North Carolina’s Outer Banks Voice reports on a state ruling that will make it easier for the owners of beachfront houses whose septic systems were destroyed in storms to rebuild, “as long as they are 50 feet from the water at low tide.” State rules generally prevent owners from rebuilding if 50 percent or more of the value of the building is lost in a storm.
Here’s a lesson for the Washington Post’s editorial cartoonist—don’t get flippant when it comes to marine science. A letter writer took the paper to task for suggesting that oysters can improve Chesapeake Bay water quality. “They can’t,” the letter writer asserted. “Sufficient numbers of oysters can’t be grown to make any meaningful difference”¦ ‘Sopping up’ never works. All the money we have spent reducing nutrient discharge from wastewater treatments plants” hasn’t improved water quality, he wrote, and neither will more oysters. “Yes, grow more oysters, but for the right reasons: jobs and a delicious food.”
Anyone watching the state of ocean fisheries knows how important the herring population is to the health of many other species. The Brockton, Mass.-based Enterprise newspaper published a recent feature, “Five Things You May Not Know About Local Herring Runs.” The story notes that “the Nemasket River supports the largest river herring run in the state. Why? More than 5,000 acres of spawning and nursery habitat are in the upper reaches of the river.”
More bad news on cod from our neighbors to the north: a study whose authors included a Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia) biology professor suggests that most fish species can recover from over-fishing in a decade if fast action is taken to reduce harvests. “But when you don’t take action rapidly,” said Jeff Hutchings, “not only does it result in a much longer potential recovery time, but the uncertainty as to whether recovery will happen at all increase exponentially.” That may explain why cod stocks have not rebounded in the 20-plus years since Canada enacted a moratorium on the commercial cod fishery.
Discovery’s website reports this: “There’s no getting away from it: your average monkfish looks seriously badass. To all intents and purposes it’s just one giant head, supported by an after-thought of a body and capped with a cavernous mouth fringed with razor-sharp teeth. If that isn’t the kind of thing to keep you awake at night, you’re a braver person than me. Or possibly another monkfish.
“When New England fishermen began finding the remains of birds called dovekies (Arctic seabirds that are the smallest members of the puffin family) in the stomachs of monkfish they had caught—well, that was something of a surprise.”