join the trips last summer and actually test my method and make sure it works,” she said in a telephone interview from the Galapagos, where she is working on gathering DNA from the samples she collected. “It’s a quick and noninvasive way to determine diet. I’m doing something pretty similar now. I’m still working on getting the DNA to the point where it can be read. I don’t have any concrete results yet.”

Ari Friedlaender, a long-term ecological researcher with the University of California, Santa Cruz, has worked with the Australian Antarctic Division and is part of the Long-Term Ecological Research program at Palmer Station, a United States station in Antarctica.

His work there is to get a better understanding of the ecological roles of whales in a rapidly changing environment.

Friedlaender, who earned his master’s in marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and doctorate at Duke University, has not worked with the shark survey, but understands the value of long-term research programs.

“When you’re studying long-lived animals like humpback whales … if you want to understand the impact of things like climate change or invariability in the environment you really need to have a long-term dataset,” he said. “If you only measure in a very finite window over a small period you may just be catching one end of a phase. To me there isn’t a status quo or a finish line for a project. The value of continuing to ask questions is they all build on the knowledge that was just gained.”

Fegley has now started taking all of the environmental data collected through the survey to predict what researchers will see in the future, including the abundance of shark and their sizes.

He’s depending on the future of the shark survey to see his research through.

The program has, in large part, been funded solely through the university. Grants are competitive and funding, in a general sense, does not always flow toward observational programs like the shark survey, Fodrie said.

“If we don’t have the program then that process stops before validation,” Fegley said. “If the program should survive and I don’t know that it’s under any eminent threat, but the threat is always there.”

Fodrie said the institute’s shark survey offers an important role in the detective work of the oceans.

“It’s already proven its worth, but will it keep proving its worth?” he said. “Without a program like this you might have people like me trying to understand an ecosystem and never really be able to tie in the sharks. In the normal day to day of putting out little nets or little buckets you’re not going to access those animals. For someone like me who wants to understand marine ecology that really leaves a large hole.”

The measures put in place in March to curb the spread of COVID-19 have changed how North Carolinians consume and dispose of waste. This is the fourth installment in a series examining how advocacy organizations, local governments and state agencies are adapting to these changes.

Debris that litters the coast has been a longstanding problem for marine life, and coordinators for University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Turtle Trash Collectors program, which previously offered in-person educational activities, have changed how they reach audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Laura Sirak-Schaeffer, grants project coordinator and lead instructor for Turtle Trash Collectors, said in an interview that the program is an environmental education initiative funded by a grant from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Marine Debris Program.

Turtle Trash Collectors is a project through MarineQuest, the official marine science outreach program for UNCW,  Watson College of Education, and the Center for Marine Science to offer young people with opportunities to explore, discover and value our marine habitats.

The goal of the program is to educate youth about the impacts of marine debris and encourage behavioral changes that will reduce its generation in the future.

“This program combines both my love for sea turtles and my passion for public education. My favorite part of my job is knowing that we are making a lasting impact by teaching everyone how they can stop marine debris,” she said.

Sirak-Schaeffer explained that marine debris has major effects on all kinds of marine organisms, especially sea turtles, which can confuse plastic bags and balloons for jellyfish. The debris can end up in their system and can get stuck, making the turtle feel full so that they stop eating. Sea turtles also can swallow fishing hooks and get caught in fishing nets.

“Since sea turtles are endangered species, we need to find a way to protect them from the impacts of marine debris,” Sirak-Schaeffer said, adding ways to help include reduce using plastic and use reusable water bottles, coffee cups, grocery bags and food containers instead, pick up trash to make sure it doesn’t end up in the ocean and encourage others to help.

Turtle Trash Collectors launched earlier this year new citizen-science program to better understand how COVID-19 is affecting pollution and marine debris.  Volunteers are to pick an area to hold a cleanup, such as a neighborhood, park or beach, and hold three cleanups in the same area, once now, then again when quarantine restrictions are lifting, and once more when everything is reopened and back to normal. Participation information is on the website.

During each cleanup, volunteers are asked to keep track of what they collect using a data sheet and then report data so progress can be recorded.

Sue Kezios, director of Youth Programs and UNCW MarineQuest, is the principle investigator, or PI, for the NOAA grant that funds the Turtle Trash Collectors project.

Kezios said that there already was in place the Turtle Trash Collector badging program to encourage young people and their families to collect certain kinds of marine debris, single-use plastic items in particular.

“But during the early days of the pandemic I started to hear stories about how the environment seemed to be responding to the decrease in human impacts. People in the Indian province of Punjab being able to see the Himalayan mountains for the first time in many years due to a reduction in air pollution, Kezios said. “This got me thinking about litter and whether that was decreasing; and if so, what would we find during beach cleanups?”

Kezios continued that the idea to launch the citizen-science project grew out of this initial idea and the fact that they were starting to hear how kids were struggling with online learning and being quarantined at home.

“Our citizen-science project is a great way to get them outside, engaged in science and helping the environment. We asked them to do a trash survey of the immediate neighborhood surrounding their homes during the early weeks of the pandemic, then a follow up survey once their community started to open back up, and a final survey once the community is fully opened,” Kezios said. “Will the trash increase as people start to spend more time out of their homes? Unfortunately, the data so far seems to indicate this is happening.”

Sirak-Schaeffer said the idea for Turtle Trash Collectors was sparked in the summer of 2018.

She and Kezios were “brainstorming ideas for new outreach programs and thought ‘wouldn’t it be fun to show the impacts of marine debris by simulating a sea turtle necropsy?’ We ran with the idea, applied for a grant through the NOAA Marine Debris Program, and were pleased to receive funding. We spent many hours designing and sewing our life-like sea turtle models, officially implementing programs in schools as of January of 2019,” Sirak-Schaeffer said.

They’ve traveled more than 9,000 miles and reached nearly 12,000 students and 500 teachers in southeastern North Carolina since starting the program, she said. ““We also educated 3,800 kids and 3,000 adults at public programs, mostly at the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center and the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher last summer.”

Kezios said she searched for a life-size and realistic-looking model and found a green sea turtle stuffed-animal toy that was easy to adapt for a necropsy simulation.

“Fortunately, our team is pretty creative, and we have a number of skilled seamstresses. I gutted the stuffed-turtles and reinforced their side walls. Another team member used cross-stitch webbing to reinforce and apply Velcro to the removable plastron,” Kezios explained. “Then we set up an assembly line and started sewing organs – muscles and heart, esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines, then trachea and lungs. The most difficult part was making small resealable openings throughout the digestive tract so we could insert marine debris that a sea turtle might mistakenly ingest.”

This is the third grant Kezios has secured that focuses specifically on the problem of marine debris.

“I think anyone who has seen coverage of a whale or sea turtle starving to death because of the marine debris they’ve swallowed or struggling to swim and breathe because they are entangled by derelict fishing gear must feel some level of responsibility for the problem,” she said. “We all generate trash, the challenge is to reduce it as much as possible and to responsibly dispose of it in an environmentally appropriate manner. Educational programs like ours can help people recognize the small ways they can contribute to a solution for a huge problem like marine debris.”

Kezios said the success of Turtle Trash Collectors was built on a previous project, Traveling Through Trash, funded by a NOAA marine debris prevention grant.

The project involved visiting schools in rural communities throughout the region with life-size inflatable North Atlantic Right Whale classroom, during which time they formed relationships with many of the school systems in coastal and southeastern North Carolina.

“The kids attended a program inside the whale and learned about marine debris origins and impacts, as well as how they can help prevent it. The program was very successful, so we were encouraged to continue our efforts with a second grant that leveraged young people’s interest in sea turtles,” Kezios said.

The idea to create stuffed turtles to simulate a necropsy, or animal autopsy, was based on the Traveling Through Trash project.

“One of the lessons we utilized with the life-sized whale was a simulated necropsy. This was so large it could only be done as a group exercise.  So, we decided to focus on a different marine organism that was equally charismatic, also impacted by marine debris, and would allow for small group interactions. The sea turtle was a perfect fit,” Kezios said.

Sirak-Schaeffer explained that before the pandemic, “we would bring our model sea turtles to elementary schools in southeastern North Carolina and do a hands-on demonstration with third to fifth grade classes. Since that is not possible right now due to COVID-19, we have shifted to a fully virtual experience. We still do our simulated necropsy and help you learn about sea turtles and marine debris, but now we do it via Zoom or other online delivery platforms,” she said.

The free virtual Turtle Trash Collectors programs are hourlong sessions that features a simulated sea turtle dissection, learn how trash can get to the ocean, see how trash in the ocean can impact sea turtles and learn how to help stop marine debris, including how to become a Turtle Trash Collector. Dates are announced on Facebook for the virtual programs designed for third to fifth graders, though all ages are welcome. Younger audiences should attend with an adult if possible. The next virtual program is 11 a.m. Oct. 3. A private program for students, Scouts or network can be scheduled as well.

Since transitioning to virtual programs in March, “we have reached over 750 students, 100 adults, and an additional 300 participants. We are looking forward to a busy fall of virtual programs and would love for you to join in on the fun,” she said.

Kezios told Coastal Review Online that the team “has done a terrific job” pivoting the project to online delivery.

“They created resources that allow students to watch the virtual necropsy on the computer screen while still following along with a dissection guide and flip book. With NOAA’s permission, we’ve been able to expand our geographic delivery area and the team has provided programs to students around the country and even overseas in places like Austria and Uganda,” Kezios added.

To join the Turtle Trash Collector badge program designed for upper-elementary students in the southeastern part of the state, participants will need to sign up to receive a Turtle Trash Collector Handbook that helps identify what kinds of debris to collect for each badge, where to find it, and how to collect the debris safely. Participants will need to collect 20 debris items in each of these categories to earn badges: snack food wrappers and food packaging; drink items such as aluminum cans, plastic bottles, etc.; plastic straws; fast food containers and plastic utensils; and plastic bags.

The Turtle Trash Collectors program has helped young people who don’t live near the coast realize that land-based litter can still make its way into the ocean and harm marine organisms, Kezios said. “Marine debris is everyone’s problem and we encourage our students to choose to be part of the solution.”