Forget the black buffaloes; there are signs of life in the bays

Pardon my paranoia, but it seems that signs and omens are everywhere abounding these days. I know people always say things like that, especially when the sky simply won’t quit raining, but it’s getting a bit overt of late.

Consider the bison. Among many Native American tribes, the birth of a white buffalo is considered an omen of peace and good fortune ahead. So what are we to make of the recent birth of not one but two extremely rare black buffaloes at North Quarter Farm in Riverhead? Will the crops fail? Is recession bound for depression? Could the Shinnecock Indian casino create a quagmire of urban blight and pestilence?

On the positive portent side, hundreds of bottlenose dolphins were recently observed frolicking in the Sound. At the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, that’s being seen as a sign of hope for the health of the Sound.

Of course, doomsayers could attribute the dolphins’ return to warming waters. People are already bewailing the Sound’s infesting plague of sea squirts, bottom-clogging filter-feeders who eat their own brains. Anybody see a Wall Street augury there?

Those attuned to aquatic signs of the apocalypse might have been struck by last week’s letter to The Suffolk Times about a supposed sheepshead caught in Southold. The writer, part-time Florida resident John Glaessgen, said it was actually a black drum, a fish much more at home in warmer waters. Glaessgen finished with a fine summation: “Nature remains mysterious.”

Gene Kelly at Montauk Sport Fishing would agree. All kinds of southern swimmers, like triggerfish and red snappers, have been turning up in East End nets, but they’ve been doing so for a long time. “Guys started catching tarpon over 30 years ago,” he said. Rod-and-reel anglers reported catching cobia and even bonefish in Great South Bay five years ago, he said.

To those who say it’s all about global warming, Kelly tends to side with Glaessgen’s “mysterious nature” position. As Exhibit A he points to the 178-pound porbeagle shark caught off Montauk a few weeks ago. This is a very northern fish, ranging up into Arctic waters. “The weather’s been colder this year, but still, it’s very, very strange.” So, based on the porbeagle portent, should we be on the lookout for global cooling?

In the end, perhaps it’s best if we do as Kim Tetrault does.

Tetrault manages (take a deep breath) the Cornell Cooperative Extension Shellfish Hatchery at the Suffolk County Marine Environmental Learning Center in Southold. On the subject of sea squirts, for instance, he said, “I’ve never seen so many.” Then he adds quickly, “But if I worry about everything, I couldn’t sleep at night.”

Tetrault and others started reseeding East End bays 15 years ago. “Nothing happened,” he said last week. Clam, scallop and oyster seedlings by the millions were sowed every year, only to die. One of the richest bays in the world had become a wet desert.

To many onlookers it started to feel like a lost cause. The seeders began to seem like a mapless army slogging along to a dismal fate. Tetrault recalls banishing that thought, saying, “We’ve just got to keep with it. One year nature will play ball.”

And then, about three years ago, he was paddling around Broadwater Cove in Cutchogue. “I looked on the banks and they were covered with oyster set,” he said. “That was the first time I’d really seen a set take hold well.”
Since then they’ve spread out, to the point where the words “Peconic Bay oysters” aren’t just sadly nostalgic anymore. More good news: “Last year’s scallop crop was the best since the brown tide.” That dark date, 1985, will be forever etched in East End minds.

But this is now, and Tetrault sees a return of “good, fresh bio film,” a kind of “slimy marine coating” that suggests life. There could also be more plankton around. And maybe the bigger bivalve broodstock has finally reached a positive tipping point. “It could just be cyclical,” he said, “but it seems to have taken hold. Nature,” Tetrault concluded with some wonderment, “seems to have rebounded.”

From all this, perhaps we can distill something called the Tetrault doctrine. It is this: Damn the omens (and frustration, and logic) – full steam ahead.


Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 17, 2009