The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Blue Economy Index (Bloomberg Ticker: BLUEECO) saw gains during February, outperforming broader, global benchmarks that suffered weaker performance.

The Blue Economy Index rose 8.66% from 2,882.49 to 3,132.02. At the same time, the S&P Industrials rose 5.64%, the MSCI All World Index increased 1.24%, and the S&P 500 fell 1.40%.

The index trackers said in a news release Thursday that the comparatively strong performance “showcases” the blue economy’s “concentrated exposure to ocean-related industries and balanced sector allocation.”

“This month’s returns were defined by strong expectations in infrastructure demand and international economic activity, as well as a sharp decline in large technology and growth stocks.”

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index tracks the economic activity of companies operating on or in oceans and waterways, with a focus on environmental sustainability. The index was developed through a collaboration between UNC Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Alliance for the Blue Economy, or AllBlue, the Cameron School of Business, and it relies on data from FactSet.

The index aligns with the World Bank’s definition of the Blue Economy: “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem.”

“The index represents a fusion of academic insight, environmental science, and financial market expertise,” according to the university.

February’s performance was supported by strong gains in industrial and utilities sectors, which benefited from rising expectations for global infrastructure spending and energy demand. Sector rotation also played a key factor as investors transitioned from technology to industrial sectors.

Industrials climbed 16.61% after investors rotated into companies tied to infrastructure, heavy manufacturing and energy systems. A large wave of AI storage and network demand helped prop up the sector’s performance, which signaled higher future revenue and earnings, according to the release.

Consumer staples, supported by increased expected demand and improved profitability in the global seafood and animal feed markets, increased 8.06%. The sector also gained from higher aquaculture prices in Asian and North American markets, which improved margins for fishing and processing companies.

Utilities rose 5.60%, driven by expanding economies and the rapid build-out of data centers, AI computing, and renewable energy systems. Furthermore, many utility companies are expanding renewable energy projects which investors view as long-term growth opportunities, the analysts said.

Consumer discretionary spending gained 3.12%, supported by steady continued growth in travel and tourism spending.

Doosan Corp. saw a 50.65% gain and topped the index for February thanks to new legislation that provided a regulatory framework for modular reactor development and export.

Harbin Electric Corp. saw a 41.88% gain thanks to an increase in Chinese gas turbine demand and the company’s financials, which forecast a 57% increase year-over-year net profit and 33% revenue growth.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. Realized a 40.31% gain based on increased submarine and defense systems production after Japan planned to increase defense spending to 2% of its GDP.

More information about the Alliance for the Blue Economy is online at https://uncw.edu/research/centers/innovation-entrepreneurship/events-programs/programs/all-blue.

Whether its a nature hike, a stormwater tour at North Carolina’s premiere coastal university, or helping a town’s staff permanently mark storm drains, there’s something for nearly everyone during Cape Fear Creek Week.

Creek Week kicks off on Sunday and goes through March 21, offering opportunities to connect with, celebrate, and care for local waterways of the Cape Fear Region.

Throughout the week, participants are invited to play Cape Fear Creek Week virtual bingo by completing activities for a chance to win a swag bag.

The events lineup starts Sunday with a birding walk from 10-11 a.m. in Leland, where participants will be given tips on how to identify local and migrating birds. Registration for this event is through the town of Leland.

On Monday, gather beneath cypress trees in Wallace Park at 2110 Market St. in Wilmington for a scavenger hunt from 10 a.m. until 11 a.m. The Alliance for Cape Fear Trees will have resources on hand to share tips on how to properly plant and care for trees.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington is hosting that afternoon a behind-the-scenes tour of its stormwater-control measures, including rain gardens, permeable pavement systems and other sustainable features that reduce runoff and support healthier waterways. This event will be held 2-3 p.m. Monday at 4935 Riegel Road. Registration is required.

On Monday evening, discover ways to diagnose and restore wetland habitats through Habitat Fixer Uppers with Fort Fisher Aquarium, a program scheduled for 6-7:30 p.m. at 1212 Magnolia Village Way in Leland. You may register here.

Tuesday, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority will host a tour of its Southside Water Reclamation Facility, 3436 River Road in Wilmington. Registered participants must be age 5 or older.

Events for Wednesday include a bird hike at Burnt Mill Creek 8-9:30 a.m., an opportunity to work alongside employees of Leland’s engineering department 4-5:30 p.m. to permanently mark the town’s storm drains, a children’s scavenger hunt 5-6 p.m. at Cypress Cover Park in Leland, and resilient coastal communities program public meeting drop in between 5p.m. and 7 p.m. at the Skyline Center in downtown Wilmington.

Events later in the week include a golden hour guided tour by paddleboat in Greenfield Lake Park, a walking tour at Pages Creek, a sustainability brewery tour at Mad Mole Brewing (for those 21 and older), a Brunswick Nature Park tour in Winnabow, and a cleanup at Greenfield Lake Park.

Details, including all dates, times and locations, are available on the N.C. Cooperative Extension website.

Cape Fear Creek Week is a collaboration between the N.C. Cooperative Extension, Wilmington’s Heal our Waterways, Leland, Cape Fear River Watch, New Hanover County Soil and Water Conservation District, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, Coastal Land Trust, Cape Fear Birding Observatory, Plastic Ocean Project, Mad Mole Brewery, UNCW Sustainability, and Alliance for Cape Fear Trees.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation’s Kerri Allen is among the newest recipients of the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Alumni Association Distinguished Awards.

The program, which honors graduates whose exceptional accomplishments, integrity and service have made a lasting impact on the university and broader community, will recognize awardees during homecoming festivities set for Feb. 9-15. A formal celebration is scheduled for June.

Allen, who graduated from UNCW with her bachelor’s in geosciences in 2011 and her master’s in 2013 in coastal geology, was selected as the “Distinguished Citizen of the Year.” She is being honored along with Trevor Todd, class of 2016, for “Distinguished Young Alumnus of the Year,” and Edward A. “Ed” Sundy Jr. class of 1973, for “Distinguished Alumnus of the Year.”

“Ed, Trevor, and Kerri remind us of what it truly means to be a Seahawk. They each use their talents to lift others—whether through education, environmental stewardship, or service to communities across our region,” UNCW Alumni Association Executive Director Lindsay A.T. LeRoy said in a statement. “Their dedication reflects the heart of UNCW’s mission: empowering people to create positive, lasting change. I’m incredibly proud to celebrate alumni whose impact reaches far beyond our campus.”

Allen is “a coastal advocate, scientist and community leader whose work has transformed environmental policy and conservation efforts across North Carolina,” according to information the university provided.

As Coastal Federation’s coastal management program director, Allen works with state and federal agencies, the General Assembly, scientists, businesses and residents to advance policy solutions that protect and restore the state’s coast. She has helped guide statewide initiatives addressing emerging contaminants, marine debris, living shorelines, and oyster habitat restoration. She recently helped lead the effort that made North Carolina the first state in the nation to ban unencapsulated polystyrene in floating docks.

She served as a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hollings Scholar in the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. Her early career included research in coastal hydrodynamics, sediment transport, and climate education, and she spent time as the education manager at Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Florida.

Allen serves on several advisory boards, including the UNCW Earth and Ocean Sciences Advisory Board, N.C. State University’s Institute for Emerging Issues, and multiple N.C. Department of Environmental Quality river basin committees. Allen helped lead We the Water, a 340-mile paddling initiative to raise awareness of water quality and environmental stewardship that generated more than $50,000 for conservation efforts.

Her leadership and impact have been recognized through honors such as the Pelican Award, Bill Petit Award and Wilmington’s 40 Under 40.  

Todd teaches third grade at Castle Hayne Elementary School, and has been awarded both the New Hanover County Schools Elementary Educator of the Year Award for 2020-2021 and the 2020 National University Teacher Award for North Carolina.

Todd volunteers for the children’s and youth ministry at Scotts Hill Baptist Church. He has served on the North Carolina Azalea Festival’s Parade Committee since 2016. Todd earned the 2022 Wilmington’s 40 Under 40 Award for the significant impact both inside and outside the classroom.

Todd is a member of the Clocktower Society and serves as a Watson College of Education representative to the UNCW Alumni Board of Directors and a partnership teacher.

Sundy, a mathematics major with a business minor, has been with Reeds Jewelers since graduating more than 40 years ago. He rose through the organization and helped launch the company’s first mall store in Myrtle Beach. He earned the Roberta Zimmer Award in 2015 in recognition of his leadership philosophy and positive impact on colleagues and customers.

For more than 30 years he has helped with disaster response and humanitarian aid by leading volunteer teams in cleanup, demolition, rebuilding and long-term recovery efforts after storms and major flooding events. Sundy spent two decades leading youth mission teams in impoverished communities, repairing homes and mentoring young volunteers. In 2019 he became site manager for the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church’s Disaster Response Team. He is a member of the Golden Wing Society, and the Clocktower Society.

Coastal Review is published by the Coastal Federation.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Blue Economy Index (Bloomberg Ticker: BLUEECO) ended 2025 on an upswing, rising 3.15% in December.

The index increased from 2,557.57 to 2,638.17 and outperformed major global benchmarks, such as the S&P Industrials, which rose 2.66%; the MSCI All World Index, which increased 1.35%; and the S&P 500 at only a 0.48% increase.

“December’s performance reflected renewed strength across consumer-facing and industrial segments tied to marine travel, logistics, and sustainable infrastructure,” according to the announcement from UNCW. “December’s advance was driven by improved investor sentiment, particularly across travel, leisure, and transportation-linked equities, as easing macro uncertainty and resilient consumer demand supported risk appetite. Increased holiday-season activity and improving visibility into 2026 demand trends contributed to a broad recovery across blue-economy exposures.”

UNCW said the index’s performance relative to global benchmarks shows how BLUEECO’s diversified composition, which includes both marine tourism and industrial and infrastructure-driven growth.

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index tracks the economic activity of companies operating within oceans and waterways, with a focus on environmental sustainability. It was developed through a collaboration between UNC Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), the Alliance for the Blue Economy (AllBlue), the Cameron School of Business and is powered by data from FactSet.

The collaborators said that, “as coastal populations grow and marine industries expand, the index offers investors a timely and transparent benchmark for evaluating the sustainable growth potential of ocean-based sectors such as shipping, offshore energy, aquaculture, and marine infrastructure.”

The index follows the World Bank’s definition of the Blue Economy: “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem” — the index is composed of leading global companies that demonstrate both commercial viability and environmental responsibility.”

The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is accepting applications for its newest program aimed at helping business owners grow and strengthen their businesses.

The center’s new Thrive Lab will offer a series of sessions that focus on finance, funding, sales, product strategy and leadership beginning in March.

“Entrepreneurs will also build a strong peer network and receive hands-on support to develop the mindset and capabilities of CEOs, CFOs and CPOs, all while preserving the unique strengths that make their businesses thrive,” according to a university release.

The lab will run through May and is open to qualified business owners across all industries. The deadline to apply is Feb. 27. Space is limited. Additional details are available on the lab’s website.

Wells Fargo’s contribution to the program covers half of the original cost to attend the lab, lowering the total fee to $750.

According to a study by the North Carolina Department of the Secretary of State in collaboration with Fayetteville State University released in 2024, adopting policies and initiatives to help 5% of “aspirational” businesses become self-sufficient will create more than 24,000 jobs annually and $980 million in new wages.

Thrive Lab was created in response to those findings as targeted effort to help strengthen businesses and support long-term entrepreneurial growth in coastal North Carolina, according to the release.

“It’s relatively easy to start a business, but many fail within a year and only half make it to five years,” UNCW CIE Director Heather McWhorter stated in the release. “Even more striking are the entrepreneurs who don’t pay themselves and who are stuck year after year. CIE’s Thrive Lab will give entrepreneurs and small business owners the tools and connections they need to succeed and to scale, leading to direct impact for our students and community.”

The sector known as the Blue Economy, which includes companies operating on oceans and waterways that are focused on environmental sustainability, saw a 1.36% decline in November, according to the University of North Carolina Wilmington Blue Economy Index, but still showed relative stability compared with industrial benchmarks.

By comparison, in November, the S&P 500 was down 0.57%, the MSCI All World Index, which measures global equity portfolio performance, dropped 0.66%, and the S&P Industrials Index ended the month with a 2.07% decline.

The Blue Economy Index (Bloomberg Ticker: BLUEECO) slipped from 2,592.91 to 2,557.57, “reflecting broad-based softness across global equity markets,” according to a UNCW news release.

“November’s decline was driven by weakness across industrial, maritime, and consumer-related segments as global risk sentiment softened,” the release continues. “Cooling manufacturing activity, lower freight demand in key trans-Pacific routes, and cautious spending patterns in developed markets contributed to a more defensive posture among investors.”

The November results, while reflecting what UNCW called “a broadly negative month for global markets,” were buoyed by the index’s diverse mix of marine transport, renewable infrastructure, and essential services companies.

Consumer discretionary spending was down 5.71%, reflecting weaker seasonal demand for leisure, travel and discretionary goods. “Slowing economic momentum and reduced spending appetite weighed on retail-linked and service-oriented holdings,” UNCW said.

Consumer staples, however, increased 1.18% in November, the month’s only gain. “Strong demand for essential goods, along with resilient pricing in food and aquaculture producers, supported modest gains despite broader market weakness,” according to the university.

Utilities were down 1.48%, reflecting what UNCW called “softer sentiment toward renewable and grid-focused firms as project timelines and regulatory decisions remained in flux. Nonetheless, core power and distribution operators maintained stable operational fundamentals.”

Industrials declined 1.13%, which UNCW said was due to lower freight volumes, moderating shipbuilding activity and softer machinery demand across Asia and Europe. “Despite the downturn, the sector remained more resilient than the broader industrial benchmark,” UNCW said.

Notable gains that helped cushion overall Blue Economy Index performance included Himalaya Shipping, which rose 20.48%; Vestas Wind Systems, which posted a 16.62% gain as renewable equipment supply chain sentiment improved and turbine orders rebounded in key markets; and Wallenius Wilhelmsen, which posted a 14.95% gain driven by vehicle logistics demand and continued strength in roll-on/roll-off shipping activity.

“Together, these names demonstrated the index’s capacity for selective outperformance even during periods of broader market weakness,” according to the release.

The Blue Economy Index was developed in collaboration among the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Alliance for the Blue Economy, or AllBlue, and the Cameron School of Business, and it relies on data from FactSet. UNCW says the index “represents a fusion of academic insight, environmental science, and financial market expertise.”

The index measures the performance of leading global firms that demonstrate both commercial viability and environmental responsibility, aligning with the World Bank’s definition of the Blue Economy: “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem.”

It serves to provide investors “a timely and transparent benchmark for evaluating the sustainable growth potential of ocean-based sectors such as shipping, offshore energy, aquaculture, and marine infrastructure,” according to the release.

The University of North Carolina’s Center for Marine Science has been awarded a $500,000 grant to help enhance flood safety and resilience efforts in New Hanover County.

With the two-year planning grant, CMS will convene a Flood Resilience Consortium “that unites agencies and organizations focused on community preparedness, facilitating outreach, workshops, research, and implementation planning to guide long-term flood resilience efforts,” according to a release from The Endowment, which awarded the grant.

“This consortium will connect the many agencies and experts already working on flood issues, allowing them to move forward with shared priorities and clear roles,” The Endowment’s Director of Community Safety Mary Vail Ware stated in the release.

The Endowment was established with proceeds from the sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center from the county to Novant Health five years ago. Since that time, millions in grant funds have been awarded to projects and endeavors in the community.

The grant “will help align ongoing resilience efforts, pinpoint high-risk areas, and guide cost-effective solutions that reduce future impacts and support faster recovery,” the release states.

The consortium will produce an inventory of existing resources and tools, including maps, models, and data, a plan detailing vulnerabilities, priority projects, timelines and responsibilities, and a funding strategy that aligns public, private and philanthropic investments with the most critical initiatives.

“This is about building a community that can withstand, adapt, and bounce back,” Ware said. “By investing in early planning and bringing partners together, we’re laying the foundation for solutions that safeguard our environment, infrastructure, and future.”

“Preparing for the future means learning from the past,” Sophie Dagenais, The Endowment’s interim president and chief executive officer, said in the release. “We remember the storms that have shaped this community, and we are committed to supporting efforts strengthening New Hanover County’s infrastructure, so residents, businesses, and ecosystems are better protected. This investment supports a coordinated, data-driven approach to flood resilience.”

As you near Wilmington for your beach vacation, you take in the classic coastal Carolina scenery — tall longleaf pines, grassy marshes, and the wide Cape Fear River. But then something strange catches your eye: a forest of bare white tree trunks rising from the swamp like a field of bones. The eeriness of this ghost forest — a place where living woods have turned to watery graveyards — leaves you wondering, “What killed all the trees?”

The answer researchers with the University of North Carolina Wilmington found in the boneyard may surprise you.

For centuries, bald cypress trees thrived on the banks of the Cape Fear River and its tributaries. Bald cypress trees — ancient survivors — are not fragile. These giants can live for thousands of years, stretching to 120 feet tall and standing strong through hurricanes thanks to buttressed roots that prevent the tree from toppling in high winds. An hour away, cypress trees on the Black River are some of the oldest trees in the world with some in Three Sisters Swamp found to be aged at over 2,600 years using tree-ring dating in a 2019 study. But here along the Cape Fear River — like much of the East Coast — many of them are dying and leaving behind ghost forests.

The cost of ghosts

Ghost forests aren’t just spooky. They’re a warning sign. Remote sensing photos from a 2020 paper by Jessica Lynn Magolan and Joanne Nancie Halls show Smith Creek’s freshwater wetlands giving way to salt marsh. Old-growth freshwater swamps are engines of life. They shelter birds, fish and reptiles. They store vast amounts of carbon. Their roots absorb floodwaters, buffering nearby communities when hurricanes roar ashore.

Ghost forests, by contrast, provide little protection. They are markers of loss — loss of biodiversity, of resilience, of time.

And they’re spreading.

Digging into the past

On a warm morning standing in the mud near Smith Creek, graduate student researcher Kendra Devereux of the University of North Carolina Wilmington holds a cylinder of tree core to the light. Each ring tells a story of a year in the tree’s life: how much it grew, whether it was stressed, whether conditions were good or bad.

Devereux and her team are piecing together a mystery. Along with her research advisers, Dr. Monica Rother and Dr. Andrea Hawkes, and a team of other collaborators and students, she’s collected tree cores and sediment samples from two sites on Smith Creek, looking for clues hidden in growth rings and in the microscopic remains of creatures. Tiny, fossilized organisms buried in the layers of river mud act like timekeepers, revealing how salty the water was at different points in history. By studying them, the team can reconstruct how salty the water was when they lived.

And the evidence revealed in their report points to what may be a surprising culprit.

A river made deeper

The cypress deaths weren’t just caused by globally rising seas or regular tides. It appears that the trees were undone, in large part, by ongoing dredging.

Over the last century, the Cape Fear River was repeatedly deepened to allow bigger ships to reach Wilmington’s port. Each time the channel grew, for example, in 1912, 1930, 1946, 1950, 1970, and from 2000 until 2005, more ocean water pushed upstream, according to a 2011 UNCW study for the Army Corps of Engineers that monitored how deepening the Wilmington Harbor would affect tidal range. Combined with rising sea levels, that extra saltwater slowly crept farther upriver and into tributaries like Smith Creek. Even tiny increases in salt can stress or kill bald cypress trees. For people, it was invisible. For trees, it was deadly.

And the problem may only be exacerbated if the Wilmington Harbor channel is deepened from a depth of 42 feet to 47 feet.

Earlier this month, the Corps released a draft environmental study on the proposed multimillion project, which would permit larger ships to cruise from the mouth of the Cape Fear more than 20 miles up river to the North Carolina Port of Wilmington.

Salt: silent killer

Freshwater has almost no salt. Ocean water is about 3% salt, or about 35 parts per thousand. Bald cypress trees start struggling when there’s just a trace more salt than they’re used to. To put it in kitchen terms, just over a pinch per gallon is enough to start killing them. Older trees, despite their size, seem more vulnerable. Along the saltier stretch of Smith Creek, untold numbers of older trees have died, leaving only snags — the standing skeletons of once-living giants.

Upstream, where the water is fresher, cypresses are still thriving, with at least one more than 800 years old. But closer to the Cape Fear, trees that have managed to survive amidst the ghost forests show signs of years of stress, with observable ring patterns that coincide with the dates of major dredging projects. In the 1970s, cypress growth was suppressed in the area with high salt. By 2000, whole stretches of trees had died, leaving behind today’s ghost forest.

A warning rising with the tide

As Wilmington faces sea level rise and continued dredging, Rother, Devereux and the other authors found, the salty tide will keep pushing inland. That means more ghost forests, fewer living cypress trees, and greater risk of flooding for the people who call this coast home.

The white skeletons along Smith Creek are more than strange landmarks. They are warnings etched into the landscape, reminders of how human choices and a changing climate can reshape even the hardiest of forests. As Rother explains, “Climate change and sea-level rise will form more ghost forests across the Atlantic and Gulf coasts,” leaving communities with less natural protection from flooding. And with continuing dredging of the Cape Fear River bottom, hurricane-prone Wilmington could face even greater risks.

Next time you cross that bridge, look again. The ghost forest isn’t just haunting the swamp, it’s a warning carved into bone-white silence.

There’s still time to register for the annual Ocean Innovation Conference at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

The conference is scheduled to take place in UNCW’s Burney Center from 8:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. Tuesday.

Virtual registration closes Friday. The fee to register to attend the event virtually is $30. Questions will be taken from virtual participants for keynote speakers and panelists and some virtual innovation fair booths will be available to those who register to attend online.

In-person registration runs through to the day of the conference and costs $129. Seats are limited.

All UNCW students may attend in-person or virtually for free. Tenants with the university’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship receive a 50% discount and CIE members and coworkers a 25% discount.

For more information about discounts contact cie@uncw.edu.

Now in its third year, the conference brings together UNCW’s deep research expertise, the entrepreneurial ecosystem of southeastern North Carolina and those passionate about the ocean and coastal communities to spark conversations about topics including marine biotechnology, alternative materials, living shoreline projects, ocean data science, and emerging innovations.

Highlights of the conference include updates on marine and coastal research, trends in blue economy innovation, and showcasing opportunities for investment, collaboration, and action.

This year’s featured keynote speakers are Deborah Westphal, author and executive advisor at The Karen Toffler Charitable Trust, and world surfing champion and author of The CODE Method Shaun Tomson.

Sessions are held throughout the day and will focus on the regional blue ecosystem, cutting-edge ocean technologies, and efforts to preserve and restore ocean resources.

The event is organized by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Alliance for the Blue Economy (All Blue).

The state has the protocols in place for successful fisheries management, but North Carolina is missing the mark, recently released state-mandated research concludes.

A top recommendation: Hire more fisheries scientists.

And the head of the state body formed to coordinate scientific research for the legislature, in a letter accompanying the report, states that lawmakers’ recent failed shrimp trawling ban measure had no basis in the report’s findings and clarifies that the recommendations did not address trawling.

Legislators in 2021 directed the North Carolina Collaboratory to evaluate the overall health of fisheries and habitats and make recommendations for better management ahead of the 25th anniversary of the state’s Fisheries Reform Act of 1997 and the Coastal Area Management Act’s 50th anniversary in 2024.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences Director Dr. Joel Fodrie and a team of nine researchers presented a summary of their findings to the North Carolina General Assembly late last month, as the legislature had mandated.

Fodrie told Coastal Review that the state requested a broad analysis as part of its 2021 budget bill, so the research team, over the course of three years, collected and used data to assess the state’s fisheries and make the state-mandated recommendations based on those findings that could improve “both marine fisheries and our coastal habitats, with a specific link between those habitats and the way they support fish.”

The 46-page summary highlights the seven findings and the five recommendations to “achieve the vision of the Fisheries Reform Act.” The state Fisheries Reform Act requires fishery management plans to ensure long-term viability of the fisheries, according to the state.

The final, comprehensive report with full analyses and data is still being fine-tuned and is to be sent to the legislature later this year, Fodrie added.

In addition to Chapel Hill, researchers who study fish biology and ecology, estuarine ecology, fisheries management and environmental governance from N.C. State University, East Carolina University and UNC-Wilmington participated in the research.

Fodrie explained that if you were to gather data across states to quantitatively evaluate each state’s attempt to manage fisheries, North Carolina scores pretty high based on the management components put in place as a result of the Fisheries Reform Act, or FRA.

The state seems to have adopted many of the practices that should produce better outcomes and have strengthened these practices for most species over time. Despite those gears being in place, the results are only so-so, he said.

The findings point to at least three significant hurdles for optimizing management outcomes, including a significant time lag in the implementation of new data or information for up-to-date decision-making, a breakdown of trust and communication among managers and key stakeholder groups, and long-term shifts in estuarine habitat quality and coverage.

“What the FRA did for North Carolina is it put us in a position to have many of the building blocks that are helpful and can remain part of the solutions, while the analyses also show that we’re still falling short of the FRA’s core objectives and thus some changes in management structures ought to be seriously considered,” Fodrie said.

About the findings

Researchers found that management intensity in North Carolina had increased over time and is equal to or exceeds the levels of other states throughout the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and Gulf of Mexico, but despite the presence of a rigorous management structure, the state continues to “exhibit challenges in achieving the core goals of the FRA, which is ‘to protect and enhance … coastal fisheries in NC.’”

A benchmark for informed fishery management, according to the summary, are quantitative stock assessments. These produce estimates of stock biomass and the harvest rate, which define overfished, related to how much fish biomass is in the system, and overfishing, related to how high the catch rate is, for the population.

The most recent stock assessments estimate that blue crab, southern flounder, spotted seatrout, striped bass and striped mullet are experiencing overfishing, meaning that the harvest rate is too high.

Blue crab, southern flounder, striped bass and striped mullet are overfished, or the stock is too low, and sheepshead and red drum are neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

The summary notes that developing and updating the fishery management plans process “is relatively slow, which potentially limits the efficacy of science- and process-based public trust resource management,” what researchers call in the summary “hallmark goals” of the Fisheries Reform Act.

Across the 12 stocks the state manages that have an initial fisheries management plan, the average time between the first plan and amendments is seven years. The average time between management plan actions is a little more than five years.

“In the context of these timelines, there is little evidence that adaptive management is being achieved by increased activity within” the North Carolina General Assembly, “by the breadth of motions adopted” by the Marine Fisheries Commission or by proclamation authority from the Division of Marine Fisheries, according to the summary.

The remaining findings relate to the pressures coastal habitats are facing from fishing, development, climate variability and other human activities. Data suggests that the entire ecosystem has changed since the Fisheries Reform Act was passed, particularly for water quality and coastal and estuarine habitats.

Researchers offered five recommendations.

Fodrie said that a primary recommendation is to increase the Division of Marine Fisheries staff, especially the number of stock-assessment scientists, so the stock assessments and fisheries management plans are regularly updated.

An independent science and statistical committee to improve fishery management outcomes in the state, as well as new approaches for enhancing the division’s outreach with stakeholder participation, trust, and management transparency, are also recommendations.

Fodrie said that the role of this type of committee and a redesigned Marine Fisheries Commission would be to target current weaknesses related to implementation of the Fisheries Reform Act, such as the mode and tempo by which catch limits are set, when and how stakeholders can be engaged, and resolving disputes between key resource users.

The final three recommendations relate to fisheries and habitat health, including adopting an ecosystem-based management approach to assess the health of the state fisheries as a whole and the drivers that affect them; stopping or reversing patterns of habitat loss and degradation, along with requiring improved monitoring of habitat extent and water quality; and re-evaluating the nursery designation system and creating an adaptive framework for protecting critical nursery areas.

“The state also has some real challenges related to what’s happening with its coastal habitats,” Fodrie said, adding that it’s a big ask to take the major steps needed to halt or reverse those trends. “This involves balancing fishing practices, coastal population growth, climate variability, and development; which would require buy-in at the whole-state level to manage at the coastal ecosystem scale.”

Note from the Collaboratory

The North Carolina Collaboratory’s “Study of Coastal and Marine Fisheries of the State” hadn’t gotten much attention since it was first mandated — that is, until the Senate added in mid-June to a House bill about recreational flounder and red snapper seasons a proposed law to ban shrimp trawling in inshore waters and within a half-mile of the shoreline.

The report was mentioned more than once during discussions between supporters and opponents. The House declined to advance the bill with the Senate’s amendment on June 25.

Looking back: House Republicans decline to take up shrimp trawling bill

Collaboratory Executive Director Jeff Warren, in a letter dated June 30, the deadline and date when the summary was released, wrote that “recent legislative actions – specifically, those related to shrimp trawling language in the current version of House Bill (H) 442 – have brought into question the contents of this report. Because this specific issue was out of the scope of this study, this report neither advocates for nor opposes a ban on shrimp trawling.”

Warren stated in the report’s cover letter that there had been multiple comments made by legislators in both chambers as well as statements circulating in the media, that “suggested the Senate was aware of the contents of this report and this advance knowledge drove actions to amend the legislation to include a shrimp trawling ban prior to the report’s release.”

Those statements were untrue, Warren stated, “and undermine the credibility of this multi-year research study carried out by nine researchers across four UNC System campuses.”

Warren added that the recommendations in the summary, and ultimately the full report, do not address, nor respond to, the shrimp trawling language contained in the shrimp trawl ban “nor were they ever designed to. Further, no legislative influence or pressure impacted the legislative recommendations or the scope of work, which has remained consistent over the three-year arc of the broader study.”

He closed the letter by adding the full report will be available later this year after it’s refined, “to ensure a broad variety of users can access the data and information. To be clear, this clarifying work will not substantively change the recommendations provided herein.”

Another project on the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus is underway to help protect the quality of nearby waters.

Crews are transforming a 250-foot hard, compacted service road at the newly renovated Brooks Field into a permeable drive that soaks in rain. The material helps to reduce flooding and decrease the volume of polluted runoff flowing into the Bradley Creek watershed, the North Carolina Coastal Federation said Tuesday.

The project is one of many on university in New Hanover County that implements the Bradley and Hewletts Creeks Watershed Restoration Plan. Wilmington adopted the plan in 2012 to guide reducing the volume of stormwater runoff in the two watersheds that connect the city, Wrightsville Beach, and Masonboro Island.

UNCW is the largest landowner in the Bradley Creek Watershed.

“We are pleased to be working again with the North Carolina Coastal Federation and Heal Our Waterways to reduce runoff on campus and showcase nature-based solutions on site,” UNCW Chief Sustainability Officer Feletia Lee said in a release.

Since 2019, the University has partnered with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, and Wilmington, particularly the city’s Heal Our Waterways Program, to install rain gardens and parking lot retrofits on campus.

“We’re proud to see this partnership continue to make meaningful progress toward the goals within the Bradley and Hewletts Creeks Watershed Restoration Plan,” said Wilmington Watershed Coordinator Anna Reh-Gingerich. “It’s encouraging to see the momentum from these projects steadily grow at UNCW and throughout the community, especially with a new permeable paver project set to begin soon at Mad Mole Brewing after the current installation is complete.”

Construction on both the UNCW and Mad Mole projects is being completed by the team at Thorpe Landscapes of Wilmington. The company provides landscaping, hardscapes, permeable pavers, and outdoor construction services in the Cape Fear region.

“These projects serve as a great showcase of responsible and attractive stormwater management that any landowner can implement,” Coastal Federation Water Quality Director Bree Charron added.

This stormwater retrofit project was supported by the North Carolina Division of Water Resources’ EPA Section 319 Water Quality Program.

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.

Masonboro Island Reserve in Wilmington was the latest to be highlighted in a multiyear campaign raising awareness of the North Carolina Coastal Reserve and the role of these natural coastal areas.

State officials and guests, including N.C. Rep. Ted Davis, R-New Hanover, took a guided boat tour Friday of the reserve followed by a short walk along a trail as part of “Discover the N.C. Coastal Reserve” campaign. This was the fourth stop of the campaign that spotlights the role of the state’s 10 Coastal Reserve sites and programs.

The N.C. Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve is a department of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management, or DCM. The May 16 afternoon tour kicked off with remarks by DEQ officials, including the department’s Secretary Reid Wilson and Division Director Tancred Miller.

“The Masonboro Island Reserve and our other Coastal Reserve locations are great places to hike, swim, paddle, learn, and relax. Here, people from all over can connect and recharge with nature, all while boosting tourism and our local economy,” Wilson said in a release. “It’s critical that we restore and protect coastal habitats, and I’m proud that our state is a national leader in these efforts. Thanks to our partners, volunteers, commission and advisory committee members, and community leaders who help to preserve these coastal lands and waters for current and future generations.”

The Masonboro Island Reserve, which sits across the Intracoastal Waterway from the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science, spans more than 5,600 acres comprised largely of marsh and tidal flats. It stretches nearly 8.5 miles, and includes 10 different habitat types, including those for various species of concern and threatened species such as loggerhead and green sea turtles, American oystercatchers, black skimmers, Wilson’s plovers, least turns and diamondback terrapins.

“Across our sites and through our stewardship, research, education, and training programs, our work is incumbent on the range of partnerships we foster to accomplish the exciting and challenging work of coastal management,” Coastal Reserve Program Manager Rebecca Ellin said in the release. “A special thanks to each of you who we work with to accomplish our mission. It is our hope that today provides the opportunity to connect and reconnect with this special place, the Masonboro Island Reserve, and with the people and work of many who protect it now and into the future.”

Programs spotlighted at the Masonboro Island Reserve included the science and monitoring at the site and how that information is used to educate and inform decision making, and how the area provides natural buffers to waves and storms, which enhances community resilience.

CMS Executive Director Ken Halanych and William “Bill” Raney, a member of the Masonboro Island Reserve Local Advisory Committee, also spoke.

“UNCW’s Marine Quest program has integrated Reserve-collected environmental data into academic curricula which helps students apply theoretical concepts to real-world environmental events,” Halanych said. ”UNCW’s Research Hatchery Operations team partners with the Reserve to support continuous water quality monitoring at the CMS pier which helps Hatchery staff monitor source water quality for life support systems and supports numerous ongoing research projects in the UNCW Research Sanctuary. This partnership helps grow our coastal workforce.”

The division is celebrating this year the 40th anniversary of North Carolina’s National Estuarine Research Reserve, which is designated by the state and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to protect special places, including Masonboro Island Reserve.

The “Discover the N.C. Coastal Reserve” campaign is to run through 2026 and include guests invited to visit reserves to learn more about the ecosystems they protect and the work occurring at each site. The next tour is expected to take place in the fall.

The death and decapitation of a bottlenose dolphin found on the shores of Lea-Hutaff Island in Pender County remains under investigation.

The decapitation has been determined to be intentional, which is a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Law Enforcement is offering a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to a criminal conviction or civil penalty of the person or people responsible, according to a NOAA release.

The dolphin was found by a member of the public April 15 near marker 105 of the undeveloped barrier island and reported to the Southeast Marine Mammal Stranding Hotline.

NOAA’s stranding partner network, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, responded to the call and found the 8-foot dolphin, according to the release.

“They determined that someone intentionally removed its head between April 16 and April 18, after they received the initial stranding report,” the release states.

An initial health assessment of the dolphin indicates the animal was carrying a bacteria called Brucella, which can be transferred to humans through direct contact. Results of a necropsy, or an animal autopsy, are pending.

Anyone with information leading to the successful identification and/or arrest, conviction or civil penalty assessment of those involved may call NOAA’s enforcement hotline at 800-853-1964. Tips may be left anonymously, but to be eligible for the reward a name and contact information must be provided with the hotline.

Violators may be punished for up to $100,000 in fines and up to one year in jail.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington Blue Economy Index delivered a positive return during March amid a troubled and volatile broader market.

The index (Bloomberg Ticker: BLUEECO), a measure of ocean-based industrial performance based on the World Bank definition of the blue economy, realized a return of 0.3%, ending the month at 1,934.5, compared to its February closing value of 1,928.0.

Major market indices, the S&P 500, MSCI All World Index, and S&P Industrials, reported significant losses with returns of -5.8%, -4.1%, and -3.7%, respectively, during the same period.

The index’s daily performance throughout the month fluctuated but showed a generally upward trend, reaching a high of 2,019 points on March 19.

“Given that BLUEECO tracks the economic activities in the oceans and waterways with a focus on environmental impact, the index’s strong performance highlights the underlying resilience and growth potential of the blue economy sectors during periods of broader market uncertainty,” according to a UNCW news release.

The materials sector of the blue economy saw a 9.3% return driven by strong performances from companies like Schouw and Co., which specializes in producing feed for aquaculture industries, including salmon, trout, sea bass, sea bream and shrimp farming.

“This surge can be attributed to positive market sentiment stemming from expectations of lower interest rates, growing investment in sustainable marine-based materials, and increasing global demand for biomaterials amid ongoing trade tensions,” officials said.

The consumer discretionary sector realized the steepest decline among all sectors, falling by 15.1%.

“This downturn indicates a notable shift in consumer spending habits, potentially driven by factors such as rising prices, increased debt, and economic uncertainty,” according to the release. “As consumers increasingly prioritize essential purchases over discretionary items, companies such as Carnival, Lindblad Expeditions Holdings, and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings have been adversely affected, placing them among the weakest performers in the index.”

Consumer staples posted a moderate gain of 3.4%, followed by utilities, which increased by 2.6%.

The index was developed in collaboration with the UNCW Cameron School of Business, UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy, and FactSet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next step for the documentary is to edit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said the connections she made that day held strong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The University of North Carolina Wilmington business school’s measure of ocean-based industrial performance showed mixed results during February but outperformed the indices described as its closest benchmarks.

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index (Bloomberg Ticker: BLUEECO) tracks the economic activities in the oceans based on the World Bank definition of the Blue Economy. The index rose by 3.7% in February, beating the MSCI All World Index, the S&P 500, and the S&P Industrials, which showed flat to negative returns during the month, mostly attributed to the Trump administration’s chaotic trade policy.

Goldman Sachs earlier this week lowered its year-end S&P 500 projections after the index on Monday saw its biggest single-day slide since Dec. 18, erasing $4 trillion in gains.

Among blue economy sectors, the energy sector saw the worst performance in February, slipping by 14.7%. “The drop was mainly due to geopolitical tensions and policy decisions, particularly ongoing U.S. tariffs,” UNCW said in announcing the results.

Consumer demand was also down significantly.

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index was developed in collaboration with the UNCW Cameron School of Business, UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy, and FactSet. The index measures economic activities in oceans and waterways.

February was the second straight month of positive return from the UNCW Blue Economy Index.

The materials sector led with a 4.3% gain; industrials followed with a 4% gain; utilities a 3.6% gain; consumer staples were down 6.6%; and consumer discretionary sector down 12.8%.

The consumer discretionary sector was dragged down by poor performances from Carnival and Norweigian Cruise Line that UNCW officials said were partly due to a policy change requiring them to pay federal income tax in the U.S.

“After previously flying ‘flags of convenience,’ which allowed them to avoid U.S. income tax, this new requirement will negatively affect their earnings,” according to the announcement.

Materials, the strongest performer during February, saw demand for commodities, particularly in the United States and China, as well as higher commodity prices globally.

Four of the top five performers in the BLUEECO Index were in the industrials sector: Wisdom, U Ming Marine, Esco Technologies, and A P Moller Maersk. 

​As the hours passed, day turning into night, prospects looked bleak for a research vessel carrying scientists and students hoping to get past the mouth of the Cape Fear River to deeper waters offshore.

The R/V Cape Hatteras had essentially been stuck at the mouth of the river for about 24 hours after leaving the morning of Feb. 10 from its mooring at Cape Fear Community College in downtown Wilmington, thanks to an abrupt change in the weather.

“I won’t lie, I did not think we would make it offshore, which feels like a waste with this large vessel to just be stuck at a spot we could sample fairly easily on smaller boats,” said Dr. Bradley Tolar, an assistant professor with the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

February tends to be a month when the weather serves up less-than-ideal working conditions offshore.

Cold temperatures, whipping winds and rain proved that to be the case during the first several hours of the maiden trip of the TEAL-SHIPS project, a groundbreaking expedition to study shore-to-sea habitats.

TEAL-SHIPS, an acronym for this mouthful: Transect Expedition to Assess Land-to-Sea Habitats via Interdisciplinary Process Studies, will allow researchers the opportunity to get an understanding of the biological, chemical and physical changes in habitats from the mouth of the Cape Fear River to the Gulf Stream’s warm waters.

This particular area of North Carolina’s coast has largely remained understudied since the 1990s. And those previous studies of the area between the 1970s and 1990s focused primarily on nearshore ecosystems.

Now, through a series of cruises (no, not the kind where mai tais are served on the pool deck), researchers of different coastal marine science disciplines hope to build a baseline in understanding how changes in the Gulf Stream flow affect the ocean’s food chain and critical habitats between the coastline and Atlantic continental shelf.

Tolar is spearheading the venture, one that was able to come to fruition through a $1.5 million General Assembly-funded grant through the University of North Carolina System Research Opportunities Initiative, a program that focuses on several research areas including marine and coastal science.

TEALS-SHIPS includes principal investigators from UNCW, the UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and East Carolina University.

Over the course of the next two years, researchers and some of their students will embark on an expedition about every three months, setting course to a series of stations mapped from the river’s mouth to the Gulf Stream. By going out every three months, researchers aim to capture any potential changes in each season of the year.

“Even though this is only giving us two years, the goal is to write grants to continue sampling further, maybe not to this level or this frequency, but just to have a better understanding of how the coast and offshore are connected,” Tolar said.

The Gulf Stream is a powerful current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, curves around the Florida peninsula, up the Eastern Seaboard and extends toward Europe where it warms western European countries.

“But for our coastline, we know that it transports nutrients, it transports species up to our coast,” Tolar said.

The Gulf Stream oscillates and there is some thought that rising sea temperatures might actually weaken the current over time.

“We don’t really know what those consequences might be to what it transports up to our coast,” Tolar said. “If it’s transporting nutrients that feed our coastal habitats, which we care about a lot with our state’s blue economy, if it weakens or oscillates farther offshore rather than coming inshore, we would want to know.”

During each cruise, physical oceanographers will collect fine-scale water samples to get a sense of how the Gulf Stream current is moving and any changes in that movement over the course of a year.

Two, 20-minute-long fish trawls will capture as much fish as possible at each of the project’s six major stations, each of which include vastly different types of habitat. Researchers will count all of the species captured during the trawl sweeps, collect 10 of each species, and measure 30 of every species.

“This allows them to get a sense of the diversity of fish, the abundance of fish, and then their variability and size to see basically how fish communities change as we go offshore,” Tolar said.

Dr. Christian Briseño-Avena, a UNCW assistant professor of biological oceanography, plankton ecologist, and another principal investigator on the project, will collect zooplankton and larger phytoplankton to study how those organisms change over time.

“Eventually we’d like to know more about how the zooplankton, or the plankton in general, are changing or not changing for this region over longer periods of time,” he said.

Copepods “change a lot in this region,” he said. But samples of the tiny crustaceans collected from this region are sparse.

Briseño-Avena said he is learning as he goes on each expedition, targeting smaller plankton, fish larvae and zooplankton scooped up from the seafloor to the surface in “bongo nets,” aptly named because they are shaped similar to the open bottomed hand drum.

During TEAL-SHIPS maiden cruise earlier this month, he was met with some surprises when the bongo nets surfaced back aboard the R/V Cape Hatteras, a 135-foot oceangoing research vessel used as a hands-on training tool for marine technology students at Cape Fear Community College.

He wasn’t expecting to see in the winter what turned out to be a large amount of ichthyoplankton, which are the eggs and tiny larvae of fish.

His students have already begun the tedious task of extracting and identifying the different groups and species of plankton he collected. The plankton will be preserved in ethanol and used to build a library-like catalogue of samples that will be available to future coastal marine scientists.

He and Tolar agree the expedition was a success, despite the weather challenges that cut the initial trip by a half day and covered four of the six stations. The ship traveled just under 75 miles offshore, making it to the Gulf Stream where the water temperatures were 30 degrees warmer than those near shore.

“At least we confirmed if we were able to do as much as we did in our 18-hour weather window we’ll be fine for our future expeditions,” Tolar said. “We’ll have no problem getting all the way out there. We learned that we could do it and we learned how to be more efficient about it.”

UNCW’s Center for Marine Science is in the process of acquiring its own, larger research vessel. The 73-foot vessel is expected to be complete in the spring of 2026. TEAL-SHIPS project principal investigators hope to use the new vessel during their final two expeditions covered by the current grant.

Tolar hopes to tap additional funding sources for the program to collect samples beyond two years.

“If we’re able to get more funding in the future we can compare the changes year-to-year,” he said. “Even if not, we have a really nice study that shows this is what’s happening here off the coast of Wilmington and that can connect how other folks along the East Coast are measuring their samples.”

Less than two weeks after Inauguration Day, the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Blue Economy Index plummeted to almost 10% of its historical high.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, where on Day 1 he immediately began firing off a slew of executive orders unraveling those of his predecessor, clearly spooked investors of ocean-related economic activities.

But that’s not an atypical reaction when a newly seated president is certain to create upheaval in terms of policy changes, according to Dr. Miran Hossain, UNCW’s associate professor of finance.

Hossain doesn’t suspect it will last because, as he puts it, “you can’t deny the ocean.”

“Policy uncertainty does affect the market volatility,” Hossain said. “I totally believe that the underperformance that the index is showing, it’s definitely because of investors panicking and not knowing what’s going to happen for the next four years, at least in terms of the policies.”

The UNCW Blue Economy Index went live a year ago, debuting as a first-of-its kind benchmark that tracks companies that earn revenue through the use of ocean resources. This can be anything from cruise lines to offshore energy companies — oil, gas or wind — to container shipping, marine equipment and construction.

The index was developed in collaboration with the UNCW Cameron School of Business, UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, and CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy.

The index, ticker: BLUEECO for those of you who check the Bloomberg terminals, specifically focuses on companies that use sustainable practices.

Last September, the index hit a historical high with better than 7% growth.

After screening thousands of companies from around the globe, the UNCW Blue Economy Index’s creators pared down the number to about 90. The index gauges how these companies are performing by combing their stock prices into a single number, which tracks their combined daily value.

The index essentially tells us about the health of blue economy, whether good or bad, and in which direction it’s going, Hossain explained.

“Why it’s going in a certain direction, that’s something to look at even more because it could be because of some policy. It could be because the companies are really not doing well because of some reason that we don’t know,” such as a company’s earnings, he said.

For that reason, it’s too early to conclude why the UNCW Blue Economy Index has been a low performer compared to some of the typical, larger indexes like the MSCI All World Index, S&P 500, and S&P 500 Industrials, since Trump’s election.

Yet there’s no doubt Trump’s second term is having an effect.

Hossain recently provided a snapshot of the index’s performance in pockets of time between Election Day and Trump’s first week back at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The S&P 500, which is a kind of measure of the overall U.S. economy, earned about a 4 to 4.5% gain during the week of Nov. 5, 2024. The MSCI All World Index, one that’s more representative of the university’s Blue Economy Index because it, too, includes the stocks of companies from around the world, had about a 2.3% gain.

UNCW’s Blue Economy Index’s performance that same week eked out at only about 1.5%, making it the worst performer of out of any of its comparable benchmarks.

“It’s just a short time period, I agree, but it is also good to just zoom in and see what happened during that period of time,” Hossain said.

Fast-forward to Trump’s first week back in office, where he signed dozens of executive orders impacting policy on everything from immigration and climate change to offshore energy, the Blue Economy Index showed a return of around 0.6%, compared to the other benchmarks, Hossain said.

“So, certainly not a good picture for the blue economy,” he said. “I’m expecting this policy shift is the major reason, but still not coming to a conclusion before looking deeper at these companies.”

This is where UNCW students enrolled in the Blue Economy Index course come in. They’re being tasked with analyzing and researching individual companies in the index to determine what’s been happening with them during the last two to three months.

Hossain was asked what advice he might have for blue economy investors.

“That’s a tough question,” he said.

The blue economy is not strictly clean energy-producing companies. It’s not purely green.

So the fact that sustainability isn’t expected to be promoted under the Trump administration will not have as much of an effect on the blue economy as, say, a solar company.

“We do need this huge marine transportation system,” Hossain said. “We do need the ports. If we look at in long-term perspective, you can’t deny the ocean. You can’t do business without keeping the ocean and the waterways in your equation. When these uncertainties ease up and we have a better idea about the tariff situation, where the Trump administration is going in that regard, I think we’ll have a better idea and the index would probably start going back to where it was.”

More than 5,000 individual plants will be available for area residents during the 27th TreeFest in Wilmington.

Scheduled for Friday, Jan. 17, and Saturday, Jan. 18, at Independence Mall inside the JC Penney corridor, hours for both days are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and only while supplies last.

Editor’s emphasis: “only while supplies last.” That means you snooze, you lose. Coastal Review assumes no responsibility for ornery latecomers, nor will we respond to complainers’ vile nastygrams.

Grown by the North Carolina Forest Service Nursery in Goldsboro, tree species for this event include longleaf pine, Atlantic white cedar, eastern red cedar, red maple, river birch, American persimmon, flowering dogwood, eastern redbud, live oak, and white oak. Silky dogwood and Indian grass will also be available.

Households can select up to five trees or grasses from the available selection for free on a first-come, first-serve basis. Organizers said a $5 donation per household is suggested and greatly appreciated.

TreeFest is coordinated by the volunteer-based TreeFest Committee and sponsors, including Wilmington, Friends of Wilmington Skateparks, Independence Mall, North Carolina Cooperative Extension, North Carolina Forest Service, New Hanover County Soil and Water Conservation District, and University of North Carolina Wilmington’s departments of environmental sciences, and biology and marine biology.

“Trees offer many benefits to our community, from flood protection and improving water and air quality, to creating shade and oxygen, to providing food and nesting sites for birds and wildlife,” TreeFest Committee Member Amy Mead said in a release. “By making sure we have a robust tree canopy, we can help our community be more resilient to the impacts of weather.”

Experts will be on hand during TreeFest to help with plant selection and care. Organizers suggest that residents consider the size of the site, whether utility lines exist above and below ground, the proximity to buildings, and site conditions like soil type, drainage and sun exposure.

The TreeFest committee asks visitors to bring their own nonleaking bag or bucket to take home their bare-root seedlings in an effort to reduce single-use plastic waste.

Trees are bare root and should be planted as soon as possible.

TreeFest began in 1997 after hurricanes Bertha and Fran decimated tree populations in the Wilmington area. Since then, more than 150,000 tree seedlings and grasses have been given to residents.

WILMINGTON – The University of North Carolina Wilmington Blue Economy Index, which measures the economic activities in the world’s oceans, rose by 0.02% in November, but still underperformed its closest benchmarks, according to a Monday news release.

The index is published on Bloomberg (Ticker: BLUEECO), which provides daily financial data.

Following a strong September showing with better than 7% growth, the UNCW index slipped by 4.55% in October, falling below the performance of its closest benchmarks, which include the MSCI All World Index, the S&P 500, and the S&P Industrials.

“The modest performance from BLUEECO can be attributed to uncertainty surrounding the United States election,” according to the release.

UNCW said the S&P Industrials increased 7.16% over the month, while the MSCI and S&P 500 showed gains of 3.27% and 5.30%, respectively.

The UNCW index’s top performer was Lindblad Expeditions, a U.S. company specializing in small-ship adventure and expedition cruises that posted a 41% return over the month. The growth was attributed to stronger-than-expected revenues.

Scottsdale, Arizona-based TPI Composites, a global manufacturer of composite wind blades used in wind turbines, was the worst performer in the index, with a 41% decline during the month. UNCW noted that the company was dogged by high operating expenses, an inability to fully pass on cost increases to customers, continued competitive presses from Chinese manufacturers, and potential inflationary challenges in regions such as Turkey.

The UNCW index follows the World Bank definition of the Blue Economy and was developed in collaboration with the UNCW Cameron School of Business, UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy, and FactSet to quantify economic activities in oceans and waterways.

Not much has changed in Sledge Forest in the more than 20 years since its distinctive features were captured on the pages of a document created to offer guidance for its future use.

That, said geologist Roger Shew, is the beauty of it.

The forest that rises from the banks of the Northeast Cape Fear River and sprawls thousands of acres across northern New Hanover County is still an important part of the river floodplain, one of the largest landscape corridors in the southeastern part of the state.

Towering up from the forest bed are cypress and loblolly pine trees, some of the oldest in southeastern North Carolina, that are hundreds of years old, a “rare old-growth occurrence,” according to a biological survey published in May 2003 by the Natural Heritage Program of North Carolina, which identified the forest as a significant natural area.

The forest’s attributes have in recent weeks been thrust front and center in a rumble that tipped off when a Charlotte-based developer submitted to the county’s planning department preliminary plans to build thousands of homes on about a quarter of the more than 4,000-acre, privately owned site.

Because the land being eyed for the proposed development of more than 4,000 single-family houses, a golf course, trails and a horse farm does not have to be rezoned, the project gets pushed straight through to the county’s technical review process, effectively omitting the opportunity for public comment.

That’s simply unacceptable to Castle Hayne resident and local activist Kayne Darrell.

“It’s a by-right property so they can go in and start clear-cutting any time they want,” Darrell told Coastal Review in a recent telephone interview. “We’re hoping they don’t yet. It’s unconscionable to me that we have no opportunity to get our questions answered or have any input on what’s happening because it’s going to impact so many of us in so many negative ways.”

Attempts to reach the developer, Copper Builders, LLC, were unsuccessful. An engineer listed on the development plan application did not return a call for comment.

The homes of Hilton Bluffs, the name of the proposed development, would be built on about 1,000 acres of uplands that adjoin about 3,000 acres of protected wetlands, those that have a continuous surface connection to the U.S. Supreme Court-defined “waters of the United States” – in this case, Prince George Creek, which connects to the Northeast Cape Fear River.

Sledge Forest is one of the largest tracts along a more than 35-mile stretch of the floodplain corridor running from Holly Shelter Creek, at the north, south to Smith Creek.

Shew, senior lecturer in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Ocean Sciences and Environmental Sciences department and a conservationist, said in an email response to Coastal Review that the forest is dominated by hydric soils that are “periodically inundated during high-tide flooding events and storm events.”

Such floods are forecast to only increase with sea level rise, the latest projections of which are a minimum of one foot by 2050.

“High-tide flooding is common along the river and has the potential to inundate much of the site,” Shew said. “And, in the future … most of the area will be inundated fully or partially with river waters. Putting golf courses, horse barns and cabins or single-family homes in this area are ill-advised.”

The roads that will connect those neighborhood amenities will have to be built over wetlands, which will, in turn, block water movement, Shew said.

“And of course, whatever (fertilizer, herbicides, etc.) is put on these areas will runoff into the surrounding wetlands and river,” he wrote.

“The best and most logical use of this land is for it to be left as a natural area that supports wildlife, rich plant communities, corridor connectivity, reduces floodwaters, and maintains all of the ecosystem services of these wetland communities for the benefit of our community in a way too fast-growing area in northern (New Hanover County),” he said. “We need to have a comprehensive plan that maintains large natural areas and this and parts of Island Creek are sights that would be best and be opportune investments for the county for its future.”

Most of the old-growth trees are largely within the project building footprint, Darrell said. A 2003 natural area inventory dated cypress to be more than 350 years old and estimated to be as much as 500 years old, and dated loblollies to be more than 300 years old.

Area residents are also concerned about what is projected to be a significant increase in traffic on rural roads in the area – more than 30,000 additional vehicles per day.

Inactive hazardous site abuts tract

Opponents of the proposed development say they’re also troubled by the fact that the development is being proposed on land that is adjacent to a state-designated inactive hazardous site.

According to information provided by the North Carolina Division of Waste Management, contamination at the site off Castle Hayne Road resulted from drums of calcium fluoride and lubricants being stored in unlined trenches during the 1960s and 1970s.

That contamination spreads across two parcels, one of which is owned by General Electric.

Contamination in groundwater in the northwest corner of GE’s roughly 100-acre tract includes uranium, vinyl chloride and fluoride.

Those contaminants spill over onto a neighboring 1,500-plus-acre parcel owned by Nuclear Fuel Holding Co. Inc., a GE affiliate, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents.

There are also contaminants in groundwater around the main plant on GE’s property. Those contaminants include tetrachlorethylene (PCE), trichloroethylene (TCE), cis- 1,2-dichloroethene, 1,1-dichloroethane, vinyl chloride, benzene, and naphthalene contaminate, according to the state.

Contamination at the main plant area is contained on-site, but is also close to the northern central property line, said Katherine Lucas, public information officer for the Division of Waste Management, in an email responding to Coastal Review’s questions.

“A portion of the (northwest) Area Contamination has migrated to the adjacent property in the deep groundwater aquifer,” she said in the email.

The site was added to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Inactive Hazardous Sites Branch inventory in 1988.

The department’s Division of Water Resources conducted regulatory oversight of all remedial activities at the site until 2008, when site management was transferred to the branch as part of a reorganization between the waste management and water resources divisions.

The site was added to the branch’s Site Priority list in 2008.

“The area of the contamination has not been calculated,” Lucas said. “Ground water contamination is being remediated with a series of hydraulic control wells and pump and treatment of contaminated groundwater.”

More than 3,500 people have signed an online petition to save Sledge Forest.

Darrell, who helped organize Save Sledge Forest, said the ultimate goal is to get the land in conservation.

“That’s where it belongs,” she said. “We’re not giving up. It’s too special a place.”

Want to see the blue economy in action in North Carolina?

There’s a map for that.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship has launched an interactive map pinpointing key blue economy businesses, startups, assets and resources in an effort to boost economic activities in the state that are related to oceans and waterways.

“The goal is to create a comprehensive database that supports entrepreneurs, fosters collaboration, and inspires North Carolinians to engage with and expand their efforts in the Blue Economy,” according to a university news release. “This tool provides a visual snapshot of NC’s potential to become a national leader in sustainable, ocean-focused innovation.”

The university has cited the World Bank’s definition of the blue economy as “sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of ocean ecosystem.”

The map is part of the center’s All Blue program and covers 10 individual sectors ranging from offshore wind to aquaculture. Resources including NC Sea Grant office locations and ongoing offshore wind projects with various electrical partners are also noted on the map.

The UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, collaborated with the university’s Cameron School of Business, CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy, and FactSet to develop the UNCW Blue Economy Index.

The index is the first of its kind to measures economic activities in the world’s ocean and waterways, with a focus on environmental impact.

The index fell by 4.55% in October, underperforming its closest benchmarks following what had been a gain of 7.17% the month prior.

During October, the index slightly decreased in its MSCI All World Index benchmark by -1.60%, S&P 500 by -0.06%, and S&P 500 Industrials by -1.38%, according to a university release.

Index performance was heavily boosted by the consumer discretionary sector, which was driven primarily by the cruise line industry where top performers Norwegian, Carnival, and Royal Caribbean saw gains exceeding 20%.

Industrials, on the other hand, saw a decline of 7.34% for the month.

WILMINGTON – The University of North Carolina Wilmington Blue Economy Index, which measures the economic activities in the world’s oceans, rose by 7.17% in September and beat the performance of its closest benchmarks.

The UNCW index follows the World Bank definition of the Blue Economy and was developed in collaboration with the UNCW Cameron School of Business, UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy, and FactSet to quantify economic activities in oceans and waterways.

“With a particular emphasis on environmental impact, this index offers investors unparalleled insights into the burgeoning economic landscape surrounding coastal communities,” according to the collaborators, who said the index outperformed its closest benchmarks, the MSCI All World Index, the S&P 500, and S&P Industrials, during September.

The S&P Industrials showed a slight increase of 3.27% over the month, while the MSCI and S&P 500 lagged S&P Industrials but still delivered positive returns for the month showing gains of 2.25% and 2.02%, respectively.

“The strong performance from BLUEECO pushes the index to over 100% returns since its inception date in April 2018,” according to the collaborators.

Beijing-based Goldwind, the leading player in the wind energy industry, saw its share price increase by 31.3% in September and was the index’s top performer. It was the company’s strongest showing since 2021, and UNCW index collaborators said its profitability boosted investors’ confidence.

“Not only does the increase in net profits boost stock prices but industry trends have shown an adoption of renewables which correlates to Goldwind’s price rise,” collaborators said.

The energy sector boosted the index performance by posting returns of 11.17%. The materials sector, however, realized the lowest performance after posting 5% returns in August but maintained a positive contribution of 0.39%.

Singapore-based Marco Polo Marine, which provides vessel chartering for various marine operations and support for offshore companies, led the energy sector with its stock price rising by 22.33%.

Four companies saw returns of more than 20% September, including Norway-based Wallenius Wilhelmsen, a global shipping company specializing in vehicle transportation, that saw a 25.77% increase in September.

Wan Hai Lines of Taiwan saw a 24.72% increase during September.

“The growth of these Blue Economy companies should not go unnoticed, as The United Nations predicts extreme growth in the Blue Economy. Pointing towards growth from a current $1.5 trillion contribution to global GDP to $3 trillion by 2030,” collaborators said.

Mitsui E&S, a Japan shipbuilding, marine engineering and renewables firm, saw a loss of 11.7% over the month, making the company the worst performer in the index.

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index does not feature any North Carolina-based firms among its U.S.-based holdings, “but three of our holdings have strong connections within the state,” Colin Waltsak, a research assistant in the UNCW Economics and Finance Department, told Coastal Review Wednesday.

They include General Electric, which has power-generation and industrial operations in North Carolina, recently invested in research and development in the state to advance technologies that support sustainable practices in the marine and coastal environment.  The company saw an 8.15% increase in September, Waltsak said.

Houston-based Kirby Corp. also has a presence in North Carolina, where they focus on diesel engine services and marine transport. The company’s share price increased 2.09% during the month.

Standex International, based in New Hampshire, also has presence in the state in the food service equipment industry, specifically supporting sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, saw a 2.31% increase in September.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington said Wednesday that its Blue Economy Index rose by 3.07% in August but still slightly underperformed its closest benchmarks.

The UNCW Blue Economy Index measures the economic activities in the oceans and follows the World Bank definition of the Blue Economy. It was originally developed in 2018 but officially launched in this year in February.

“The modest performance from BLUEECO doubles the performance of last month’s return,” UNCW said in a press release.

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index was developed in collaboration with the UNCW Cameron School of Business, UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy, and FactSet, a global data and software firm. The UNCW index measures economic activities in oceans and waterways and places an emphasis on environmental impact, offering investors insights into what its developers describe as a “burgeoning economic landscape surrounding coastal communities.”

While the index underperformed the MSCI All World Index, the S&P 500, and S&P Industrials, according to the UNCW analysis, the benchmarks delivered similarly modest gains during the month.

That’s except for the S&P Industrials, which experienced a 4.58% increase in August. The MSCI and S&P 500 showed gains of 3.77% and 3.70%, respectively.

“Since April 27th, 2018, our index has outperformed MSCI All World Index by 11.91%, making it very appealing to investors,” Colin Waltsak, a research assistant in the UNCW Economics and Finance Department, told Coastal Review Wednesday. “Not only this, but the United Nations believes the Blue Economy will grow over 50% by 2030. Our index is a great tool for investors who are aiming to capture long term growth of the Blue Economy and shines light on the economic importance of coastal communities.”

The sector saw majority positive contributions to the index, according to university index analysts. The materials and real estate sector helped the index performance by posting returns of 4.99% and 4.89%, respectively. The energy sector, however, dipped into the negatives with returns of -6.82% over the month, according to the UNCW analysis.

UNCW noted that the materials sector was dominated by Schouw and Co., a supplier of feed for aquaculture. Schouw also is one of the largest suppliers of hydraulics in Denmark, producing hydraulic systems for industries including offshore wind energy.

The top performer within the index was CS Wind, a South Korea-based company specializing in manufacturing and sales of wind towers for offshore wind energy. CS Wind saw an increase of 29.48%, attributed to an earnings statement showing 99% growth over the year. The company had acquired Vesta Towers America, providing entry to the North American market.

The worst performer in the index was Grieg Seafood, a Norwegian salmon farming company that saw a 17.77% decrease over the month attributed to reduced harvest volumes, down by 7,000 tons. “The company also faced challenges with fish health and environmental issues which led to a higher mortality rate, straining operations, and contributing to economic loss,” UNCW officials said in the analysis.

Thousands of dollars in rebates are available for commercial businesses, owners of apartment complexes and other large-scale property owners who want to help reduce the amount of pollutant-laden stormwater runoff reaching two Wilmington watersheds.

The city in January launched a green infrastructure cost-share rebate program, one intended to further boost ongoing efforts to cut down on the amount of runoff that flows from rooftops and other impervious surfaces during rainfall and into creeks and waterways directly downstream.

This new program specifically targets Bradley Creek and Hewletts Creeks watersheds, which collectively span a little more than 21 square miles and include connections to two Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway drainage areas.

Local government programs like New Hanover County Soil & Water Conservation District’s that focus on helping residents install nature-based features like rain gardens and cisterns, and host rain barrel sales, have become increasingly popular, said Anna Reh-Gingerich, watershed coordinator of Wilmington Stormwater Service’s Heal Our Waterways Program.

“We have waitlists and people are seeking out site visits, which is awesome, but we’re also trying to reach those commercial properties, those high-density developments and HOA (homeowners associations) properties to make sure that everybody has access to these resources too,” she said.

The cost-share program offers rebates up to $10,000 for eligible projects where property owners go above and beyond what the state mandates them to manage runoff from their properties.

“This is for going above that so that we can actually reduce the total volume of stormwater runoff rather than just maintain the status quo,” Reh-Gingerich said.

For example, a commercial business owner who replaces an existing parking lot of impervious pavement with a pervious surface or installs a pervious parking lot as part of a new development, would qualify, depending on the size of the project.

That’s just one of many options from which property owners can choose. Properties with room for larger-scale projects might consider installing a rain garden that includes native plants or constructing a wetland.

Install a cistern above or below the ground to capture stormwater runoff and use the water to irrigate greenspace. Remove an old concrete pad, slab or patio to create more greenspace, “because you’re removing impervious surface, which creates stormwater runoff,” Reh-Gingerich said.

There is also the option of installing a green roof, which has vegetation on it that helps soak in rain. A stormwater runoff mitigation method not common in the area, but one Reh-Gingerich said is included as an option in the city’s stormwater manual.

“It is cost-share so we do want property owners to invest in the projects that they’re putting in, but we want to offer a little bit of additional funding to help them make it happen,” Reh-Gingerich said.

The city has a brochure detailing the cost-share breakdown.

Reh-Gingerich estimates that the annually funded program will help fund about two projects each year.

These projects help implement further the Bradley and Hewletts Creeks Watershed Restoration Plan the Wilmington City Council adopted in 2012.

The plan was created by the city in the mid-2000s in partnership with Wrightsville Beach, the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science, Withers & Ravenel Engineers, and the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, in response to heavily degraded water quality in the creeks.

Bradley Creek’s water quality has been impaired since the mid-1940s, according to the plan. Much of shellfish harvesting has been closed for decades in Hewletts Creek, the watershed of which by 2021 had about 25% impervious surface coverage and a population of about 20,000, according to a North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality report.

But efforts to reduce pollution in the watershed by reducing the amount of runoff going into the creek have been paying off, according to that report.

A North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries Sanitary Survey from 2016 until 2021 noted that while shellfish harvesting in Hewletts Creek is prohibited, “significant strides have been made in reducing fecal coliform impacts,” the report states.

“Fecal counts at sampled sites have gone from tens of thousands of colony-forming units (CFU) per 100 milliliters (mL) in pre-2006 to the hundreds or tens of CFU/100 mL in the 2016-2021 sampling period, with some sites meeting the state coastal standard of 14 CFU/100 mL fairly consistently,” according to that report.

Quarterly sampling at four tidal sites on the creek coordinated by Dr. Michael Mallin, a professor at UNCW’s Center for Marine Science, substantiate water quality improvements in the creek. That sampling has occurred since 2007.

“It’s important to continue to do what we can on land because we all live downstream of each other and we’re all connected by the way that water flows,” Reh-Gingerich said. “So, what we can do to improve our stormwater footprint, the more that we can help protect these resources for years to come.”

UNCW, the largest landowner in the Bradley Creek watershed, has partnered with the Coastal Federation to install nearly half a dozen rain gardens and retrofit a number of parking lots since 2019.

Mad Mole Brewing has tapped the university as a resource for interns to help figure out how to reduce stormwater runoff coming from the property off Boathouse Road near Bradley Creek.

The business received funds through an U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Section 319 Nonpoint Source Management Program grant awarded to UNCW to remove portions of impervious pavement from its parking lot and refill those areas with permeable pavers, explained Dano Ferons, Mad Mole’s operations manager.

“Our building has four downspouts in the back and two in the front and that runoff just goes straight out into Bradley’s Creek,” he said. “The goal is to get that first inch of rainfall from the roof into the permeable pavers up against the downspouts and then the rest of the parking lot could collect that first inch down at the end of the driveway.”

To capture that amount of runoff, they will have the parking slots at the two downspouts on the front of the building ripped up and replaced with the permeable pavers. A strip of pavers will be installed across an end of the parking lot to infiltrate rain water that flows across the lot.

The project, which is expected to be underway later this year, will cost about $10,000, Ferons said.

“But of that $10,000 we’re not responsible for any monetary valuation. Our entire contribution is going to be education, employee time and on-site resources,” he said.

Next on his list is figuring out how to best mitigate runoff coming from the downspouts on the back of the building, a project that would potentially be eligible for the city’s cost-share rebate program.

“We’ve got a curb back there in a private alley behind the building and [our intern] is going to see if we can knock out part of the curb and put a swale in,” Ferons said. “I’m not sure if we’ll be allowed to do that so the other option that we’re looking at is cutting the pipes and running them into rain barrels and then rigging up a pump system and making a rain garden out the back of the brewery in that same swale area. Then we would have a whole other area that we could put a rain barrel or potentially divert the downspout and use it for water around the grounds.”

If you love the sweet taste of a fresh North Carolina bay scallop you may want to stop reading this now … but please continue — it’s not all bad news.

Although the likely invasive species of parasite that a team of University of North Carolina Wilmington researchers have identified in bay scallops here in the state is gross, these scallops are not harmful when consumed.

That’s good news for the bay scallop lover, but it’s bad news for a shellfish that has never fully recovered from a red tide event in the late 1980s, struggles to thrive in polluted waters and dwindling habitat and gets picked off by predators.

“I view this parasite as just one more hit to the scallops,” said Dr. Julia Buck, an assistant professor in UNCW’s Department of Biology and Marine Biology.

After Buck was hired on at the university in 2019, a colleague asked her a question that would set the course for an investigation to determine what type of parasite was infecting some of the bay scallops in North Carolina, where it came from, how prevalent it is in the state’s waters where bay scallops grow, and how it affects scallops.

Dr. Ami Wilbur, director of UNCW’s Shellfish Research Hatchery, first noted the parasite, a squirmy ring of white, tiny, finger-like projections around the flesh of a scallop she was examining in 2012.

It would be several years before she would get the opportunity to meet Buck and ask the most basic of biological questions: What is it?

Buck promptly determined the parasite was a trematode. Trematodes are a diverse group of organisms in which thousands of species have been known to science for a long time.

But this particular species of trematode was a mystery.

The literature Buck and Wilbur dove into provided no clues. The pair fanned out pictures of infected scallops to fellow scientists up the East Coast (bay scallops are not commonly found from South Carolina south to Florida’s Atlantic Coast) and across the Gulf of Mexico.

Scientists responded with two very different answers. Those in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Virginia had not seen the parasite.

A scientist on Florida’s Gulf coast had and, after researchers did some genetic sampling, they determine the parasites found off Florida’s west coast were the same as those found in North Carolina.

“The bay scallop is an iconic species that people care a lot about,” Buck said. “And yet, even though this parasite is very visible to the naked eye – when you open the scallop you see that it is infected – no one had described the parasite. There was no record of it in the literature whatsoever. That’s really weird. We would have seen it 100 years ago and there would have been a record of it in the literature. The fact that it’s not there tells us that it’s likely an invasive species.”

The team at UNCW conducted DNA sequencing, a laboratory process that allows scientists to learn the exact order of the four building blocks that make up DNA, and compared it to DNA in a database of genetic sequences known as GenBank.

They found the parasite’s closest known relative, a genus that was only recently described, in Australia.

Researchers can’t say with absolute certainly that this species of trematode came from Australia to the U.S.

Buck can only theorize that the parasite infected plankton that hitched a ride on a container ship.

What the team does know is that trematodes have a complex life cycle. They need to infect multiple hosts in order to make it to adulthood.

“We don’t actually know the specific identify of any of those hosts except for the bay scallop at the moment,” Buck said.

What they suspect is that this species of trematode initially latches onto a scallop before it goes on to a small crustacean, like a copepod, a tiny crustacean that is a key component in the marine food chain.

The theory is that infected copepods get eaten by smaller fish and smaller fish get eaten by larger fish. The adult worm develops in the larger fish, where the worm releases eggs, which then infect more bay scallops.

The team research, supported by North Carolina Sea Grant, found that the parasite is now found in most waterways where bay scallops live.

Fellow researcher and former UNCW graduate student Hailea Boggess, who earned her master’s last December, looked at wild scallops in places including Chadwick Bay and Core Sound.

“We basically covered the area in North Carolina where scallops exist because we wanted to know what the prevalence was throughout North Carolina,” Buck said.

Roughly speaking, Boggess found around 20% of the wild scallops she collected to be infected by the parasite.

Researchers found that infections are seasonal and that parasites are likely dropped off by larger host fish, perhaps tarpons, that migrate to North Carolina in the summer then head south back to Florida when the water turns cool.

“We see new infections happening over the wintertime,” Buck said. “This is just every single year we look this is exactly the same pattern we find.”

Ongoing research suggests that the parasite does not try to kill its initial host, but that it does try to steal as much energy as it can to put into its own reproduction.

Trematodes castrate their initial host, which means the parasite strips the scallops they infect of the ability to reproduce.

Buck said the team has also found that the parasites affect the growth of the scallops they infect, perhaps because the parasite lives in a scallop’s gills, making it hard for the scallop, a filter feeder, to eat.

Additional research, including physiological effects the parasite has on scallops, is expected to be published later.

Coastal Review reached out to Adam Tyler, owner and operator of Core Sound Oyster Co. in Smyrna, who recalled the days of his youth when the sound teemed with scallops, a shellfish he calls “sweet as candy.”

“At wintertime at low tide you would go down to the grass flats with a five-gallon bucket and fill it,” with scallops, he said.

The N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries lists the status of the bay scallop fishery as “depleted,” with harvests in recent years decreasing to practically no landings.

“Used to (scalloping) was something you could bank on,” Tyler said. “If oystering was poor, you’d go scalloping. You could always go scalloping, go oystering in the wintertime if there were no fish and now, unfortunately with the decline of the scallops and the regulations, everybody is being forced commercially into the same fisheries, which is further straining resources, which leads to more regulation and more consolidation.”

He’s watched large schools of rays come through and decimate juvenile scallop beds. He “always swore” predation and water quality have been largely to blame for the population decline.

The discovery of the parasite, “was completely new to me,” he said.

If he’s come across infected scallops, he doesn’t know it. Tyler said he can shuck one scallop in about 25-30 seconds.

“When you’re cutting them that fast you really don’t look at it closely like that,” he said. “You just spent all day catching them and now you’ve got to spend half the night opening them.”

Shucking involves removing the gills, which means parasites are likely pulled and tossed aside.

Any remaining parasite is killed off if when the scallop is cooked or frozen, Buck said.

“There are some shellfish-borne diseases, but by-and-large most marine parasites aren’t compatible in humans,” said Jeff Dobbs, a marine biologist with the Division of Marine Fisheries. “I definitely don’t want to be an alarmist about this parasite in particular. In fact, we have seen some promising upticks in Core Sound and Back Sound and Pamlico Sound.”

He encourages anyone with questions or concerns to contact the division’s Shellfish Sanitation and Recreational Water Quality section.

He also asked that anyone who sees shellfish die-offs contact the division.

It’s not uncommon for Dr. Jim Herstine to hear his name enthusiastically called out when he’s out and about in Wilmington.

Admittedly, he doesn’t always immediately recognize the smiling face greeting him in a parking lot or grocery store. By his estimates he taught some 300 students in a class that he and a couple of colleagues came up with to offer at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the mid-1990s.

But his former students who took the North Carolina coastal issues and experience class, now more than 20 years strong and counting, remember the course that took them from the classroom on a trip through the Outer Banks.

“It was my favorite class to teach,” said Herstine, who earned the title professor emeritus when he retired in the summer of 2018. “The whole purpose of the class was to get the students out of the classroom and into real-life situations.”

He’s “tickled to death” the course continues to leave an impression on students willing to brave the seven-night, eight-day field portion of the class that entails camping, kayaking and covering miles and miles of coastal areas to learn about and experience the Outer Banks and the issues communities within the region are facing, be it climate change, tourism-related impacts or development.

Today, UNCW students may take this unique course during the university’s first summer session, which ran from May 20 through June 18 and was, this year, opened to undergraduate students by Dr. Jennifer Biddle, an associate professor of public and internal affairs who inherited the course from Herstine.

Biddle explained in a telephone interview earlier this month that the ultimate goal of the field course is to bridge the gap between science and policy by exploring an area filled with beautiful beaches, “but they have a lot of serious threats that they are being faced with.”

“The idea is we really are trying to help (students) understand the variety of perspectives on these coastal issues,” Biddle said.

Think of it as a guide to get students to appreciate and empower them in how they can help affecting change where they live.

Students learn about how different organizations are coping with threats facing these coastal communities, why it’s important to protect those areas and how they, in their future professions, can work with various organizations and groups in helping coastal communities deal with these issues.

It’s an ultimate field trip that takes the students through an immersive experience from the Virginia border to Carteret County, stopping along the way to kayak along freshwater rivers and coastal sounds and meet with an array of professionals, from federal and local government officials to coastal environmentalists to ferry captains.

They camp primarily in state parks and on national seashores, more often than not washing off the day’s grime in cold showers at primitive campgrounds.

But what they lack in modern-day comforts, they gain from the sound of a chorus of frogs at night, marveling at a stingray swimming gracefully near their kayaks and good conversation about the day’s highlights over a communal dinner, Biddle said.

“You have the whole tourism economy meets sea level rise,” she said. “Or, even in Hyde County, the loss of economic opportunities meets sea level rise. And, one of the prevailing things in the Down East area is sense of loss.”

That includes a loss of community, loss of lifestyle and livelihoods and loss the community has experienced as members of families who have been here for generations move away, she said.

This year’s class of 15 students, including five undergraduate students and 10 graduate students, represented an array of studies: oceanography, political science, public administration, environmental sciences, biology, public policy and the university’s Master of Coastal and Ocean Policy degree program.

“I definitely came back tired. I definitely came back dirty, but it was a fantastic opportunity because I came back with so many different perspectives,” said UNCW Assistant Director of Transfer Admissions and graduate student Trey Ricks. “I think one of the things that I walked away with that has been most impactful is that you have to work with the environment and people to make any kind of change.”

Fulbright Scholar and UNCW graduate student Elisapeti Veikoso saw some parallels between the issues Outer Banks communities are facing and those of her native Tonga.

“I have to say that this course was an eye-opener for me in how developed countries try to deal with coastal issues and the big issues that we’re facing nowadays – climate change, sea level risk and frequent tropical cyclones, I think you call them hurricanes,” she said. “I got the same feeling that we have at home. We’re not alone in dealing with climate issues. As an islander, that is our story as well. This class is really an eye-opener.”

That’s what the professors – current and past – aim to provide through the course.

“It took a lot of people to put the whole class together,” Herstine said. “Do I think that the class itself is a legacy for the university? Yes, I definitely do.”

The University of North Carolina Wilmington said Wednesday that its monthly measure of ocean-related economic activities underperformed its closest benchmarks last month.

The index that measures economic activities in the oceans fell by 3.71% in June. It was the first time in two months that the index underperformed its closest benchmarks, the MSCI All World Index, the S&P 500, and the S&P 500 Industrials.

The index is published on Bloomberg (Ticker: BLUEECO), which provides daily financial data.

While the Blue Economy Index delivered the weakest gains throughout the month, its benchmarks experienced modest gains, UNCW announced. The S&P Industrials showed a slight increase of 0.24%, while the MSCI and S&P 500 competed for the top-performing benchmark with gains of 1.68% and 3.31%, respectively.

The collaborative attributed Blue Economy Index’ negative performance to a “pullback” from strong returns of more than 12% combined in April and May.

“Every sector contributed negatively to the index except for the Real Estate sector,” according to the UNCW collaborative. “Real Estate contributed to keeping the index from providing lower returns, and made the most significant contribution, posting returns of over 16%. This stunning performance comes from the stabilization of interest rates, and an uptick in mergers and acquisitions in the sector throughout the month.”

Coastal Review first reported on the UNCW Blue Economy Index June 7, noting that it was developed in 2018 but officially launched in February of this year. It’s a collaboration among the UNCW Cameron School of Business, the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy, and FactSet.

The UNCW collaborative said the index’ top performer was Lindblad Expeditions, a US-based cruise company that saw an increase of 26.47%, reflecting positive trends for the cruise industry.

The worst performer in the index was Nordex SE, one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers. The company reported a 22.23% decrease attributed to order slowdowns amid rising second-quarter prices.

The renewable energy sector showed weak returns throughout the month as investors cashed in on gains, UNCW said.

A stormwater retrofit project aimed to improve water quality in the Bradley Hewletts Creek Watersheds is in progress on the campus of University of North Carolina Wilmington.

The work to replace sections of conventional asphalt at Randall parking lot with permeable pavement began in late June and is expected to be complete in about a week. This type of pavement allows stormwater to pass through to the ground underneath, rather than flow directly into storm drains.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation, UNCW and the city’s Heal Our Waterways Program have been working with Coastal Stormwater Services Inc. and DiMaio Concrete, both based in Wilmington, on the stormwater retrofit project.

The project is one of numerous that have taken place since a watershed restoration plan was adopted in 2007.

“This collaborative initiative continues to make great strides towards achieving the goals within the Bradley and Hewletts Creeks Watershed Restoration Plan. We’re thrilled to see more nature-based solutions to help protect Bradley Creek come together through the hard work and determination of this partnership,” Anna Reh-Gingerich, watershed coordinator with Heal Our Waterways, said in a statement.

Since 2019, the university, the Coastal Federation and Wilmington have installed several rain gardens and numerous parking lot paving retrofits.

“We are pleased to have this parking lot help reduce runoff and be able to showcase these techniques along with our campus rain gardens as a living classroom,” Feletia Lee, UNCW’s chief sustainability officer, said in a statement.

This stormwater retrofit project was supported by the North Carolina Division of Water Resources’ Environmental Protection Agency’s Section 319 Water Quality Program. 

The University of North Carolina Wilmington said Wednesday that its monthly measure of ocean-related economic activities rose 10.11% in May.

Colin Waltsak, a research assistant in the UNCW Economics and Finance Department, told Coastal Review Friday that the UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index was originally developed in 2018 but officially launched in February of this year.

The index is published on Bloomberg (Ticker: BLUEECO), which provides daily financial data.

“Our index measures global ocean economic activities. Just as the S&P 500 Index reflects the health of the US capital market, our index offers an estimate of the blue economy,” Waltsak said in an email response.

He said the goal is to get the index picked up by an asset manager to take it public.

The index, which follows the World Bank definition of the “Blue Economy,” a broad swath of sustainable uses of ocean resources. These include the harvest of living and nonliving resources, renewable or inexhaustible natural forces such as wind or wave energy, carbon sequestration, and ocean- and waterways-based commerce, transport and trade.

“The index continues to outperform its closest benchmarks, the MSCI All World Index, the S&P 500, and the S&P 500 Industrials,” UNCW said in the announcement. “While S&P 500 Industrials showed the weakest gains throughout the month, rising only 1.69%, the MSCI All World Index and S&P 500 were neck and neck, achieving 4.10% and 3.93% respectively. Despite these major indices showing modest growth in May, the Blue Economy Index surged past them, delivering gains more than double those of its nearest benchmark (MSCI) and closing the month with a remarkable 10.11% increase.”

The top performer, according to the index, was TPI Composites Inc, a US-based wind blades manufacturer, which saw a 72.33% increase. The gains followed a recent earnings report in which TPI announced revenues that were 0.94% higher than expected.

A Taiwan-based shipping company, Wan Hai Lines Ltd., also performed strongly, posting a return of 57.70% for the month after launching a direct service from Indonesia to West India.

According to the index, the worst performer was Mitsui E&S Holdings, a shipbuilding company in Japan focused on engines and automated gantry cranes. The firm had posted a disappointing earnings report for the first quarter.

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index was developed in collaboration with the UNCW Cameron School of Business, UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), CIE’s Alliance for the Blue Economy, and FactSet, a data and software firm serving investment professionals worldwide.

The UNCW index places an emphasis on environmental impact and offers investors insights into what its developers describe as a “burgeoning economic landscape surrounding coastal communities.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Secretaries’ Science Board to review PFAS’ effects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you ever stopped and stood on the part of the beach where ocean waves rhythmically skim up toward the dunes then back to sea?

That area, the one where you feel your feet sink little by little into the wet sand, is called a swash zone.

University of North Carolina Wilmington Assistant Professor Ryan Mieras is leading a team of researchers who are setting out to understand how sand moves within these dynamically changing oceanfront areas with the idea that, in years to come, they can create a tool to help forecast which areas of a beach may experience little to no sand loss or substantial sand loss during coastal storms.

A swash zone is a highly complex area of the oceanfront. Sand in these shallow, murky areas are camouflaged by bubbles and foam, making it difficult to be examined by instrumentation like satellites, laser scanners and acoustic sensors typically used to measure ocean forces.

“We’re getting better at modeling how the beach will change under day-to-day conditions, under storm conditions and so on and so forth,” Mieras said in a telephone interview. “But all of those gains in knowledge and improvement of these forecast models has only been accomplished because of observations and measurements further offshore than right at the swash zone.”

A fundamental problem with current models is that, while they are good at computing waves and factoring in tides and how winds generated in coastal storms may create certain types of waves, these models treat the beaches as if they were concrete.

“If we have a better way of computing how the beach changes under storm events, keep in mind all of those changes are occurring in the swash zone where the waves are impacting the dunes, we can pass that back to the model that’s calculating the waves in the storm surge elevation and that may change the risk for a particular location or community that would have otherwise maybe been under-predicted or over-predicted,” Mieras said.

The U.S. Coastal Research Program and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have awarded Mieras a nearly $1 million grant to head the four-year, collaborative study with researchers from the University of Delaware and University of Texas at Austin.

For the next year and a half, the team, including one doctoral student attending each of those universities, will work on how to mimic conditions that will generate what are called “intensive sediment transport events” in a wave flume, a massive, rectangular aquarium-like tank that can produce waves and currents to simulate a hosts of real-life sea conditions.

This large-scale laboratory experiment will be conducted throughout an eight-week stretch of summer 2025 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, home to the Corps’ Engineering Research and Development Center.

This center’s Coastal Hydraulics Laboratory includes a 10-foot-wide, 200-foot-long wave flume, one that is ideal for the team to what Mieras described as getting the physics of sand movement correct.

Those measurements will be taken using a host of sand transport sensors and instruments, some of which have been developed, manufactured and tested by Mieras’ undergraduate students at UNCW’s Coastal Engineering Wave Flume. That flume – 5 feet wide and 80 feet long – was commissioned just last year.

His team will document the concentration of sands within the water, the velocity, elevation and speed of the water and how much the lab-created beach is changing at as much as 50 times per second.

“So we’re getting a really, really detailed understanding,” of how sediment moves, he said.

Researchers will use something called particle image velocimetry, or PIV, to investigate and document how sand shifts under a variety of conditions.

“We’re measuring everything, everywhere,” Mieras said.

The team, uniquely crafted of researchers who are experts in measuring and modeling sand movement, will then spend the next two years taking data quantified in the lab and using it to understand the fundamental physics of why sand does or does not move under different conditions.

The last year of the study, the team will incorporate what researchers learn into a regional scale model called XBeach, which the Corps uses to simulate shoreline responses to storms.

“The goal is eventually to then test it with regional scale coastal morphology, with the new version and with the old version, and see if it does any better,” Mieras said.

The hope, he said, is that, say a decade from now, the results of their research will provide a better way of not only forecasting storm surge, but also update coastal region erosion in real time so forecasters can better understand hour-by-hour storm surge and coastal flooding risks.

“So, it’s not just for the Corps to say where do we deploy resources, but I think anyone who lives near or at or on the beach always wants to know more and more and more information,” Mieras said. “The hope is that not only do we have more information, but it’s more accurate.”

Their work is part of a larger collaborative study examining the transport of sediment on beaches.

WILMINGTON – The race is on to revive the ocean’s growingly imperiled coral reefs.

Damage and decay caused by everything from warming sea temperatures to pollution to overfishing to disease are erasing these underwater architectural structures crucial to other marine life and coastal shorelines.

University of North Carolina Wilmington researchers recently received grants totaling about $2 million that will allow them to further investigate potential ways of protecting coral against disease and climate change.

The funding, which comes from $18 million in global grants doled out to fast-track coral conservation and restoration research, also paves the way for a historian at the university to examine ethical questions about potential implications of releasing coral genetically modified to resist climate change into the wild.

Super coral?

In 2020, UNCW Associate Professor Nicole Fogarty and her team of researchers at the university’s Center for Marine Science became the first to spawn two species of endangered Caribbean coral in a laboratory.

In the three years since, the lab’s success at spawning baby coral prompted the move to a larger space — actually a separate building dedicated entirely to coral reproduction.

About a half-million larvae have been spawned with this year yielding the highest numbers yet. The lab has shipped roughly a quarter-million of those larvae to research partners in Florida and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for further experimentation.

“We can actually test the various stressors that corals are experiencing, especially the environmental stressors so namely things like increased temperature, decreased pH or ocean acidifications, changes in light intensity and light spectrum, and dissolved oxygen to mimic what’s occurring,” in their natural environment, Fogarty said.

She is part of a research collaborative that received a nearly $1.5 million, three-year grant and includes Jake Warner, a developmental geneticist and assistant professor, and Nathan Crowe, a science historian and associate professor, who will work in conjunction with researchers with the University of the Philippines.

Fogarty will provide coral larvae spawned in her lab to Warner, whose research team will then use genetic editing tools to try and create corals that can resist warming sea temperatures and other climate change-related phenomena.

Warner said researchers will also be able to study corals in ways that scientists haven’t been able to do before, including examining the functions and interactions of genes and proteins, a field referred to as functional genomics.

Warner stressed that coral genetically modified in his lab will remain there.

“Now we’re not engineering corals and then putting them back out into the wild,” he said. “The goal is to develop this technology so that if we ever decide we don’t need it, we don’t have to reverse engineer it, it’ll just be there ready to go because using this kind of technology in the wild brings some very important ethical considerations.”

That’s where Crowe comes in.

He explained that only recently have researchers begun to think about genetically modifying organisms to combat climate change.

“And those conversations have been only almost completely around climate change issues on land so the marine environment opens up new questions about aims and goals for the marine environment and creating new ways in which these corals could spread,” he said.

Crowe said it is important that these conversations are held now to help regulators make future policy decisions relating to releasing genetically modified corals into the wild.

The team plans to share its findings during the International Coral Reef Symposium to be hosted in New Zealand in July 2026. Crowe plans to host a conference at UNCW in summer 2025, inviting scholars to discuss the study.

“The idea, rather than kind of providing them just the technology and then letting them figure out what issues to consider, the hope is to provide those types of laid out various issues, concerns, potentials for the technology, so that each individual policy group can do what’s right for them,” he said. “So often we have developed these technologies and then, in retrospect, think about the issues that they might bring up. Then, what happens is, and we’ve seen this over and over again, the realities of those technologies can then make people feel as though they have very limited options.”

“CMS and UNCW are really doing some of the foremost work in this area in the world and so it’s really an important place for us to have these conversations,” he said.

Building biological defenses

Researchers looking at ways to restore and protect coral reefs know the clock is ticking.

Natural processes and human activities have severely damaged many of the world’s coral reefs.

Scientists predict that, if this trend continues, living corals on many of the world’s reefs will be dead in 20 years.

Coral reefs cover more than 4 million acres of sea floor in waters of the United States and its territories in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.

More than 25% of all marine species live in coral reefs.

In addition to their importance to marine life, coral reefs also serve as coastal shoreline guardians.

“They provide this solid, basically limestone structure that’s surrounding coastlines and that’s really important for preventing runoff and also coastal protection from storm surges,” said UNCW Assistant Professor Blake Ushijima. “You can imagine the amount of force from (coastal) storm surges and runoff that can occur.”

Ushijima has received a more than $400,000 grant to fund ongoing research on developing probiotic treatments to protect coral against stony coral tissue loss disease, or SCTLD.

This disease is decimating coral in the Caribbean, which is experiencing one of the worst disease outbreaks in recorded history for corals.

SCTLD is particularly dangerous because it attacks coral tissue, melting the tissue away like a flesh-eating disease.

“Some of the most susceptible corals, you have 100% mortality,” Ushijima said. “It’s just gone.”

The grant awarded to Ushijima will be used to open a site in San Andres, a Columbian Island, adding to the small number of hubs being established in the Caribbean where researchers are testing for different probiotics and developing potential treatments against SCTLD.

These hubs, including those being built in Montserrat in the Leeward Islands and the Dominican Republic, include so-called bio secure facilities. Water used in these facilities is treated to remove potentially bad microbes and re-treated before it is released back into the natural environment.

Testing probiotic treatments at different facilities throughout the Caribbean will help scientists discover which treatments work best for corals in those regions.

Brain corals and maze corals, which build the bases of reefs, are particularly susceptible to SCTLD, Ushijima said.

“This disease seems to specifically target what we call the mounding coral, like the brain corals,” he said. “They’re solid limestone. The bad part is those tend to be slower growing, but they’re building the very structures of the reefs.”

SCTLD affects at least 24 of the 50 or so coral species in the Caribbean. The disease was discovered off the coast of Miami in 2014 and has since spread to two dozen different territories and countries, Ushijima said.

He is partnering on the project with researchers from the Perry Institute of Marine Science and University of Massachusetts Lowell as well as various Columbia-based organizations.

“We know (SCTLD) is a waterborne disease, but we don’t know how specifically it’s transmitted, but it’s reached across the Caribbean so it’s very unprecedented,” Ushijima said. “The scary part is it’s not going to be the last disease outbreak. It’s just one of many that will occur just from how this world is going. The more we encroach on it, the more battered the environment and more pollution, climate change, it’s going to cause all these chain reactions.”

The All Blue 201 workshop scheduled for 1-3 p.m. Tuesday in Wilmington is an opportunity to delve into a comprehensive discussion of the coastal economy in North Carolina.

The workshop is hosted by and will take place at University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, 803 South College Road.

Register online to save a spot. There is no charge attend.

Attendees will examine various aspects of the blue economy and discuss topics such as whether the seafood we’re eating is sustainable, how to grow entrepreneurial ecosystems to support the blue economy, what to know about blue economy policy, how to create a blue economy financial index, and how to build an EcoTech Innovation Engine.

Speakers on the schedule are CIE Scientist in Residence Troy Alphin, as well as Dr. Jenny Biddle, program coordinator for the master’s of coastal and ocean policy. Visitors will also hear from CIE Entrepreneur in Residence Richard Keary and Jay Schach, CIE entrepreneur educator, Cameron School of Business adjunct.

Attendees will be asked to provide their perspectives.

WILMINGTON – More than 127 million people, 40% of the population, live in America’s coastal communities where rising seas and more frequent, intense coastal storms are challenging convention.

Here to take on those challenges is a growing workforce of entrepreneurs tapping into what proponents and practitioners call the blue economy.

The blue economy is collectively defined by the World Bank and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, as the sustainable use of ocean resources to grow coastal economies while preserving the ocean’s ecosystem.

America’s blue economy in 2019 supported more than 2 million jobs and contributed nearly $400 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product through things like tourism and recreation, commercial and recreational fishing, power generation and research, according to NOAA.

The blue economy that year outpaced the country’s economy “in its entirety,” the administration said.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, has taken notice and, since 2020, been ramping up a program to promote blue economic-driven initiatives.

“I think the one way that I would say we are evolving is toward the ocean innovation space, the blue economy,” CIE Director Heather McWhorter said.

CIE was created a decade ago following a request from Wilmington Chamber of Commerce officials to the university’s then-Chancellor Gary Miller.

“At that time in Wilmington there wasn’t a place for entrepreneurs to gather,” McWhorter explained.

The center, located a short distance from the main campus on College Road, is part of the university’s research and innovation, assisting entrepreneurs in the community as well as faculty and student entrepreneurs.

One aspect of CIE that makes it particularly unique is its mentor program, which consists of 140 volunteer mentors who can share personal experiences from starting their own businesses.

Though some of the volunteers actively work, many are retirees who moved from northern cities to New Hanover County for its beaches and warmer climate.

“We have this incredible knowledge and people who have scaled businesses and been leaders of companies to work with people with ideas that are getting started and I would call that one of our signature programs just because we can help so many different types of entrepreneurs along that journey,” McWhorter said.

In 2022, CIE served 236 entrepreneurs, who, in turn, created 50 jobs and raised $25 million.

Roughly 10% of those entrepreneurs were aiming for startups in the blue economy.

“I think it has grown and we want to continue to grow that. That’s really a huge opportunity for us a region, as a state,” McWhorter said.

CIE hosted last month an Ocean Innovation Conference, an on-campus event that sold out to an audience who listened to discussions from entrepreneurs, scientists and researchers about ocean-based innovation and technology, investment opportunities in those innovations, and ventures being undertaken to preserve ocean resources.

Wilmington last year ranked No. 2 worldwide among cities with populations between 100,000 and 300,000 by StartupBlink, a global startup ecosystem mapping and research center.

This region’s entrepreneurs are solving big problems, McWhorter said.

There’s OpiAID, a life science company that creates personalized plans for people in addiction treatment; SeaTox Research Inc., which was founded in 2013 by a UNCW clinical research professor and her husband, uses marine resources to develop natural products into new bio-actives and better methods to test for toxins that can contaminate commercial seafood; and Local Catch, an app that connects people and businesses within the commercial fishing industry to buy and sell local seafood.

“They’re solving the opioid crisis. They are taking on other sustainability issues, but what I would say is that everyone here loves the ocean and that’s why they came here,” McWhorter said.

So, she’s sparking in entrepreneurs the idea of solving problems related to the ocean and the opportunities associated with solving those problems “in a big way.”

“It’s not simply picking up plastic on the beach,” McWhorter said. “These problems are big and complicated and need to be thought of in a big way for big solutions. How can we get entrepreneurs, businesses, citizens, retirees, all of the above interested in this idea of problem solving related to the ocean and coastal resiliency of where we live. I know blue economy can be bigger because there are opportunities and it’s not about taking from the ocean, it’s about helping the ocean. It’s about problems like how we can work with this wonderful resource that we have, but also the business model has to be viable.”

CIE has a startup incubator that helps startups by providing workspace, mentoring and training, and seed money, and offers programs for entrepreneurs pursuing high-tech and science-based companies.

There’s a pitch coach to help entrepreneurs refine what they present their ideas to specific audiences, raise capital, or raise federal grant funding.

Every Wednesday, CIE offers a networking opportunity at 9 a.m. The center offers help with grant applications as well.

The region has what McWhorter said is a “gargantuan opportunity” to expand blue economic opportunities.

Wilmington’s geographic location to the ocean and intricate system of waterways, the strength of the university’s research base — UNCW’s Center for Marine Science has more than 120 researchers alone — and Cape Fear Community College’s workforce development puts it at an advantage to potentially become a leader in ocean innovation.

“There isn’t a blue economy hub between Boston and Miami and so if we could really start thinking about innovative approaches more here in Wilmington, perhaps that could be us,” McWhorter said. “We still have work to do. When you’re building an economy that takes time. We have volunteers that have really helped to guide thought around that, but I think at this point it is about continuing to get the right partners around the table that can help to spark this.”

A new discovery in one type of color-changing fish could be used to help artificial intelligence developers fine-tune how smart systems respond in a changing environment.

Research headed by University of North Carolina Wilmington assistant professor Lorian Schweikert has found that hogfish, popular among recreational fishermen for its mild, sweet meat, have a cell hidden underneath their skin that allows the fish to observe itself change color.

This is the first time a photoreceptor, or a cell that responds to light, has been found to exist in skin rather than in the central nervous system of a vertebrate animal, one that has a backbone and skeleton.

The study, published last month, found light sensors concealed behind a cell that researchers did not know existed until now.

This finding answers a long-standing question about why, at least for hogfish, light sensors are in the skin, said Schweikert, a sensory biologist.

“It’s also cool because it’s whimsical to think these animals are watching their own color change,” she said.

They’re able to do that thanks to the color-changing cells, which work like a Polaroid camera that lets the fish take a picture of itself to monitor itself changing color.

Schweikert said to think of yourself getting dressed in the morning without a mirror and without the ability to bend your neck. You would not be able to see whether you put on your clothes correctly.

Hogfish, named for their long, pig-like snouts, which they use to graze for crustaceans underneath the sand, are tasty to humans, sharks and barracuda alike, making their ability to camouflage paramount to their survival. These fish are typically found throughout the Caribbean and from North Carolina to Bermuda as well as the northern coast of South America.

“In the case of color-changing animals that frequently do this for camouflage to hide from predators it’s a life or death decision and they need a way of monitoring the quality of their performance,” Schweikert explained. “In physiology we call this a feedback system, sensory feedback. It’s a way of monitoring our own performance.”

This incredible feedback system could aid the ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence.

From robotic vacuum cleaners and self-driving cars to voice-activated systems like Amazon Echo or Apple’s Siri, smart systems use sensory feedback to understand their own performance.

“Basically, by looking at how systems like in the skin of these fish, how they’re organized, how they work, we can take those kinds of principles and develop our new solutions to that kind of technological problem,” Schweikert said.

This is all a result of a fishing trip she went on in the Florida Keys roughly seven years ago while a graduate student at the Florida Institute of Technology.

She caught a hogfish, and, after it died, she picked it up to find the side of the fish that had been facing the boat’s deck had taken on a white color and a bit of a pattern that matched the deck itself.

“There’s many color-changing animals in nature that do unbelievable displays of color change, but what surprised me was the fact that this color change happened post mortem in this animal and it made me think that the skin could do this maybe independently of the eyes and of the whole system,” Schweikert said.

By that time scientists knew that  virtually all animals that change their skin color to camouflage have light-detecting systems, or “visual systems.”

But no one understood why.

To be crystal clear, Schweikert said, she now knows that the color-change she witnessed on the boat several years ago was a response simply to the pressure or temperature of the boat deck.

“That experience gave me the idea to investigate skin further,” she said.

Through her postdoctoral years at Duke University and Florida International University she collected data, which she then shared once she was hired at UNCW with students she recruited to launch a research program to collect the data would answer her question of “why.”

Doctoral candidate Lydia Naughton, who, along with undergraduate Jacob Bolin co-authored the hogfish study with Schweikert, is further investigating the characteristics of the novel cells in those fish. Maureen Howard, an honors student, is studying light sensing systems in the skin of flounder.

The inaugural Ocean Innovation Conference scheduled for later this month will explore measures being taken to protect the ocean and advancements in ocean-based innovation and technology.

To be held 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Sept. 19 at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Burney Center, the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CIE, and the Alliance for the Blue Economy, or All Blue, are hosting the event.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines a blue economy as a “sustainable and equitable ocean and coastal economy that optimizes advances in science and technology to create value-added, data-driven economic opportunities and solutions to pressing societal needs.”

There will be three speakers and panel discussions on how to make the region an blue economy hub, use of robotics to study the ocean, sustainability, strategies to grow the region’s research capacity. Throughout the day, an Innovation Expo with up to 20 innovative companies and programs will showcase their work.

“By bringing together influential figures in the industry and the region, the CIE aspires to ignite a more collaborative process in developing new ideas and innovation in the blue economy and to create a vibrant blue economy hub in Southeast North Carolina,” CIE Director Heather McWhorter said in a statement.

Cost to attend is $99 and reservations can be made online. Contact cie@uncw.edu for information on the available scholarships for students and others.

Conference speakers include Wilmington native U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Laura M. Dickey, deputy for materiel readiness. Materiel is military materials and equipment. She will provide key insights about Coast Guard’s current activities and how future plans will impact coastal North Carolina.  

Marine biologist and author Wallace J. Nichols will discuss the “Blue Mind” movement, an emerging field of research, and health and wellness practice that explores the cognitive, emotional, psychological and social benefits of water. 

The luncheon keynote speaker is Jake Kheel, author of “Waking the Sleeping Giant: Unlocking the Hidden Power of Business to Save Our Planet” and vice president of the Grupo Puntacana Foundation in the Dominican Republic. Kheel, who is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, will share information about the Dominican Coral Innovation Hub and discuss the role of the private sector in marine conservation. 

Event sponsors are NC Idea, North Carolina Sea Grant, the City of Wilmington, UNCW Center for Marine Science, Blue Mind Coworking, Cape Fear Community College Small Business Center and the North Carolina Small Business and Technology Development Center at UNCW.  

Environmental advocate and educator Roger Shew takes viewers on an exploration of the natural wonders in the Wilmington area in his documentary, “Shew’s Natural Treasures: The Coastal Plain of Southeastern North Carolina.”

Shew, senior lecturer of geology at University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Department of Earth & Ocean Sciences, highlights in his film the natural landscapes in the region and explores the threats and challenges these environments face. 

The film will be screened at no charge from 4-6 p.m. April 30, followed by a Q&A period at the university’s Lumina Theater, 615 Hamilton Drive, Wilmington.

“For four years, our production team documented the coastal plain with Roger. He led us on a unique adventure as we experienced nature from his perspective,” said Jesse Bradley, director and co-producer. “The film is a collaboration of professionals, students, educators, and advocates connecting science, craft, and art with love of nature to tell its compelling story.” 

Shew is joined in the documentary by North Carolina Coastal Federation retired Coastal Scientist Tracy Skrabal, outdoor educator Charles Robbins, UNCW Professor Emeritus Dr. Paul Hosier, Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette, Carolina Beach State Park Superintendent Chris Helms, Southeast Chapter of The Nature Conservancy Program Director Deb Mauer, Waccamaw Siouan STEM Studio Program Director Ashley Lomboy, and Navassa Mayor Eulis Willis.

University of North Carolina Wilmington associate professor Dr. Narcisa Pricope has been appointed to a three-year term with the United Nations to advise the UN Convention to Combat Desertification Science-Policy Interface. 

Pricope, who teaches in the university’s Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Center for Marine Science, has researched land change science, water resources and climate change.

During the three-year appointment to the Science-Policy Interface, established at COP11 in 2013 to translate scientific findings and assessments into policy-relevant recommendations, Pricope will help UN policymakers make more informed and effective decisions for balancing the needs of the ecosystem with the needs of society.  

She will provide data analysis, projections and policy recommendations related to land degradation, or the reduction or loss of the productive potential of land. Desertification is a form of land degradation by which fertile land becomes desert. 

She has spent more than a decade researching drivers, causes and impacts of land degradation on three continents.  

“Addressing land degradation is essential to improve the livelihoods of those most affected and to build resilience to safeguard against the most extreme effects of climate change. The impacts on natural habitats–flora and fauna–and the human system can be equally detrimental,” Pricope said in a statement.

According to research co-authored by Pricope for the project Tools4LDN, more than 20% of the Earth’s vegetated surface is estimated to be degraded, affecting more than 1.3 billion people, with an economic impact of up to $10.6 trillion. Land degradation reduces agricultural productivity and increases the vulnerability of those areas already at risk of impacts from climate variability and change, university officials said.

Examples of land degradation can be seen in marshes where native plants are shifting to invasive reeds, in grasslands that are being replaced with unpalatable shrubs and in coastal regions where rising tides are causing erosion.

“We need to carefully balance how to manage, restore or conserve our ecosystems to ensure they continue to function in a manner that supports life and livelihoods equally, which is challenging yet doable, and that is what I’m hoping to contribute through my involvement in the UNCCD SPI,” Pricope said

Researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington will soon be able to study the coastline from the sky.

The university is going to be the first in the Southeast to own an unoccupied aerial system, or UAS, observatory to map coastal areas.

The UAS will allow researchers to study everything from coastal water quality to the morphology of barrier islands.

The system is being funded by a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Grant for more than $850,000, according to a university news release.

Narcisa Pricope, a professor of geography and lead principal investigator is one of five UNCW faculty to receive the grant.

Pricope, who is also director of the university’s Geospatial Intelligence Certificate Program, said in a statement that the UAS not only will allow researchers to study the coast in new ways, but give students an edge in using this type of technology in the workforce.

“This acquisition will enable continuation and development of new and diverse interdisciplinary applications of UAS-derived data and provide unparalleled opportunities for student training, professional development and community partnerships,” she said. “All of our research activities will include and train students, benefit our community and benefit the global science community. Empowering students with these high-demand skills will increase their competitiveness in coastal engineering, geography and environmental science job markets and expand representation in the rapidly growing UAS and geospatial employment fields.” 

UNCW’s UAS Coastal Observatory will advance several areas of study related to resilience and sustainability, including: flooding impacts on the environment and coastal infrastructure; barrier island morphology and evolution; coastal water quality; coastal vegetation and the impacts of saltwater intrusion and emergence of ghost forests; submerged aquatic vegetation and harmful algal blooms; wildlife habitat models; and archaeological and cultural resource identification.

Researchers in several university departments, including Earth and ocean sciences, environmental sciences, anthropology, biology and marine biology and coastal engineering, plan to use the observatory.

The observatory will be housed in the university’s Center for Marine Science’s MARBIONC lab and is expected to be fully operational by January 2023.

Information collected from the observatory will be available to the public through a UNCW-hosted dashboard.

A University of North Carolina Wilmington professor is part of a collaboration of researchers working on a project to drastically cut carbon dioxide emissions generated in the cement-making process.

Catharina Alves-de-Souza, director of UNCW’s Algal Resources Collection, has been awarded a $1 million grant to study how to most effectively grow microalgae that produces limestone, a main ingredient of cement.

If produced in mass quantities, biogenic limestone, or that which is created by lab-grown microorganisms, could be used in the place of a percentage of limestone mined to make cement.

“So instead of having cement that is 100% made by limestone that you find in nature, we’ll have 50%,” Alves-de-Souza said.

That may not sound like a lot, she said, “but actually it can make a lot of difference. We need to show that’s possible.”

University of Colorado Boulder Associate Professor Wil Srubar, head of the university’s Living Material Laboratory, in 2020 began exploring how to grow limestone particles using coccolithophores, one-celled marine microalgae that produce calcium carbonate.

“It is a carbon negative form of calcium carbonate, or limestone, and that has real implications for the cement and concrete industry in the United States,” Srubar said.

Portland cement, the most common type of cement used throughout the world, is made from quarried limestone burned at high temperatures, which releases large amounts of carbon dioxide.

This process is responsible for 7% of annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Most atmospheric CO2 dissolved in seawater is rapidly converted to bicarbonate. Coccolithophores use this bicarbonate to create limestone, which is a form of carbon capture.

Srubar’s team discovered that substituting lab-grown limestone in the place of natural limestone creates a net carbon neutral way to make portland cement.

Replacing traditional methods of cement manufacturing would curtail about 2 gigatons of CO2 emissions each year around the world, “simply by using this limestone that we grow instead of quarrying it out of the ground,” he said.

To make the trade out work, coccolithophores will have to be produced in mass quantities.

Based on their calculations, Srubar’s team believes about 1 to 2 million acres of open pond systems would be needed to grow enough microalgae-producing limestone to meet the demand for cement production, which is about 90 million tons annually, in the United States.

About 100 million acres of land is used to grow corn in the United States.

“What we found is we need just 1% of that to satisfy the demand of cement production in the United States,” Srubar said.

This is where Alves-de-Souza comes in. Her lab is equipped to grow biogenic limestone in large volumes.

Using the knowledge Srubar’s team has on microalgae’s biology, ecology and physiology, Alves-de-Souza is testing the best conditions to grow mass quantities of coccolithophores.

“We are going to grow them and we are going to expose them to the conditions that we want and we’re going to select the cells that are growing better under these conditions. It’s a lot of experiments,” she said.

How microalgae get bicarbonates from salt water to form calcium carbonate is a process that depends on a variety of things, including the pH, or measure of acidity or alkalinity, and nutrients in the water.

Timing is also key because coccolithophores grow quickly and, if used in cement manufacturing, will have to be harvested at just the right time.

Alves-de-Souza began producing the microalgae in small amounts in her lab last August, making small adjustments to find the right balance of nutrients, the right amount of pH, and timing.

“I have figured out a lot and that’s why we’ve used preliminary data for the project,” she said.

That helped researchers obtain a $3.2 million grant split between UNCW, CU Boulder and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

The microalgae will be grown in the lab at UNCW in a 100-liter bioreactor and a 1,000-liter bioreactor. Alves-de-Souza will send monthly shipments of the microalgae produced in her lab to her collaborators at CU Boulder, who will extract not only limestone, but other biomass from the microalgae, including proteins, lipids and carbohydrates.

During the three-year project, Alves-de-Souza expects to produce at least 5,000 gallons of coccolithophore cultures.

“Right now, we are working with one culture, one microalgae, but the idea is that we are going to isolate to get more of these cultures from nature and at some time we are going to use artificial selection to get better cultures, cultures that are doing more of what we want. They are calcifying more,” she said. “We still have a lot to do.”

In order to bridge the gap to commercialization, Srubar’s team last year founded Minus Materials Inc., a startup to attract corporate partnerships.

Srubar, a co-founder and acting CEO, said Minus recently completed a pilot-scale project with a local concrete company in Boulder and has plans in place to produce ton-scale quantities of biogenic limestone within the next 12 to 24 months.

“I think this is a really exciting time for our team and we’re looking forward to not only embarking on this project, but also seeing this through to commercialization,” he said.

There are no invisible barriers, no protective borders that stop contaminated water and air traveling from poorer, predominately Black communities to more affluent, largely white towns and neighborhoods.

What happens in communities of color, which are disproportionately affected by polluters that discharge chemicals into waterways, spray them on the ground or emit them through smokestacks into the air, should sound the alarm for what’s to come for the larger region, said La’Meshia Whittington, a professor in Meredith College’s division of sociology, deputy director for Advance Carolina and campaigns director for the North Carolina Black Alliance.

Whittington was among a handful of panelists who spoke Sunday during a forum hosted at the University of North Carolina Wilmington by the People of Scientific and Equitable Achievement, or P.O.S.E.A., a student-led initiative to support inclusion, diversity and equity in the sciences. The organization was formed last year by students Ashantee Pickett and Makayla Oneil and sponsored by UNCW’s Center for Marine Science and MarineQuest, a marine science outreach program.

The public event, hosted in person and online, tackled issues of environmental justice and water quality in an area where drinking water sources have been plagued by industrial discharges of chemical compounds known as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, hog lagoon and coal ash spills, and runoff from large animal feeding operations.

“You should be guaranteed affordable, safe water,” said Roger Shew, a geologist and earth and ocean sciences lecturer at UNCW. “It’s a fundamental, given right. The government has an obligation to protect our waters. Unfortunately, that’s not enough, as you know.”

Shew and other panelists discussed the history of how government, driven by economics, has worked on the side of industry as opposed to the people.

It’s a history, Whittington explained, of the institution of slavery, beginning with enslaved Africans forced to work plantations that phased into corporations that set up shop in predominately Black communities, paid low wages, and were allowed to discharge pollutants on the ground and into the waters and air within these communities.

Black communities that thrived were targeted, she said, through Jim Crow legislation.

Such is evidenced in places like Warren County, a rural, poor and largely Black county in the northeastern Piedmont region of the state, that, after its residents in 1982 protested the dumping of thousands of truckloads of soil contaminated with toxic PCBs within the county, gained national attention and became the birthplace of the environmental justice movement.

Just across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington sits another predominately Black community where, for decades, a thick, tar-like substance called creosote was stored in unlined ponds.

The former Kerr-McGee wood treatment plant, now a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site, is just one instance of industrial pollution within the 14-square-mile town of Navassa.

There are also brownfield sites within the town, which has a population of about 2,100 to 2,200 residents, about 70% of whom are Black, according Navassa Mayor Eulis Willis.

Willis said he watched creosote bubble up from Sturgeon Creek as a North Carolina Department of Transportation crew worked in 2002 to replace the bridge that connects the town to neighboring Leland.

He talked about Navassa’s history and the town’s ties to the Gullah Geechee, descendants of West Africans enslaved on rice and indigo plantations along the south Atlantic Coast.

The land on which the former creosote plant was located was a rice plantation.

“Right now, it’s about, I’d probably say, halfway through,” Willis said of the EPA’s process to remediate the Superfund site.

Further up the Cape Fear River from Navassa, rural, poor, largely nonwhite communities have been dealing with a different type of industry – concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

CAFOs are large-scale industrial agricultural facilities that raise animals for meat, eggs or milk.

Larry Cahoon, UNCW professor of biology and marine biology and advocacy committee chair of Cape Fear River Watch’s board of directors, shared the history of how these large animal feeding operations landed in disadvantaged communities.

It’s a story that goes back to the 1930s, when tobacco was the state’s golden crop and the federal government established allotments in an effort to raise the price of tobacco.

County-level boards got to determine which farmers received an allotment.

“Which tobacco farmers do you think got allotments and which tobacco farmers did not?” Cahoon asked the audience. “Black tobacco farmers, and there had been some, were shut out across the board, and so the opportunity to make a lot of money was systemically denied to Black farmers.”

In the mid-2000s, as tobacco was being phased out, the farmers who had government allotments were given dibs on the burgeoning swine industry in North Carolina, he said.

Black farmers, once again, were kept out of the most lucrative farming, Cahoon said.

“That’s systemic racism at work,” he said.

CAFOs are disproportionately in communities with higher percentages of people of color and low-income residents. These large animal feeding operations are known to pollute ground and surface water and reduce air quality.

More than two decades ago, Cahoon and a colleague were hired to lend their expertise to Waterkeeper Alliance, which filed a civil suit against pork giant Smithfield Foods.

The lawsuit ultimately resulted in what is referred to as the Smithfield Agreement, a 2000 settlement between the company and the state attorney general where Smithfield and its subsidiaries agreed to pay up to $2 million each year for 25 years.

The money is placed into an account and distributed through the state’s Environmental Enhancement Grant, or EEG, Program to projects designed to enhance the environment.

Last fall, Cahoon and UNCW research professor Michael Mallin received an EEG of more than $90,000 to study water quality of wet detention ponds.

“The waters of the state actually belong to the people of the state,” he said. “Not a private corporation. Not the government. The government is supposed to act as stewards of those resources. They were the ones who are supposed to make sure our waters are fishable, swimmable and drinkable, and when they’re not that means the government hasn’t done its job.”

He said that government should be accountable for ensuring industries keep their waste from intruding on the properties and in the bodies of private residents.

“The fights that we’re fighting here involve the use of other people’s properties and bodies for waste and disposal,” Cahoon said. “I think what we need to do is come back to the notion that you keep your stuff on your property and don’t let it come off.””

Sunday’s forum was the third hosted by P.O.S.E.A.

Sure it’s there, but are the algae blooms made up of teeny-tiny organisms clumped together on the water’s surface harmful?

Can it make people sick, kill oyster larvae or fish?

The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Algal Resources Collection, or ARC, which recently received a nearly $600,000 grant, aids researchers and scientists throughout the world in determining those answers.

What differentiates UNCW’s collection from other microalgae culture collections in the United States is its ever-expanding catalog of harmful microalgae cultures, explained research professor and ARC Director Catharina Alves-de Souza.

Alves-de Souza is responsible for organizing, updating and making the collection accessible to researchers around the globe.

Her work is a key piece of a larger puzzle in the study of microalgae species that cause harmful algal blooms.

“These cultures, the nice part about them is that we can use them to characterize the species,” Alves-de Souza said. “We can determine the identity of the species by using the DNA. We can determine whether they’re toxic or not and we can also, with the help of chemists, determine which toxins they produce. We can get a lot of information that does help to understand what the other scientists are getting from the field samples.”

The three-year, $581,765 grant from the National Science Foundation she was recently awarded will cover the cost of a new machine that will expedite the identification process of microalgae species.

Using an instrument based on imaging flow cytometry, the machine is basically an automated microscope equipped with a high-speed camera that can be trained with artificial intelligence to identify various microalgae species — think technology similar to that used in facial recognition.

“These machines allow us to look for a lot of samples from blooms in a short period of time to determine which species are present in the samples,” Alves-de Souza said. “This also allows us to check for contaminants in the culture. That’s going to be very important because then we are going to make this information available and all the researchers, not only in the United States, but also institutions in other countries, will be able to use this same information, and use the same protocols.”

Money from the grant will also be used to store some microalgae cultures through cryopreservation, a freezing process that extends the shelf-life of an organism by years. This method of storage doesn’t work on all microalgae species, but it will shave some time that has to be dedicated each month to transfer cultures to new flasks to keep them growing and readily available for purchase.

This is the second grant, the first was awarded in 2018, Alves-de Souza has received since she was hired by the university in December 2016.

The microalgae species collection her predecessor built over the course of more than 20 years needed to be organized, expanded and publicized as a public resource on a website in serious need of an update. That first grant covered those goals.

At the same time, Alves-de Souza began to contribute a much-needed addition to the collection.

“In the beginning the collection had only marine species,” she said. “The freshwater bacteria is actually one of the main problems here in North Carolina.”

Alves-de Souza is using the cultures to gain an understanding of the ecology of these toxic microalgae and how environmental conditions determine the formation of harmful algae blooms. That information, she said, will help researchers like her learn how to mitigate these toxins.

Take microcystin, for example. This algal toxin is listed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a potent liver toxin and possible human carcinogen and it has been found in different freshwater systems in the state. In her research, Alves-de Souza found microalgae producing toxins that were not previously found in North Carolina, including microalgae that produce paralytic toxins.

Alves-de Souza stressed that she hasn’t found the species in high cell concentrations in the environment, “but it’s important that we know that they are there and that we understand their ecology so we can predict if the environmental conditions change, if you are going to have blooms of these particular species in the future. It’s not a problem now, but we know that the species is there so it’s important to know what species we have there so that we can be prepared.”

She is collaborating with Nathan Hall, a research assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences, to investigate the effects of harmful algae on oyster larvae.

Raphidophytes is a class of algae that has been shown “to do nasty things” to Japanese pearl oysters, but no one has studied whether this species impacts eastern oyster larvae, Hall said.

“Catharina has one of the best collections of raphidophytes in the world,” he said. “She gave me lots of different strains of cultures that I can test against and see if they do anything to kill eastern oyster larvae. That project’s still ongoing.”

Hall refers to himself as a phytoplankton ecologist, one trying to unlock the mysteries of these microscopic organisms that form the base of the food chain in the ocean.

“There’s hundreds of species of phytoplankton out there in the water,” he said. “What makes certain ones do well in certain areas at certain times of the year is a question I think a lot of phytoplankton ecologists have and it’s an important question sometimes, especially when one of those species does well as toxic, for example. To do that, first you have to know what species are there. And, in some cases, you really have to be able to culture it to tell what’s even there. That’s one of the things Catharina’s collection is doing.”

From red tide in Florida to paralytic shellfish poisoning blooms in waters north, “bad” algae are around us here in North Carolina.

“Even though we think it’s the same species just because it looks like the species, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s producing the same toxin or any toxin at all,” Hall said. “Having the cultures of that species already in a library somewhere, if all of a sudden we started having a problem with one of these algae that are harmful somewhere else, we could go then to that library collection and see whether if ours produces the same toxin. It’s just a matter of keeping an eye (on it) and so having those cultures already there could be really useful.”

Submitted by UNCW Media Relations

When Rita and Tom McCabe started collecting shells, fossils and treasures like megalodon teeth during leisurely walks along the shoreline of West Onslow Beach in the 1970s, they gradually found a variety of larger bones that they kept stored in their garage for years. 

When Rita was ready to part with some of their collection, the McCabes called the University of North Carolina Wilmington Department of Biology and Marine Biology to see if it would be interested in a donation. 

“They drove a small Chevy S10 pickup truck to campus, and they had bones hanging out all over the place,” recalled Dr. David Webster 1976, senior associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences and UNCW professor of 39 years.  

Little did they know, the McCabes had found the bones of a North Atlantic gray whale, a marine mammal species that has been extinct for at least 300 years. 

“At first, we thought they were bones from a humpback whale, but as I looked closer and as the UNCW Marine Mammal Stranding Program grew under the leadership of Dr. Ann Pabst and Mr. William McLellan, we discovered what a rare specimen we had,” Webster said. “At that point, we grew very excited because there was very little scientific information on the North Atlantic gray whale population because it was no longer here.”

A visit from Dr. Nicholas Pyenson, fossil marine mammal curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, confirmed that the skeleton was a North Atlantic gray whale and a valuable scientific specimen. 

Housed in Friday Hall for decades, along with 30,000 other specimens currently on display, the skeleton is the world’s most complete specimen of a North Atlantic gray whale, made up of 42 bones including the jawbones, cranial bones, vertebrae, ribs, scapulae and upper and lower arm bones.  

UNCW recently gifted the skeleton to the Smithsonian Museum where it will be permanently displayed in the National Museum of Natural History, and its origins will be recorded in the National Archives.

UNCW researchers – both staff and students – have performed years of forensic science on the whale specimen under Webster’s leadership.

Faculty member Dr. Alyson Fleming coordinated the documentation of the skeleton along with Courtney Johnson, associate professor of art and art history, who photographed all individual and collective elements of the juvenile specimen. Additionally, students like Savannah Maynor, class of 2021, helped measure and document the elements and conducted literature and background research over multiple semesters.  

UNCW researchers discovered through radiocarbon tests that the bones are hundreds of years old and probably washed ashore after the young whale died of natural causes during a migration period. They theorize that the carcass floated into the New River Inlet and ended up in the nearby salt marshes. Some of the bones have root stains that are traced back to the salt marsh grasses, while other bones have cut marks on them.  

Dr. David La Vere, a professor in the department of history, provided information on culture in the southeast region at the time. He thinks the cut marks are most likely from Native Americans who fished and hunted along the coast who found the whale and butchered the carcass.

A team of Smithsonian curatorial staff traveled to UNCW in November and took two days to carefully pack up the bones, transport them back to the nation’s capital and place them securely into their new home in the paleobiology collection at the museum.  

In  “A Gray Whale Makes its Way to the Smithsonian,” an article featured on the Smithsonian Ocean website which documents the transfer, author Alia Payne wrote, “…the skull alone took four people and a rolling cart to carry in.” 

Scientists worldwide will now be able to dive deeper into research about this marine mammal and why it became extinct.  

“We are being good stewards of representing science the way science is supposed to be by giving this specimen to the museum,” said Webster. “The UNCW name will always be affiliated with that specimen because our specimen number is written in indelible ink on every bone.” 

Rita and Tom McCabe are no longer living, but Webster said he thought that they would be happy to know their beach walk treasures are now preserved in “the best collection in the United States” and could lead to new discoveries. 

“I’m sure they are just tickled pink,” he said. “They are probably saying, ‘Can you believe it? We made it big time’.” 

ST. JAMES — Years ago, the phrase “living shoreline” wasn’t well known in North Carolina outside of, say, the circles of coastal scientists and researchers.

“I don’t recall that at the time we used the term ‘living shoreline’ as much as we do today,” chuckled Taylor Ryan of St. James in Brunswick County. He’s project leader and founder of the community group, The Royal Order of the Honorary St. James Oysters.

When Ryan went to the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, to ask how his town could reduce erosion along its waterfront park, he had no idea his request would result in a burgeoning, 16-years-and-counting relationship forged by a passion for education, research and resiliency.

The small, relatively young town of St. James in Brunswick County in August created an endowment fund at the university with a gift of $25,000 to support students’ work and research at the town’s living shoreline, officials announced last month.

UNCW has more than 2,000 funds that support an array of programs, but the St. James endowment is special because it was set up by the town.

“This is unique in that the town actually created the endowment fund,” said Lindsay Crighton, director of development of UNCW’s Division for University Advancement. “This is unique because it is pairing a town and the university in looking at coastal resiliency and looking at how a coastal university can partner with a coastal community and have such an impact in the region.”

It all started in the mid-2000s when Ryan attended a seminar about oysters — specifically, the value of an oyster.

A single oyster can clean between 40 to 50 gallons of water a day, Ryan learned. Their shells can be incorporated into a living shoreline, one that is built of natural materials to stabilize and protected a shore.

Such a project sounded like the right fit for the shoreline along St. James’ Waterway Park nestled along the Intracoastal Waterway.

Ryan went to St. James’ then-Mayor Shelley Lesher to ask for $5,000 to kickstart a living shoreline project at Waterway Park. Her answer was an immediate “yes.”

Fast forward through the permitting process, which was not a simple one, to the first build, one where UNCW students and their professors, Coastal Federation officials and 94 St. James residents worked together.

Since that first build, 9,000 bushels of shells have been placed along the shoreline and more than 27,000 plugs of Spartina grass have been planted, according to St. James Mayor Jean Toner.

The town’s website states that some 540 feet of shoreline has been restored and stabilized with plans to do another 2,360 feet.

“Every year, twice a year, we have students and staff join with our residents to work along our intracoastal shoreline to build up the oyster reefs,” Toner said. “It’s been an excellent project. We’ve learned a great deal from the staff and students. We’ve really enjoyed the partnership we have with them. This program, in particular, I’ve just never seen this much dedication.”

Their enthusiasm ultimately led to a natural collaboration between the town and university, one that reaches beyond the confines of St. James’ boundaries and affords college students a treasure trove of research opportunities.

Over the past year and a half, the university has been hosting presentations open to residents in the region.

Those presentations have included conversations about coastal habitats and the dynamics of living shoreline erosion, issues that are of general interest to the broader community.

“When we’re doing a build it’s not just a build, it’s also an outreach and education,” said Martin Posey, a professor and director of UNCW’s Center for Marine Science.

The benefits of the project have become multifaceted.

“That’s one of the great aspects of having this long-term study where we’ve been able to see over the 15 years how has it done as we are beginning to get more storm effects and sea level rise,” Posey said. “And, the endowment sort of solidifies this research can continue another 10 or 15 years. We’re not going to be here forever, but the endowment will help ensure that work continues and we’re able to continue to see how do these systems respond in the long term when they’re faced with these pressures of climate change.”

Posey and Troy Alphin, senior research associate at the center’s Benthic Ecology Laboratory, have been involved in St. James’ living shoreline from the get-go.

The town’s support has afforded a great opportunity for dozens and dozens of students, both graduate and undergraduate, they said.

“The classroom is good. The classroom tells you the facts and the figures and the labs give you some controlled approach. But, to actually get out there and do the research, to see how things don’t always work out the way you want them to work out, to see the fact that results can be fuzzy and you have to sort of figure out what’s happening, to learn the art of science is something that is absolutely critical that has to be done hands-on,” Posey said.

Kenneth Halanych, who took the helm in June as the UNCW center’s executive director, said the relationship between the town and the university has an even broader outreach.

“Engaging both the community and the young researches in science really helps build the trust in science from the community perspective,” Halanych said.

“One of the things we’ve had a huge problem with in this country, especially in the last little bit, is the trust in science and the trust in expertise has been greatly eroded. So, this is a chance for scientists to go and interact with the community, to interact with young researchers or young individuals and say, look, the science is critical in your everyday life,” he said. “This sort of activity I actually think is really important for helping people understand the importance of science and the scientific process. These types of partnerships between communities and universities and the involvement with students is critical for building a productive future.”

The St. James endowment will provide funds to continue the partnership at the university and support students’ work in the town.

“Our hope is eventually that other people in Brunswick County, people that are interested in coastal resiliency and marine biology and applied learning at UNCW that they will be interested in supporting this fund as well because we want other towns, communities, etcetera to look at this opportunity and think well maybe we could do this as well,” Crighton said. “As more support comes in we’re going to be able to do more work, not only in the town of St. James, but also in Brunswick County and expand the ability to have more applied learning opportunities for our students at UNCW, which is a big thing.”

University of North Carolina Wilmington and the Coastal Land Trust are among the more than two dozen recipients of this year’s Environmental Enhancement Grants from the North Carolina Department of Justice.

UNCW faculty members Michael Mallin and Lawrence Cahoon were awarded $92,192 to study the water safety of wet detention ponds, Attorney General Josh Stein announced Thursday during a visit to UNCW’s Center for Marine Science.

The grants, given annually, are to preserve and enhance the environment. Across the state this year, nearly $3 million in grants will be awarded to 27 recipients. Since the program began in 2002, almost $34 million has been awarded to more than 150 projects, the Department of Justice website states.

“Your work to study these issues along North Carolina’s beautiful but at-risk coast is critically important,” Stein said during his visit Thursday, according to a news release from the university.

“At this center, researchers and educators are fighting the threats of climate change on two fronts: you’re conducting research that will help us address some of the problems, and you’re educating and training the next generation of experts who will continue and grow that work,” he continued.

Mallin and Cahoon, faculty in the Department of Biology and Marine Biology, are tp sample pond water for algal blooms and toxins, fecal bacteria and other water quality measures, and sample sediments for toxic chemicals, heavy metals, nitrogen and phosphorus.

Mallin said ponds are ubiquitous throughout the urban and suburban landscape, and they receive polluted stormwater runoff from all kinds of land uses.

“Such stormwater treatment systems are everywhere in the urban and suburban landscape and easily accessible to adults, children and pets, and no comprehensive analysis of their potential biological and chemical dangers has been accomplished,” he said. “The data should be valuable throughout the North Carolina coast and elsewhere in the state and out of state.” 

The researchers’ data will be statistically compared with pond physical characteristics and drainage area factors to see what physical and land-use factors most impact pollutant loads, said Mallin. The research will take place in New Hanover County, primarily in the summers of 2022 and 2023. Using the collected data, researchers can then determine which ponds are most unsafe and why.
 
“We will work with and inform our long-term collaborators in the City of Wilmington Stormwater Services and their public outreach program,” Mallin added.

Mallin’s laboratory is based in UNCW’s Center for Marine Science. CMS has been associated with local water quality analyses and issues for the past 25 years. 

“CMS-affiliated faculty and students work around the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the deep sea to the Appalachians,” said Chancellor Jose V. Sartarelli, in a statement. “The center has garnered more than $25 million in external funding to address local, state, national and global issues across biological, chemical, physical, health and engineering disciplines.”  

Water is a critical aspect of our environment that is often overlooked, said Ken Halanych, executive director of UNCW’s Center for Marine Science.  

“This research allows us to use and enjoy resources, such as local ponds and waterways, more fully,” he said. “The grant represents a key partnership between the state and CMS researchers to assess and maintain safe ecosystems to the betterment of our community.” 

Coastal Land Trust to get $50,000

The North Carolina Coastal Land Trust is another recipient of the grant. The Land Trust will receive $50,000 for the Hoggard’s Millpond Conservation Project, which will help the trust acquire 348 acres of Hoggard’s Millpond Tract and transfer it to the town of Windsor to create a new public park, Stein said in a release.

“Public parks make our communities stronger and happier,” said Stein. “I’m pleased to distribute these funds to help the town of Windsor create a new public park that the community can enjoy for decades to come.”

“Coastal Land Trust is ever appreciative of this recently approved EEG grant for our Hoggard’s Millpond Conservation Project which represents a unique community conservation partnership to protect a site with significant wildlife, historic, water quality, and recreational resources,” said Janice Allen, director of land protection, in a statement. “Our primary partner, the Town of Windsor, is one step closer to having a new nature/historic park for its residents, and visitors, to enjoy.”

The Coastal Land Trust will also receive $50,000 for the Cape Fear River Conservation Partnership to acquire a 272-acre parcel along Cape Fear River. The land will be transferred to the state of North Carolina to be managed by the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission as either game lands or a state conservation area.

“Conserving this area along the Cape Fear River will allow generations of North Carolinians to enjoy it in the future,” Stein said, adding that he is glad that this grant will help preserve North Carolina’s environment.

“The recently approved EEG grant for the Coastal Land Trust’s Cape Fear River Conservation Partnership will greatly assist us with our efforts to acquire an additional 272-acres of land along this iconic river,” Allen said. “The Cape Fear River property is a special place on our coast with old growth cypress-tupelo swamp forest important to rare fish and wildlife including the federally threatened Wood Stork and state significantly rare Swallow-tailed Kite.”

Statewide winners

• Pembroke will receive $62,000 to create a stormwater utility program with community input meetings, a management plan, an operations and maintenance plan and stormwater ordinances.
• The Winyah Rivers Alliance will receive $172,420 to create a water-quality monitoring program in the Lumber River Watershed that will be supported by the local community and the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
• North Carolina A&T State University will receive $133,000 to research how dissolved organic nutrition from landfills impacts the environment in eastern North Carolina water bodies and determine effective treatment strategies.
• Wake Forest University will receive $250,000 to develop a low-cost lake water quality monitoring system using drones and satellite data in conjunction with North Carolina Central and North Carolina A&T State Universities.
• The Southwest Renewal Foundation of High Point will receive $87,000 to help fund the creation of 2.15 acres of a public botanic garden at the headwaters of Richland Watershed in High Point.
• RiverLink will receive $150,000 for the Southside Community Stormwater Project. The project will fund a restored wetland and measures to capture and filter polluted stormwater runoff and prevent flooding at the Erskine Apartments, a historically Black neighborhood in Asheville.
• The Foothills Conservancy of North Carolina will receive $100,000 to help acquire 2,681 acres on Pinnacle Mountain, including areas with public access to a 12-mile segment of North Carolina State Parks’ Wilderness Gateway State Trail.
• The Blue Ridge Resource Conservation and Development Council will receive $100,000 to restore and repair a stream bank along Bledsoe Creek and prevent further sedimentation and erosion.

University of North Carolina Wilmington alumnus Joe Oliver and his colleagues at the Bahamas-based Coral Vita have won a prestigious award for their work restoring coral reefs. The prize, along with global recognition, comes with about $1.3 million.

The Earthshot Prize is an award given by the Royal Fund of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to initiatives that are doing important environmental work. Every year for the next 10 years there will be five, $1.3 million prizes awarded, providing at least 50 solutions to the world’s greatest environmental problems by 2030, according to the Earthshot Prize website.

Coral Vita, the Revive Our Oceans winner, and four other winners were announced Oct. 17 in London. The five are the first-ever winners of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize.

Oliver was born in Wilmington, and said that marine biology called to him from an early age. He grew up playing in the water — always fishing, boogie boarding, and the like. As a preteen, he participated in UNCW’s MarineQuest program, a youth outreach initiative that provides young people with the chance to explore and become immersed in the marine environment. This experience solidified his track.

“I’m actually proof that a proper outreach education program works,” Oliver said.

Oliver graduated from UNCW in 2006 with a degree in marine biology, and went on to become an instructor for the MarineQuest program. A particular interest in coral reefs and a connection through a friend is what led him to Coral Vita, a company dedicated to regrowing the world’s dying coral reefs. He accepted a job as director of restoration operations, relocated to the Bahamas and got to work.

“I couldn’t let the opportunity to run this type of facility pass me by,” Oliver said.

Coral reefs are made from colonies of coral polyps that are fixed together by something called calcium carbonate, the hard material that gives reefs their structure. As a whole, coral reefs encapsulate an entire underwater ecosystem, and are critical to the health of the ocean. It is estimated that as much as 25% of the ocean’s species depend on coral reefs during at least some portion of their life cycle. This makes coral reefs one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, not just in the ocean.

But factors such as ocean warming, ocean acidification, overfishing and pollution pose imminent threats to the health of coral reefs. According to the Coral Vita website, these factors have contributed to the loss of 50% of the world’s reefs within the last few decades. Without intervention, that number will rise to more than 90% by 2050.

Enter Coral Vita. Oliver and his teammates work with aquaculture farms to regrow coral. One of the main practices they use is called micro-fragmentation. They can take a broken piece of coral and break it into smaller pieces consisting of just a few polyps apiece. They begin growing the coral fragments individually in aquaculture raceways. Then, they integrate them into plates where they can grow back together cohesively. Normally, coral grows very slowly. But the separation that occurs during micro-fragmentation stimulates growth for the coral. In this environment, they can speed up a process that normally takes much longer.

“What would take 100 years, we can hopefully do in 10,” Oliver said. “Maybe even less.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Coral Vita (@coralvitareefs)

Some corals of different species do not grow harmoniously together and will try to outcompete each other for resources. But as long as the coral is of the same species, they’ll grow back together happily. Oliver and his team are also experimenting to find out what combinations of species can grow together without conflict.

And then they can transplant the cultivated coral back to the ocean. They use ocean-friendly concrete to make the transplant, but are experimenting with other methods of securing the farmed coral in place to make sure the impact to the ocean environment is minimal.

An important part of this process, said Oliver, is to increase the adaptability of the coral before they put it back in the ocean. Using special treatments at their aquaculture facility, they can get the farmed coral used to harsher conditions than coral can normally handle. Once they are back in the ocean, the idea is that they won’t be as prone to succumbing to the hazards that currently kill coral.

Currently, Coral Vita’s success rate is high — a 50 to 70% survival rate for transplanted coral. They aim to get it even higher.

The monetary prize will go to continuing Coral Vita’s work and expanding outreach, said Oliver. The win was important for Coral Vita, but ultimately extends beyond them as well.

“We didn’t win it just for us, we won it for everybody that does coral restoration,” Oliver said. “And for me, what I hope to be (a) secondary benefit in the future, is that more people will be paying attention to these problems and looking at how to be a part of the solution.”

The other organizations to win the 2021 Earthshot prize were:

• Build a Waste-Free World Winner: Milan, Italy. The city came up with an initiative that redistributes food that would have been discarded to those who need it, thereby reducing waste and feeding the hungry.
• Clean Our Air Winner: Vidyut Mohan of India. Takachar is a technology that converts polluting agricultural outputs into usable biofuel and fertilizer that can ultimately be resold.
• Fix Our Climate Winner: Enapter Project. This technology converts renewable electricity into hydrogen gas that is free of emissions.
• Protect and Restore Nature Winner: Costa Rica. This nation developed a policy that pays citizens to plant trees in an effort to preserve the rainforest.

The Alliance for the Blue Economy, a multidisciplinary initiative launched Tuesday by the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is to establish southeastern North Carolina as a national and global leader in the blue economy.

Blue economy is “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs, while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem,” according to The World Bank.

The blue economy delivered in the United States nearly $400 billion to the Gross domestic product, or GDP, in 2019, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The Alliance for the Blue Economy, also known as All Blue, will support blue economy entrepreneurs and innovators, promote the region as a blue economy innovation hub, assist in the creation of blue economy-ready infrastructure and attract blue economy investment capital, according to the university.

The alliance plans to work on being awarded federal, state and regional grants with government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations and private sector partners.

“The collaboration between All Blue and the CIE (Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship) offers UNCW and the region a significant opportunity to leverage resources to attract, support and sustain Blue Economy businesses,” Stuart Borrett, associate provost for Research and Innovation, said in a statement.

In addition to region being home to UNCW, which has more than 100 faculty engaged in marine sciences and ocean/coastal preservation, Cape Fear Community College and the Port of Wilmington, the southeastern region is positioned to become a viable blue economy leader because of its extensive coastline and river estuary, its coastal access to open water and its growing reputation as a leader in technology-focused businesses that employ highly skilled workers, university officials said.

Advisory board of science and business leaders from the region and UNCW are leading All Blue that will focus on five strategic sectors: sustainable aquaculture and fisheries; marine biopharma; regenerative tourism; coastal resilience; and ocean engineering and marine robotics.

The launch Tuesday is the culmination of 18 months of planning, research and strategy development with more than 180 local business, science and academic leaders involved as volunteers and consultants. All Blue was initiated by former CIE Director Diane Durance, who remains a consultant.

“The United Nations’ declaration of 2021-2030 as the Decade of the Ocean has put a global spotlight on the critical challenges facing marine and coastal environments,” said Durance. “Federal and state support for programs and infrastructure to promote innovation and new ventures in the Blue Economy has never been stronger. This is a pivotal moment – and one we want to capture for North Carolina.”

With the launch of the Alliance, southeastern North Carolina will join the ranks of a growing number of Blue Economy hubs in the U.S. and internationally, including Boston, San Diego, Seattle and Gulfport, Mississippi. In fact, the hub in North Carolina will be the only one on the East Coast between Boston and Florida.

The Alliance for the Blue Economy will make its local debut during “All Blue Week” Nov. 1-6.

More than a dozen events are planned around Wilmington, on the university’s main campus and UNCW’s Center for Marine Science. These events will include an opening keynote address by Deborah Westphal, author of the new book “Convergence,” a blue economy hackathon co-sponsored with Cape Fear Collective, and recreational opportunities such as boat tours from the Blockade Runner resort.

More information, including details on sector leadership and initiatives, can be found at All Blue’s website and Facebook page.

UNCW’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship works to identify and nurture high-growth, high-impact companies and to accelerate the entrepreneurial ecosystem in southeastern North Carolina.

University of North Carolina Wilmington Chancellor Jose V. Sartarelli announced last week his plan to retire June 30, 2022.

UNCW officials said that during Sartarelli’s tenure, the university and community worked together to overcome significant challenges in the aftermath of hurricanes Florence and Dorian, navigate the campus impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and to focus more fully on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion.

For the past three years, UNCW has been one of three UNC System institutions ranked among the “Top 100 Public National Universities,” according to U.S. News & World Report.

“The success that our students, faculty, staff and alumni have achieved in recent years has been nothing short of outstanding,” Sartarelli said in a statement. “I am immensely proud to have served UNCW during such a pivotal time in history, and I want to thank the Seahawk community for making this great university so special. Leaving UNCW and the City of Wilmington will not be easy for my wife Kathy and me, but we are looking forward to a new adventure.”

Sartarelli took office at UNCW July 1, 2015, after serving West Virginia University as chief global officer and Milan Puskar Dean of the College of Business and Economics. Before transitioning to education, he spent three decades in international marketing and management with Eli Lilly and Co., Bristol Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson. 

“Chancellor Sartarelli has taken UNC Wilmington to new heights, leading with ambition all while handling serious challenges posed by hurricanes and the pandemic,” said UNC System President Peter Hans. “UNCW has increased its student population by nearly 40 percent in the past decade under the Chancellor’s direction, providing quality educational opportunities to more North Carolinians and expanding campus facilities to meet that growth. I’m so grateful for his steady and visionary leadership, and I know all Seahawks join me in thanking him for his service to UNCW and the state.”

Sartarelli said that announcing now will give the UNCW Board of Trustees, Hans and the UNC System Board of Governors nine months to conduct a national search for the next chancellor.

A native of Brazil, Sartarelli earned his bachelor’s from the São Paulo School of Business Administration in São Paulo, Brazil. He then attended Michigan State University as a Fulbright Scholar, earning a master’s in marketing and his doctorate in business administration.

“What an exciting experience this has been for me and my wife Kathy, and my service to UNCW isn’t finished yet,” Sartarelli said, reflecting on his tenure thus far. “There’s more to be done this year, and I am eager to be a part of helping our great university continue to focus on achieving excellence in everything we do. Go Seahawks!” 

The University of North Carolina Wilmington has named Kenneth M. Halanych executive director of the UNCW Center for Marine Science.

University officials announced the selection Thursday. Halanych’s appointment is effective Oct. 1. 

As the leader and chief advocate for UNCW’s coastal and marine sciences, Halanych is charged with oversight of the programs and facilities housed in the center, including MARBIONC marine biotechnology program, the Shellfish Research Hatchery and Finfish Mariculture Program. He is to report to Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs James J. Winebrake, officials said. 

“Dr. Halanych is an outstanding marine scientist who will bring significant field experience and grants administration expertise to the Center for Marine Science,” Winebrake said. “I am confident he will successfully lead the center to greater prominence and distinction both nationally and globally.” 

Halanych joins UNCW from Auburn University, where he is the Stewart Schneller Endowed Chair and Alumni Professor of Biology. He also serves as the curator of invertebrates at the AU Museum of Natural History. Prior to joining AU, he worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts. 

“UNCW’s Center for Marine Science continues to grow, filling an important role between understanding marine and coastal systems and societal needs,” Halanych said. “The faculty, staff and students have a well-known reputation for high-quality research and technology initiatives. I am excited to work with them, and other stakeholders, to develop the regional, national and international profile of CMS.” 

Halanych has earned international recognition for his research on marine invertebrate evolution and genomics. In September 2020, he participated in his 21st major scientific cruise by leading a group of 20 scientists on a 14-week voyage to investigate the biogeography and adaptation of invertebrate animals in Antarctic waters. He has helped secure approximately $10 million in extramural funding and authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

His work has been featured in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Current Biology, and he provided interviews for The Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair and NPR, among others. He also served on the research board of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative that awarded $500 million in funding in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He is the current editor-in-chief of Biological Bulletin. 

Halanych has served on several National Science Foundation panels, was a visiting professor at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a visiting instructor at the Friday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington. In 2018, he was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He holds a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin and an undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University, where he was honored as the 2002 Distinguished Alumni Lecturer.

Beneath the clear, turquoise waters off the shores of Carrie Bow Cay, Belize, sponges and seaweed have taken up residence where coral once flourished.

The sponges that cover reef there — part of the Meso-American Barrier Reef — pump massive amounts of seawater, are a food source for various reef fish, and, as one doctorate student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington has discovered, certain species of sponge absorb toxic chemical compounds.

Lauren Olinger has spent more than two years researching several species of the most common sponges in the Caribbean that now thrive on the reef.

What she has discovered is that sponges with an abundance of microbes, or tiny living things too small to be seen by the unaided eye, “take up” significant amounts of compounds versus sponges that have a low abundance of microbes.

“From the compounds that these species were taking up, a lot of them were organohalides, so that means that they had halogen in them,” Olinger said in a recent telephone interview. “It’s interesting that an animal could use something that’s halogenated. These compounds can be really toxic. They can also include contaminants so there’s some interesting consequences there and it might tell us something about what these compounds are being used for.”

Organohalides include the elements chlorine and bromine, which are toxic in humans. They include many toxic pollutants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, insecticides, and industrial byproducts.

UNCW professor Joseph Pawlik said Olinger’s research demonstrates, for the first time, that sponges can eat organic compounds that have halogens in them.

“These are classes of compounds that include many toxic pesticides and industrial solvents,” he said. “We’re not saying that it’s taking those up. We’re just saying that we know they’re taking up organohalides. We can identify the molecules well enough. We don’t necessarily have absolute identification of the compounds and that’s a matter of the technique that’s being used to identify compounds that are found in very, very small concentrations. The next stage of Lauren’s work is to actually identify some of those compounds.”

Sponges are actually known for consuming dissolved organic carbon, an unusual food source for animals. But dissolved organic carbon, or DOC, can be up to 90% of what a sponge eats, Olinger said.

Olinger and her colleagues dived and collected seawater going into and coming out of sponges along a reef system off the small island on which the Smithsonian Institute’s Carrie Bow Cay Field Station is located, about 15 miles offshore.

Those samples were taken to the field office and prepared for analysis back at UNCW, where dissolved organic matter, or DOM, included in those samples were analyzed.

Olinger’s research is being published in Frontiers in Marine Science.

A hypothesis referred to as the “sponge loop” suggests that sponges benefit coral reefs by taking up DOM and converting it into their own bodies.

“If sponges are converting this carbon into something that other animals could use then this could be simulating the reef because, on coral reefs, they’re really desert-like,” Olinger said. “There’s not a lot of nutrients there.”

Yet, the ever-growing presence of sponges on reefs, including the coral reefs of the Florida Keys, are not necessarily a good sign.

“What we’ve seen over the course of the last several decades is that reefs are being taken over more and more by sponges in addition to seaweeds and the one species that seems to be doing particularly well that grows very large is the giant barrel sponge, which gets to the size of small car,” Pawlik said. “The positive thing about sponges, unlike seaweeds, they do provide critical habitat for fish, lobster and all the other things that human beings like to eat. But, they don’t build calcium carbonate reefs. So, over long periods of time reefs are going to disappear. Sponges cannot persist in storms, in hurricanes the way coral reefs can. It’s just not as strong. That’s why sponges are a poor substitute in the end.”

If sponges are allowed to thrive in these environments, Olinger said, that will make it harder for corals to recover or come back in and grow.

Sponges simply cannot replace coral, but their importance to the sea is undeniable.

“If we find that a certain species of sponge does something important to seawater or has a change in the seawater or eats something out of the seawater, that’s really important,” Olinger said. “If there’s a contaminate there could be applications for using that sponge as a bioremediation. That’s super out-there, but it’s an idea. Otherwise, there’s a whole level of things that eat sponges and that if we know if sponges are doing something good for the environment like recycling carbon, then we could make a stronger case for protecting the fish that eat them so that we can maintain a more healthy environment.”

A new project at University of North Carolina Wilmington has been installed to reduce polluted stormwater runoff from entering city waterways.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation partnered with engineering firm Coastal Stormwater Services Inc., Flora Landscapes, UNCW and Wilmington’s Heal Our Waterways program to design and build a rain garden, a shallow depression with native plants, on campus to absorb rain before it can become polluted runoff, the federation announced Wednesday.

“Rain gardens, like the one on UNCW’s campus, are a great way to utilize the land to reduce runoff and create an attractive landscape feature,” said Lauren Kolodij, deputy director with the federation.

The rain garden installed on Suite Services Loop will reduce polluted runoff on campus by about 1 million gallons annually, according to the federation.

“UNCW is the largest land owner in the Bradley Creek watershed. We are pleased to have this rain garden and other stormwater reduction projects on campus to not only reduce runoff but to be able to showcase these techniques as a learning tool,” said Kat Pohlman, UNCW’s chief sustainability officer.

Bradley Creek, which drains an area of 7.2 square miles, including most of the UNCW campus, neighbors Hewletts Creek, which drains an area of 11.6 square miles, both into the Intracoastal Waterway. Wilmington along with the federation, Withers & Ravenel Engineers, Wrightsville Beach and UNCW Center for Marine Science, began in 2007 on a long-term Bradley And Hewletts Creeks Watershed Restoration Plan. This project is part of the restoration plan.

“It was wonderful to see community members come together to help improve water quality in Bradley Creek and its tributaries. We’re excited to see their hard work grow into a successful rain garden,” said Anna Reh-Gingerich, interim watershed coordinator with the City of Wilmington Heal Our Waterways Program.

In addition to reducing the amount of runoff being generated from the UNCW campus, the rain garden will also serve as a community living classroom.

The North Carolina Division of Water Resources’ EPA Section 319 Water Quality Program provided funding for the garden.

WILMINGTON – A University of North Carolina at Wilmington laboratory made history this month by spawning in captivity an endangered coral that once thrived in shallow reefs in the Caribbean.

Researchers at the university’s Center for Marine Science are the first to spawn two species of coral, including Orbicella faveolata, also known as mountainous star coral, in a laboratory.

Their success at reproducing the coral stems from a groundbreaking discovery just a few years ago in the United Kingdom, where a then-doctorate student collaborated with Neptune Systems, a company that makes aquarium controller systems, to electronically mimic environmental settings coral rely on in the wild to spawn.

“Ever since then other institutions and other laboratories have been able to do so,” said Nicole Fogarty, the assistant professor who headed the research in the lab referred to as the Spawning and Experimentation of Anthropogenic Stressors, or SEAS facility. “This has just been a big game-changer in trying to spawn corals in technology.”

It also has the potential to help restore coral reefs that are dying off at alarming rates as a result of the changing climate, which is causing ocean warming and ocean acidification, diseases, land-based sources of pollution and habitat degradation.

An emerging illness called stony coral tissue loss disease has been spreading throughout Caribbean coral reefs.

Fogarty left Florida last year when she accepted the job as assistant professor at UNCW’s biology and marine biology department, replacing one of her former professors.

She has been studying coral spawning for nearly 20 years.

Stony coral tissue loss disease is the scariest threat she has seen to coral reefs in the Caribbean, she said.

“It’s devastating the Caribbean,” she said.

There are more than 800 species of coral throughout the world’s oceans. About 60 species of coral are in the Caribbean.

In 2014, the National Marine Fisheries Service listed 20 species of coral as threatened, including five in the Caribbean.

Mountainous star occurs off southern Florida to the Bahamas and may be present in Bermuda. This species of coral has in the last few decades declined rapidly and is found in the Florida Reef Tract, which is the only barrier reef ecosystem in the continental United States.

That tract has lost 90% of its mass in the last 50 years.

Reefs make up 1% of the ocean floor, but are home to 25% of marine life.

Fogarty and her team have been studying how the current threats affect the health of corals from infancy to adulthood.

Successfully spawning endangered corals may help ongoing reef restoration efforts in places like the Caribbean, Pacific and Indo-Pacific regions.

“By doing this we can then have corals spawn year-round,” Fogarty said.

The peak spawning months for corals in the Caribbean and western Atlantic region are in August and September, when the weather is warmer.

Corals reproduce only one to two times a year, after the evolution of what Fogarty describes as synchronized events.

This happens through the culmination of lunar and solar cycles, with coral usually spawning anywhere from two to 10 days after the full moon.

Replicating this cycle of temperature, sunlight and moonlight is key in getting coral to spawn in captivity as they would in the wild.

Setting up a system to closely mimic this cycle took time – about a year.

Research assistant Kory Enneking was instrumental in getting the computerized system – Neptune System Apex – just right to recreate the needed conditions for coral spawning in the lab.

He described the multiple parts to successful spawning. There was the upfront programming that required him to gather sea surface temperature from weather buoys off the Florida coast. He went online and pulled information about lunar and solar cycles in the Fort Lauderdale area.

Once he had that information, he keyed it into a microprocessor in what he refers to as a “set and forget” system.

Then there were the constantly changing factors, such as water quality management that had to be monitored more frequently.

The whole process took about five to six months from start to finish. It was one Enneking, who was a graduate student at the time, said is not overly complicated.

Yet, earlier this month when little pink bundles of eggs and sperm floated to the water’s surface and broke apart, thus spawning, he felt a rush of relief as he and his colleagues marveled and cheered at their success.

“It surprised me that it worked, to be honest,” Enneking said. “I’m confident in what I’m doing, but you never know until it happens. I’ve seen spawning happen probably seven, eight times in the wild through projects I’ve worked on with Dr. Fogarty. I knew it was possible. No one ever did it with the species we’ve been working on. We had some hiccups. Every project has its hiccups. Nothing’s perfect and it still worked for us. These corals are extremely sensitive and they’re hard to work with. This is potentially a solution to saving these coral reefs, give them a better chance of surviving.”

Shortly after the mountainous star coral spawned earlier this month, the lab celebrated another milestone by being the first to spawn Pseudodiploria clivosa, or knobby brain coral, in captivity.

Knobby brain coral is not a listed species. It too occurs in the Caribbean.

By being able to spawn corals year-round, the theory is that new, baby corals can be raised to a certain size where they are likely to survive when placed in a natural reef. Introducing infant coral from genetically diverse populations spawned in labs into the wild may heighten the chances of reef restoration.

“With sexual reproduction, egg and sperm are meeting and that’s how you’re getting new genetic and unique individuals,” Fogarty said. “The next big step is to get more individuals of the species.”

That will be part of the focus of their research over the course of the next year.

If they can spawn genetic individuals of the species, Fogarty said, that would be a “giant leap forward” in coral reef restoration.

Ana Yranzo, a fellow with the global conservation initiative EDGE (Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered) of Existence program, works with Orbicella coral species in Morrocoy National Park in Venezuela.

She said in an email that there are currently no restoration efforts of Orbicella in Morrocoy and called the lab’s successful spawning of the coral “wonderful news.”

Some years ago, various coral species, including Orbicella annularis, from other similar reef areas were transplanted in Morrocoy, Yranzo said.

“The project was done in a small scale in one reef and other species (e.g. Meandrina meandrites, Montastrea cavernosa) were more successfully adapted than O. annularis,” she wrote. “Along the Caribbean there are have been done many (restoration) efforts, especially in fast growing species from Acropora genus (mostly Acropora cervicornis) and asexual methods have been the most commonly used, such as direct transplantation, coral gardening, and micro-fragmentation. It is important to highlight that I have never work on (restoration) and is possible that I missed some other works done on this topic. I am of course very interested in acquiring more knowledge on this subject, since it constitutes a way of contributing to the permanence of our reefs.”

Yranzo’s research has entailed assessing two types of Orbicella, including mountainous star in the national park and Cuare Wildlife Refuge, which adjoins the park and is included in the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance.

A massive mortality event in 1996 killed 90 percent of the benthic fauna in the national park, but reefs in the Cuare were not affected, she said.

“Currently, after more than twenty years of the event, the assessments done during the project (period 2018-2010), allowed us to corroborate that these species are still the main reef builders of the area, especially Orbicella faveolata,” Yranzo said. “The reefs considered the healthiest before are the same we found today and that health is related to Orbicella live cover. This includes reefs from Cuare Wildlife Refuge and from the central sector of MPA (Morrocoy National Park). So, although the reef system from Morrocoy National Park have been strongly affected by different perturbation sources, Orbicella species are still an important component. In case of Cuare Wildlife Refuge, they represent the reefs in better condition from the whole area studied.”

Just as Yrazno has been wrapping up her research project, a spill from a petrochemistry refinery near the site she has been studying occurred just days ago.

This is a terrible addition to all the stress factors that have affected the coral reef system from the area and this time we presume that reefs from Cuare Wildlife Refuge were affected because a part of the oil spot saw in satellite images were above the Refuge,” she said. “It’s a presumption because we still don’t know how reefs are after the oil spill because both MPA were closed by authorities with total access restriction. It is necessary to do an assessment of the situation to really know the impact on the different species from the fauna and flora that lives on both MPA. Not only in coral reefs, also in mangroves, seagrasses among others, all connected as an ecological unit. One of the most worried facts of these spill is that August and September are months of spawning for Orbicella species so the impact for their population could be worse.”

This story was updated Aug. 31 to include comments from Ana Yranzo.

Aaron Ramus, 2020 Coastal Research Fellowship recipient, is studying nonnative seaweed in the North Carolina Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve.

North Carolina Sea Grant and the state Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve Program sponsor the fellowship, which supports work in the state’s reserve system.

Ramus, a doctoral student in marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is looking at how Gracilaria vermiculophylla, or simply gracilaria, influences predator-prey relationships, as well as the production of hard clams.

“I’m very excited about receiving this award,” Ramus said in a statement.

His research will provide insights on gracilaria’s potential effects on predation on the hard clam.

“Hard clams constitute the basis for a popular recreational and major commercial shellfishery in North Carolina,” Ramus said. With his new work under the Coastal Research Fellowship, he says he hopes to better understand how gracilaria affects the food chain, including the hard clam fishery.

He also is gathering data about what’s happening at the benthic level, or the lowest level in a body of water, including some of the layers of bottom sediment and studying the seaweed’s abundance and variation.

He added that he plans to share his results through an open access journal, conferences and other avenues. He also will develop a web-based interactive map of gracilaria’s distribution and abundance.

“Understanding the distribution and impacts of invasive and nonnative species on coastal ecosystems is a pressing management issue,” Brandon Puckett, research coordinator at the N.C. Coastal Reserve, said a statement. “Aaron’s previous research, as well as past Coastal Research Fellows’, has suggested that these impacts are likely context dependent and not always negative.”

Ramus received his master’s in marine biology from UNCW and his bachelor’s in biology from UNC Chapel Hill. His adviser at UNCW is Lawrence Cahoon.

University of North Carolina Wilmington biology and marine biology professor Martin Posey, who has a long history of applying his work in fisheries and aquaculture, is one of two UNC System faculty members recently honored with the 2019 Governor James E. Holshouser Jr. Award for Excellence in Public Service.

The UNC Board of Governors announced Thursday the award recipients, which also include UNC Charlotte English Department chair and professor Mark I. West, a pioneer in the field of children’s literature and advocate for early childhood literacy.

The award honors faculty who exemplify the University’s commitment to service and community engagement. Typically, the UNC System names just one recipient of its prestigious annual service award, but this year, for only the third time in the award’s history, the selection committee made an exception.

“Both of these distinguished professors deserve this high honor,” said UNC Board of Governors Chair Randy Ramsey. “The Board of Governors recognizes them for transferring their academic expertise into stewardship and service. The important work that they do on a daily basis, on behalf of their communities and the state, embodies the best of the University.”

Created in 2007 and renamed in 2013 to honor former governor James E. Holshouser Jr., the award is designed to “encourage, identify, recognize and reward public service by employees of the University,” according to the announcement.

“The Holshouser award is a tangible reminder of the incredible impact members of our faculty have on the many lives that they touch, benefitting not just our students, but potentially every North Carolinian,” said UNC System Interim President Bill Roper. “Dr. West and Dr. Posey have consistently demonstrated that education involves always so much more than delivering information. It can and should be driven by a mission to make the lives of those whom they serve richer and fuller.”

Posey, who has served in UNCW’s biology department since 1989, has also served as director of the UNCW Center for Marine Science and was associate vice chancellor and dean of undergraduate studies. His 30-plus years of service have been devoted to university outreach and service, through which he has translated his academic expertise into policy and management.

Much of his engagement work is focused on the variety of challenges facing coastal areas, including resource management and sustainability issues.

He has served on the state Marine Fisheries Commission, the Coastal Resources Commission Scientific Panel on Coastal Hazards, and the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries Crustacean Fisheries Advisory Committee, among others. He has collaborated with, or offered his expertise to, community and nonprofit organizations, among them the North Carolina Coastal Federation, the Cape Fear River Organization and the Lower Cape Fear River Program.

Officials said Posey has been devoted to enhancing education connections between UNCW and the community, notably with K-12 schools. He has been active in Project Quest, which provides hands-on learning experiences for middle school students in underserved regions. He has also helped to organize the Planet Oceans seminar series, which brings local and national researchers together to discuss coastal issues.

At UNCW, Posey has served on countless committees and organizations working toward the advancement of the university.

“Dr. Posey is truly the epitome of everything academic institutions treasure in a faculty member,” said UNCW Chancellor Jose V. Sartarelli. “He’s a prolific researcher, a generous and supportive colleague to so many, and an integral part of the Wilmington community — personally and professionally. His presence on our campus has inspired students and peers for decades, and his impressive body of work has had regional, statewide, and global impact. It’s incredibly gratifying for all who admire Martin to see him recognized in this way. We are all very proud to know and work with Martin, and grateful for his boundless contributions to our university and community.”

Both recipients receive a $7,500 stipend and a bronze medallion in honor of their work. The board said it would honor both of them in person at a future meeting.

WILMINGTON – The University of North Carolina at Wilmington last week kicked off a series of seminars on coastal resiliency in a changing climate.

Nine different academic areas at UNCW are collaborating on the series to present what the university called “a more comprehensive and integrative look at the challenges we face as an institution and community living on the coast.”

The first seminar, Adapting to the Storms: A conversation about Wilmington and the Cape Fear Region after Florence, held Tuesday, Sept. 24, at UNCW’s Center for Marine Science, was a broad-ranging, question-filled discussion about how to cope with and adapt to life as the sea level rises and other effects of climate change alter the environment within the coastal plain.

To address the question of how, speakers introduced two schools of thought.

At one end of the spectrum is perhaps the least popular notion that barrier island beaches should be left in their natural state and property owners retreat from the rising sea.

Then, there’s the idea of engineered beaches where shorelines get routine sand injections and inlets are stabilized.

How much man-made effort should be made to protect coastal properties and who should be responsible for paying for the work and maintenance of things like beach nourishment and channel projects?

Tancred Miller’s role as the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management’s coastal and ocean policy manager is to engage people within coastal communities to find answers to those and other questions.

“It has to happen at the ground level,” he said Tuesday before a crowd of roughly 100 people.

His question to coastal residents: “Even if (sea level rise) is very gradual, can we continue to sustain ourselves in this environment?”

“We are trying to balance environmental protection with private property rights and development,” Miller said. “We are trying to manage our way out of a crisis.”

Coastal residents are feeling the impacts of climate change, he said, which is leading to a shift in discussions about whether it is, in fact, real.

“They’re seeing places flooding like they’ve never seen before, where they’ve never seen before,” Miller said.

In order to adapt, sensible policies need to be made concerning coastal development, he said.

“You can build to fight the wind, but not the water,” Miller said.

Dylan McNamara, chair of the university’s physics and physical oceanography department, explained that one of the issues that holds coastal communities back from adapting to the changes being experienced along the coast is the cycle of rebuilding.

Storms damage and destroy homes and businesses and eat away beaches. Subsidies and insurance companies pay for those homes and businesses to be rebuilt in the same areas and restore the beaches.

This, in turn, leads to a period of significant economic development in which there’s more beachfront building, dune building and renourishment, all of which contribute to increased property values.

“As long as there’s money to be made in these systems, I think we’re going to be caught in this system,” McNamara said. “From a standpoint of how the system works, if people had to pay for their damages it would put a lot of friction in it.”

In the case of the federal buyout program, higher property values mean higher purchase prices, which means the government will have to pay more in property buyouts.

The cost to buy properties in some coastal towns would be “immense,” and simply unaffordable, McNamara said.

“I don’t know how you manage retreat in Myrtle Beach, or Atlantic City in New Jersey, but there could be communities that handle it very well,” he said.

Population growth projections – 50-60% in New Hanover and abutting coastal counties – only raise further concerns, said state Sen. Harper Peterson, D-New Hanover.

“What impacts will that have on our livability as a community,” asked Peterson, who was among the audience. “I don’t know how we’re going to survive. We cannot recover if we take another hit like (Hurricane Florence). I don’t know where you start, but this is a great start right here. It’s not quality of life, it’s survival. We have to survive and do whatever it takes and not do it the same old way.”

Seminars will be held monthly at the university through April.

WILMINGTON — University of North Carolina Wilmington biology professor Brian Arbogast was selected to serve as chair of the American Society of Mammalogists conservation committee, the university announced last week.

At about 2,500 current members, the American Society of Mammologists established in 1919 to promote the study of mammals hosts annual meetings, produces several publications and maintains a mammal images library.

The society has more than 30 committees, including the conservation committee first established in 1927 to promote the conservation and welfare of natural populations of land mammals.

“I’m very excited to be the new chair of this committee, especially now when we are facing so many challenges to preserve biodiversity,” Arbogast said in a statement. “The ASM Conservation Committee is very active in writing position letters and resolutions that emphasize the scientific basis for proposed actions under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, as well as educating the public about conservation issues affecting mammals on both the national and international level.”

Arbogast has been a member since 1992 and hosted the annual meetings in 20o4 of the American Society of Mammalogists while assistant professor at Humbolt State University.

Learn More

• Brian Arbogast Bio

WILMINGTON – The University of North Carolina Wilmington has announced leadership changes ahead of the new academic year, including top marine science and research posts.

UNCW Provost Marilyn Sheerer announced the new appointments Tuesday as part of a message that also included that she would be returning to the university faculty next summer, a step she had planned to take after serving in the provost role for five years.

Sheerer announced that Stuart Borrett was named associate provost for research and innovation, effective immediately. Borrett had served as interim associate provost for research and president of the nonprofit UNCW Research Foundation since last year.

In his new role, Borrett will be UNCW’s chief research officer, assisting the university leadership in developing, coordinating and growing research activities. He will also oversee the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

“He came to UNCW in 2007 and brings to his new role a record of academic research accomplishments and leadership experience, as well as enthusiasm for helping UNCW continue to build its research capacity,” Sheerer said in the announcement.

Graduate School Dean Chris Finelli is to take on additional duties as executive director of marine sciences, overseeing the Center for Marine Science, the Shellfish Research Hatchery and Marine Biotechnology in North Carolina, or MARBIONC, UNCW’s research- and development-based economic development program on the Myrtle Grove campus, as well as the finfish mariculture center on Wrightsville Beach. Finelli is a former chair of the Department of Biology and Marine Biology and a former interim chair of Mathematics and Statistics. His appointment is effective Aug. 1.

Lynn Leonard is to serve as director of the Center for Marine Science, effective Aug. 1. Leonard is former chair of the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences and succeeds Martin Posey, who is to return to the faculty to devote more time to teaching and research after three and half years as director.

Senior Associate Provost Rich Ogle is to become interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, effective Aug. 1, succeeding Dean Volety who has taken on a role at Elon University.

Christine Pesetski was named interim director of University College, where she has served as associate director since 2018. She is to work with Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of Undergraduate Studies Paul Townend while the university conducts a search for a new director.

Also, Campus Space Planner Woody Sutton is set to retire after nearly 30 years at UNCW. His role included the challenging task of finding space on campus to relocate faculty and staff who were displaced by Hurricane Florence.

The university is to begin national searches for a provost and a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences this fall.

RALEIGH – Last year, the North Carolina General Assembly backed a locally focused strategy in response to revelations about GenX in Wilmington’s water supply.

Last week, several members who supported the plan told researchers from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and officials with the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority they didn’t like what they got.

At a meeting Thursday in Raleigh of the House Committee on North Carolina River Quality, Rep. Jimmy Dixon, R-Duplin, accused UNCW scientists who worked on GenX studies on oysters, rainwater and river sediments of practicing “political science” to get the most ominous results.

He criticized CFPUA executive director Jim Flechtner for including additional per-fluorinated compounds along with GenX in filtering tests and for the report’s cost estimates of new water system filtration.

“I think your presentation to the committee was biased in making the problem look bigger than it is,” he said.

Dixon suggested that lawsuits were driving the science and said CPFUA did not need a new filtration system since levels of GenX in the water supply have stayed below the 140 parts per trillion health goal since Chemours stopped discharging GenX in wastewater.

“The water’s clean, folks,” Dixon said. “The raw water is safe, it’s below the 140.”

Rep. Pat McElraft, R-Carteret, also was critical of the reports, saying the findings on oyster mortality were written in a way that would frighten the public. She said tests at extremely high levels of GenX should not have been conducted because levels would not get that high. The public, she said, will focus on the mortality results at those levels.

“To me, it’s a scare tactic,” she said.

Committee members also were concerned the reports had already been made public.

The release of both reports was a requirement under last year’s GenX provision in House Bill 56, which set an April 1, 2018, due date for the reports to be sent to the legislature’s Environmental Review Commission. Both reports, which have been available on the ERC’s website since then, are public records.

On Friday, UNCW and CFPUA each issued statements standing by their work.

“Our scientists have no agenda, political or otherwise, beyond following standard scientific protocols and performing the research requested of them via HB56,” university spokeswoman Janine Iamunno, said in an email response to Coastal Review Online.

Iamunno confirmed that researchers intend to continue the next phases of the oyster and sedimentation studies.

In a tersely worded statement to Coastal Review Online Friday, CFPUA executive director Jim Flechtner said the utility also stands by its report.

“CFPUA presented yesterday at the request of the legislators. The information was shared accurately and correctly. We stand by what we said,” Flechtner said.

He said the utility authority has been clear all along that it would seek to recover its costs if a new filtration system were needed.

“From the onset, CFPUA has stated our position that compounds should be stopped at the source. We believe that our customers should not have to bear the costs associated with removing unregulated chemicals from our drinking water,” he said.

The tense discussion with researchers came as the committee wraps up work ahead of this year’s short session.

Last fall, after the passage of House Bill 56, House and Senate leaders set up committees on river quality in each chamber and to hold hearings and work on GenX and emerging contaminant legislation.

Since then, however, both sides have failed to reach agreement on a new round of proposed legislation that would expand research and testing capabilities. In a special session in February, House and Senate negotiators failed to find a compromise on House Bill 189 because of a funding impasse after the Senate rejected a Department of Environmental Quality funding request backed by the House.

On Thursday, the House River Quality Committee approved a restart of House Bill 189 as part of its report to the House ahead of the General Assembly session, which starts May 16.

River Quality Committee chair Rep. Ted. Davis, R-New Hanover, told committee members that he continues to work with a group of senators on what’s possible in what is expected to be a shorter-than-usual short session.

“I am presently working with members of the Senate on a compromise bill,” Davis said, adding that one thing he is insisting on is consideration of the DEQ funding request.

Davis said that in addition to provisions already under discussion he’s going over other suggestions sent to the committee with his Senate counterparts to see if any of those might be able to be done this year.

Davis said it is doubtful any controversial suggestions will be taken up, but he expects the committee’s work is likely to be extended beyond its Dec. 31 end date and would work on legislation for the 2019 long session as well.

Learn More

• View a Cape Fear Public Utility Authority slideshow on its study results

RALEIGH — University of North Carolina Wilmington researchers have found trace amounts of GenX in rainwater on campus, WRAL.com reported.

A university scientist told state legislators Wednesday about the discover during a meeting of the House Select Committee on North Carolina River Quality.

The concentration of GenX, a product of Chemours in Bladen County used to make Teflon, was about 25 parts per trillion, well under the state’s health goal for the compound of 140 parts per trillion.

Researcher Robert Kieber told the committee that the Chemours plant, 70 miles away from UNCW, is the likely source of the discovery. Kiebert said he believes the substance is widespread.

The state Department of Environmental Quality is testing air from Chemours’ smokestacks with results expected early next month.

Learn More

• WRAL.com’s report

WILMINGTON – University of North Carolina Wilmington Environmental Concerns Organization and North Carolina Climate Solutions Coalition are hosting a free conference 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14, to discuss economic and environmental impacts of and solutions for climate change to our area.

The goal of the free forum in UNCW Dobo Hall, Room 134, is to communicate the importance of the Jacobson Resolution for the city of Wilmington. It supports a North Carolina goal of 100 percent clean energy by 2050 and the creation of green jobs. This plan was presented to all 50 states in the country last year by Stanford University and UC-Davis. Chatham County, near Chapel Hill, is the furthest east of the current resolution signers.

This national and local group of expert guest speakers will include energy sector professionals, UNCW professors, business leaders, and politicians. It is an opportunity to learn, to collaborate, and join other concerned area citizens.

Featured guest, retired Rear Adm. Leendert “Len” Hering U.S. Navy, is a prominent military and civilian sustainability leader with a broad background in energy and environmental issues and recipient of Presidential Award for Leadership in Federal Energy Management. He joins Bill McKibben, Dr. Kyle Horton and Dr. Harvard Ayers in discussing the impending challenges southeast North Carolina faces with climate change.

Learn More

• Jacobson Resolution
• Climate Panel Discussion Facebook Page

WILMINGTON — Dylan McNamara, associate professor and chair of the University of North Carolina Wilmington Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography, has been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate ways public policies will affect both economic decisions and the coastal environment, the university announced Thursday.

McNamara will lead an interdisciplinary team of researchers from geomorphologists to economists, to address the interactions of natural forces, economic decisions and public policies to determine how the environment and patterns of human settlement react to rising seas and related coastline changes. The grant will fund the research for four years and the project is already underway.

Researchers from UNCW, Duke University, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the University of Georgia, The Ohio State University, East Carolina University and the University of Colorado will create and investigate computer modeled coastal communities similar to those found along U.S. East and Gulf Coast barrier islands.

The results of the team’s research will provide insight into how real estate markets respond to complex changes in environmental conditions, public policies, scientific knowledge, and individual attitudes and values. Research is a key priority of the university’s Strategic Plan.

WILMINGTON – University of North Carolina Wilmington research professor Steve Ross has received national recognition for a project he co-led studying deep-sea canyons of the Mid-Atlantic and the diverse ecosystems they support.

UNCW announced Friday the research, done in collaboration with scientists from other institutions and funded through federal grants, won the 2015 Excellence in Partnering Award from the National Oceanographic Partnership Program, or NOPP. The partnership award will be presented at February’s Ocean Sciences 2016 Conference in New Orleans.

The project, “Atlantic Canyons: Pathways to the Abyss,” came about as a result of increased interest in developing offshore oil and gas resources. Federal agencies targeted the canyons and their unique ecosystems as areas of environmental concern. The NOPP award is the second for the five-year project. Last year, it won the Department of the Interior’s Partners in Conservation Award. Ross, a fisheries biologist, and Sandra Brooke of Florida State University led the research.

“Our findings have led to proposed federal protection of these canyons and the marine life that thrives within them, said Ross, who is based at the UNCW Center for Marine Science. “Not only has this been recognized as good research, but it has resulted in a strong resource management component as well.”

Among the variety of marine life the research team found thriving in the canyons and around the methane seeps that occur in the region were deep-sea corals, including a cold water species known as Lophelia, and 123 species of fish.

In addition to UNCW and FSU, the research team included scientists from Wales, the Netherlands, the University of Rhode Island, Oregon State University, Texas A&M University, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the U.S. Geological Survey and the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences. The group’s work was featured in the October issue of Chesapeake Quarterly.

NOPP is collaboration among federal agencies, including the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and USGS, that promotes ocean-related research partnerships, with a focus on developing interagency initiatives to manage and protect our ocean resources.

Last of two parts

WILMINGTON — Dolphins that strand along the southern coast of North Carolina often end up in a small building on the campus of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Inside the Louise Oriole Burevitch Laboratory are a human autopsy table and a specially built table for what is obviously meant for much larger creatures. A hook on a chain attached to a track on the ceiling dangles overhead, used to lift large dolphins and small whales onto the tables.

While some dolphins are necropsied on the beach, many are brought here where they can be examined and dissected. Samples are collected and shipped all across the country, including to the University of California at Davis for molecular biology and to the University of Illinois for histology to confirm the presence of disease.

“Most of our work during a necropsy is to gather samples to better understand this disease process,” explained Ann Pabst, a professor of biology and marine biology at UNCW. “But we are also trying to support as many different kinds of research as we can, because this is a rare opportunity. This animal is dead and we try to get as much information as possible.”

While researchers can confirm that morbillivirus is to blame for the dolphin die-off, what they can’t say is why it is happening now.

William McLellan is about to perform a necropsy on a bottlenose dolphin at the UNCW lab. Photo: Marine Mammal Stranding Program, UNCW

“We know why the disease might have the potential to make a large impact but we don’t know the series of events that caused it to happen right now… Why now? That is kind of the $100,000 dollar question. And we may never have the answer,” explained Pabst.

What they do know is that, 25 years after the last morbillivirus outbreak, there is now a population of dolphins that no longer have immunity to the virus. Wild dolphins have a life span of 25-30 years meaning that the majority of the population was not alive during the last outbreak, leaving the population vulnerable to another outbreak of the same virus.

And while no environmental trigger has been identified in either die-off, scientists do know that the health of the ocean environment can have a large effect on the health of the marine mammal population. But they stop short of saying just what kind of effect.

The 1987 outbreak was compounded by a biotoxin called brevetoxin. This toxin was found in high levels in the water at the same time that the virus was killing a large portion of the dolphin population.

As Pabst explains no one knows exactly what role this played in the high mortality rates, but it certainly didn’t help. “It was predominantly morbillivirus (killing the animals) that was probably exacerbated by this biotoxin. So they got this double hit, a perfect storm,” she said.

Unfortunately history appears to be repeating itself. Dolphins are again facing a perfect storm of catastrophes. Higher-than-average bottlenose dolphin strandings are occurring even in areas where the morbillivirus has not yet reached. And while scientists are hesitant to name a specific cause of these increased mortality rates, they do recognize that many of the populations are facing threats to their environment. There is evidence that dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico are still struggling from the effects of the BP Deep Water Horizon oil spill in 2010, and harmful algal blooms are linked to the deaths of hundreds of dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon in Florida.

This onslaught of threats has lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare each of almost all the sites of dolphin deaths as a “unusual mortality event,” or UME, a label that recognizes a significant die-off in a population of marine mammals and the need for an immediate response. Only the west coast of Florida is currently not experiencing a UME.

“Bottlenose dolphins have been named sentinels of coastal ecosystem health,” said Pabst. “If in virtually all of its geographic distribution, from the Gulf of Mexico to the U.S. Atlantic coast, animals are suffering some kind of UME, it likely suggests that there are issues that we should be considering,”

Toxic contaminants in the water have also long been one of the issues of concern for researchers. Dolphins are a known to store toxins in their blubber which could threaten the health of already sick animals.

“There is no doubt that contaminant loads are high in these animals,” explained William McLellan, a UNCW biology professor that coordinates the strandings of marine mammals in the state. “The animals feel crappy so they don’t feed. Well then they start spending those lipid resources, and those lipids hold contaminants that start spitting back into the animal that is already immunocompromised.”

A dead dolphin on a beach near Wilmington. Photo: Marine Mammal Stranding Program, UNCW

Just what role this is playing in the morbillivirus outbreak is unknown Pabst is hesitant to directly link contaminant load in these animals with the high rates of death. “But we need to be very precise,” she said. “We cannot, because we don’t have the data, directly link an animal’s decline in health with toxin load. But what we do know is that bottlenose dolphins are in a compromised coastal environment where they are exposed to human made toxins. So we have to acknowledge that humans play a role in creating the health of the environment that the animals are in.”

So far researchers have focused on identifying the viral pathogen linked to the deaths and have not examined the levels of toxins in necropsied animals. But McLellan notes that this is likely because contaminant loads are already assumed to be heavy.

“Only because, the terrible thing is, it is not going to be anything new,” he said. “A whole bunch of samples were run from the animals in 1987 and they had the highest levels of mercury ever tested in a cetacean.”

The current outbreak is expected to continue for at least several more months.

“Since it is already in Florida, we are not going to be out of this until March or April at the earliest,” McLellan said wearily. “Southern North Carolina will stay in it the entire time, and we may actually get a pulse [of increased deaths] as these animals start moving north again.”

With large-scale funding cuts to stranding response programs and to many of the agencies involved in the recovery and investigation of animal deaths, many of those involved recognize that they need to marshal their resources now in order gain the greatest understanding from this event.

“A lot of the money is going away, but as a network we want to use our resources now to get this one really documented so that we know when it started, we know that is moving, and we can actually get a better picture out of this. It’s not easy, but a lot of folks are working really hard on it,” said McLellan.

And as Pabst notes, these research efforts may be critical to the recovery of the dolphin population. “We do know that these animals are going to need our extra protection,” she said. “We don’t know now if this is going to change the status of the stocks, but it is well within the realm of possibility. Even if it didn’t, it would still be incumbent upon us to do everything we can to try to protect them because they have suffered huge losses.”

Report sightings of stranded or dead marine mammals to 911 or your local municipality.