Todd McLeish: Seeking strategies for sustaining bay scallops

Bay scallop staring at you with its blue eyes

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

In the Great Salt Pond on Block Island, native bay scallops are thriving like nowhere else in Rhode Island. Scientists from The Nature Conservancy survey the 673-acre tidal harbor every autumn and have recorded hundreds of scallops each year, despite as many as 50 recreational shellfishermen harvesting scallops from the pond each November and December.

The same cannot be said of the rest of the Ocean State’s waters, however, where bay scallops are few and far between.

On Block Island, Diandra Verbeyst leads a three-person team of Nature Conservancy scuba divers and snorkelers who monitor 12 sites around the Great Salt Pond. They have counted an average of 225 scallops annually since 2016, up from just 44 observed by previous observers in 2007, the first year of monitoring.

“There are slight rises and falls from year to year, but the population is pretty stable,” Verbeyst said. “Based on the 12 sites we monitor, the population is indicating that there is spawning happening each year, and there is recruitment to the population.”

In addition to scallop data, Verbeyst and her team also collect information on water quality and other environmental conditions during their surveys.

“The scallops are an indication that the ecosystem is healthy and doing well, and for me, that’s fascinating in itself,” she said. “No matter where you are in the pond, there’s a good chance you’ll see a scallop.”

Bay scallops are bivalve mollusks with 30-40 bright blue eyes that live in shallow bays and estuaries up and down the East Coast, preferring habitats where eelgrass is abundant. They are short-lived animals — most don’t live more than two years — and are significantly smaller than sea scallops, which are found farther offshore and are harvested by the millions by New Bedford-based fishermen.

Chris Littlefield, a Nature Conservancy coastal projects director and former part-time shellfisherman on Block Island, recalled collecting scallops as a child in the Great Salt Pond 50 years ago, and he has been gathering them in small numbers for his family’s consumption ever since. He said the scallop population received a boost in 2010, when immature scallops grown at the Milford {Conn.} Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were dispersed into the pond in a project funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“That project broke through some kind of threshold,” Littlefield said. “Scallops weren’t as abundant before that, and they used to be confined to certain key locations and that was it. But now they’re more abundant and more people are finding them and harvesting them.”

Unlike Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and a few locations on Cape Cod and Long Island, where regular seeding of immature bay scallops has resulted in thriving commercial fisheries, Rhode Island has a tiny commercial fishery for bay scallops — fewer than three fishermen participate — and the fishery is not sustainable.

Anna Gerber-Williams, principal marine biologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Marine Fisheries, just completed the first year of a three-year effort to assess the state’s bay scallop population. She is focused primarily on the salt ponds in South County, especially Point Judith Pond and Ninigret Pond, which historically had healthy bay scallop populations.

“We manage and regulate the bay scallop harvest, but besides Block Island, we haven’t had an actual assessment of what the population looks like in Rhode Island,” Gerber-Williams said. “We know it’s pretty low, and we know the actual commercial harvest numbers are very low. But we don’t have anything to base our management on. The hope is that this project can turn into more long-term monitoring, similar to what’s done on Block Island, and maybe lead to restoration efforts.”

Based on her first year of surveys, Gerber-Williams said there are self-sustaining populations of bay scallops in Point Judith Pond, and their abundance can fluctuate significantly from year to year.

“Scallops are very habitat-dependent,” she said. “The habitat in the salt ponds is very patchy, and those patches are very small.”

Unlike clams, which bury themselves in the sand, bay scallops sit on the seafloor and can swim around by rapidly opening and closing their shell, making them difficult to track and count. Gerber-Williams said they are threatened by several varieties of crabs, which can easily crush the scallops’ shells with their claws.

“Part of the scallop’s strategy is to hide from the crabs in the eelgrass,” she said. “When they’re younger, they attach themselves to eelgrass blades to keep themselves above the bottom and out of reach of predators.”

Dan Torre at Aquidneck Island Oyster Co. experimented this year with growing bay scallops in cages in the Sakonnet River off Portsmouth. He bought scallop seed from area hatcheries last July, and they are approaching marketable size now. He has contracted with one local restaurant to buy his experimental crop, with hopes of scaling up the operation next year.

“I believe there’s a market, but it’s a niche market,” he said. “Normally with sea scallops, you sell just the shelled adductor muscle, but with bay scallops you sell the whole animal. The shelf life isn’t the longest, but it seems like there are a bunch of restaurants that are eager to try them.”

In an effort to figure out how best to restore wild bay scallop populations in the region, the Rhode Island Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation is collaborating with The Nature Conservancy to synthesize what is known about the history of the bay scallop population and fishery in Point Judith Pond.

According to Dave Bethoney, the foundation’s executive director, it will be combined with information about scallop fisheries in Massachusetts and Long Island, N.Y., as a first step to developing a restoration plan.

“How to make them sustainable is the real puzzle,” Bethoney said. “Even successful efforts on Long Island are based on a seeding plan — getting scallops every year from aquaculture facilities to replenish them. They have successful populations, but they’re not self-sustaining. I don’t know how we change that.”

Gerber-Williams agreed.

“In my opinion, the way to boost populations here and keep them at a level that’s sustainable for a good fishery in Rhode Island, we would have to have a seeding program similar to what they have in Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard,” she said. “Every year they put out thousands of baby bay scallops. They seed their salt ponds every single year to keep a decent fishery going.

“So the next step for us would be to do that kind of seeding program in Rhode Island. We’re in the process of creating a restoration plan for various species of shellfish in Rhode Island, and my hope is that bay scallops are a part of that.”

Hopefully the current researchers go back to the North Cape shellfish injury restoration project, which included release of bay scallop seed into the South County salt ponds, to learn about what worked or did not work for the multi-year that wrapped up by 2010. The reports are available and some of us who worked on the project are available to discuss challenges and successes.

Todd McLeish is an ecoRI News contributor.

Eelgrass is prime habitat for bay scallops.

Todd McLeish: Some photographers are dangerously disturbing birds

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The increasing popularity of bird photography and the desire of photographers to showcase their images on social media is raising concerns that birds are being harassed and disturbed, leading to potentially harmful effects on their health.

Bird-conservation organizations around the globe, from the National Audubon Society to Britain’s Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds, are asking bird photographers to avoid getting too close and reminding the photographers of the codes of ethics that many wildlife photography organizations have established.

Local wildlife advocates have noted that it’s also an increasing problem in Rhode Island.

“It’s definitely a problem here, and it’s getting worse,” said one longtime birder who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. “There are more photographers, and there are more forums that photographers can post their photos on. It’s an ego trip for them. They want to post their photos and get likes, and that leads them to harass the birds.”

Laura Carberry, refuge manager at the Audubon Society of Rhode Island’s Fisherville Brook Wildlife Refuge, and Rachel Farrell, a member of the Rhode Island Avian Records Committee, said getting too close to wild birds can pose serious dangers to them. Birds see people as predators, and when people approach, the birds must stop feeding and instead exert extra energy they may not have to escape the area. They also may be forced to leave their nests unattended, making their eggs and chicks vulnerable to predation, thermal stress, or trampling.

When a rare European bird was discovered at Snake Den State Park, in Johnston, R.I., last year and birders and photographers flocked to the site to observe the visitor, some photographers chased the bird across a farmer’s fields to get better photographs. Birders say that is a common occurrence whenever rarities are discovered.

Owls are particularly sensitive to disturbance, Farrell said, and the managers of Swan Point Cemetery, in Providence, have resorted to putting yellow caution tape from tree to tree around an area where great horned owls have nested in recent years to keep photographers from going too close.

“I remember seeing a photographer banging a stick against the bottom of a tree to get an owl to come out of its hole,” Farrell said.

Other birders recalled when a photographer played a recording of a screech owl for so long that one of the nestlings almost fell out of the nest because it was so distressed by the recording.

According to Carberry, Audubon has occasionally had to close parts of its refuges when owl nests have been discovered because photographers go off trail and disturb habitats to approach the nest. The organization has asked birders not to report where owls are nesting until after the breeding season to reduce the problem.

“We often tell people that if the bird is looking at you, you’re too close,” she said.

It’s not just a problem with photographers, however. Some birdwatchers are also at fault for similar behaviors. Some will play audio recordings of bird songs to attract the birds out into the open, for example, a practice condemned by ornithologist Charles Clarkson, the director of avian research at the Audubon Society of Rhode Island.

“The daily energetic demands of birds are extremely high, even when they are not actively nesting,” he said. “Distracting birds from essential tasks — foraging, preening, defending territory — can leave them in an energy deficit, which is difficult to make up,” he said. “To lure birds in using taped calls can have serious negative consequences for individual birds and even local bird populations where taped calls are used regularly. It’s best to leave birds be and use your own power of observation to find as many as possible.”

How to resolve the problem is unclear. Enforcing codes of ethics is difficult, and speaking up sometimes results in abusive responses. The Atlantic Flyway Shorebird Initiative is surveying birders and bird photographers to assess the scale of the problem and to see if educational messaging and communication tools could be developed to address the issue.

“I think folks lose sight of what they may be doing to the species they are trying to get a glimpse of or take a photo of,” Carberry said. “They should always think of the bird first and think if they are impacting it in any way. I think that if they put the birds’ needs first, they would be more careful about approaching a nest or getting a little too close.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: Artificial light threatens animal populations

Light pollution is mostly unpolarized, and its addition to moonlight results in a decreased polarization signal.

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Global insect populations have declined by as much as 75 percent during the past 50 years, according to scientists, potentially leading to catastrophic impacts on wildlife, the environment and human health. Most studies point to habitat loss, climate change, industrial farming and pesticide use as the main factors driving the loss of insects, but a new study in the United Kingdom points to another cause: light pollution.

The ever-increasing glow of artificial light from street lights, especially LED lights, was found to have detrimental effects on the behavior of moths, resulting in a reduction in caterpillar numbers by half. And since birds and other wildlife rely on caterpillars as an important food source, the consequences of this decline could be devastating.

According to Douglas Boyes of the British Center for Ecology & Hydrology, street lights cause nocturnal moths to postpone laying their eggs while also making the insects more visible to predators such as bats. In addition, caterpillars that hatch near artificial light exhibit abnormal feeding behavior.

But moths are not the only wildlife affected by artificial light.

Since most songbirds migrate at night, birds that have evolved to use the moon and stars as navigational tools during migration often become disoriented when flying over a landscape illuminated with artificial light.

“City centers that are very bright at night can act as attractants to migrating birds,” said ornithologist Charles Clarkson, director of avian research at the Audubon Society of Rhode Island. “They get pulled toward cities, and when they find themselves amid heavily lit buildings, they become disoriented, leading to a large number of window strikes and increased mortality.”

It is unclear why birds are attracted to lights, but studies have found increasing densities of migrating birds the closer one gets to cities.

“Birds probably see these cities on the horizon from a long distance, and they get pulled toward these locations en masse,” Clarkson said.

Street lights have also been found to be problematic to birds. Birds are active later into the evening when they are exposed to nearby artificial lighting at night, and they often sing later as well.

“Sometimes that might lead to more food availability, since lights attract insects,” Clarkson said. “But it also affects the physiology of the birds when they’re active when they should be sleeping. Some birds that live in heavily lit urban or suburban areas begin nesting earlier, too, up to a month earlier than they typically would. And that leads to a phenological mismatch between when food is traditionally available and when the chicks are hatching and need to be fed.”

Artificial lighting may cause other species to face a similar mismatch. Christopher Thawley, a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Rhode Island, studied lizards in Florida and found not only that the reptiles advanced the onset of breeding when exposed to artificial light, but they also laid more eggs and even grew larger under artificial lighting conditions. Other kinds of wildlife could have comparable results.

“Light at night can sometimes mimic a longer day length, and a lot of animals use length of day as a cue for when to start breeding,” he said. “If they’re exposed to light at night, they think the days are longer so it must be time to breed. Length of daylight is also a good cue for when to migrate or when to start calling, and that could potentially be an issue for some species.”

Thawley said frogs that call at night near artificial light could be more vulnerable to predators.

“When nights are darker, frogs call more, and when the moon is bright they call less,” he said. “It’s more dangerous to call during a full moon because predators could see you. That would be especially true under artificial lighting conditions, too.”

Scientists are still trying to understand the intricacies of how light pollution impacts wildlife, and yet some cities are already taking action to reduce its impact. Dozens of cities around the United States and Canada, including Boston, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., have launched “lights out” programs aimed at dimming city lights during the peak of bird migration.

Providence is not among the cities participating in a “lights out” program, but local advocates have discussed how to get it started for several years. They say it would be a positive first step toward reducing the impact of artificial lighting on local and migrating wildlife.

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog and frequently writes for ecoRI News.

Todd McLeish: Strengthening plant and animal diversity by planting native plants

Purple coneflowers, a native plant, on a ‘‘pollinator pathway’’ that helps boost populations of wide range of wildlife.

—Photo by Frank Carini/ecoRI News)

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Rhode Island gardeners in Cranston and Barrington are joining a national effort to install native plants in their gardens. The idea behind the effort is to link their yards with native habitat on protected lands and create what organizers are calling “pollinator pathways” to boost populations of bees, butterflies, birds and other wildlife.

In the Edgewood section of Cranston, Suzanne Borstein is leading the effort to get her neighbors and friends to plant native plants in what she calls the “tree lawn” — the area between the sidewalk and the road. Since last November, she has hosted a series of online meetings to discuss the initiative, and nearly three dozen Cranston households had agreed to participate by the beginning of May, with more signing on every week.

“The connectability of the garden spaces is what’s especially important,” Borstein said. “If you have a great yard but nobody else in the neighborhood does, then the pollinators won’t be attracted or sustained.”

Planting native plants and restoring native habitat is vital to preserving biodiversity, according to the National Audubon Society. The habitat created by native plant gardens helps to nurture and sustain insects, birds and other creatures.

The idea for the Pollinator Pathways program emerged from a popular book written by University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy called Bringing Nature Home. According to Borstein, Tallamy’s idea was to get people to replace half of their lawns with native plants that would support native insect populations, which in turn support bird populations. If enough people participated, the pollinator pathways would link properties that, when combined, would total more acreage than all of the country’s national parks.

Borstein, a clinical psychologist, said the goal of her effort is to “raise awareness of the importance of choosing native plants. I’m making it as local as I can so we can build community, neighbor to neighbor. I want to increase the availability and use of native plants.”

But where to buy native plants for local use is a considerable problem.

“There’s a new awakening that we should plant natives, but native plants are hard to find,” said Sally Johnson, vice president of the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society board of directors. “I don’t think the commercial market has responded yet to the need.”

The Rhody Native program, launched by the Rhode Island Natural History Survey in 2009, was initially successful at growing native plants from seeds collected locally, but it couldn’t be sustained by a nonprofit with limited staff and funding.

When Borstein contacted Johnson for help in sourcing native plants for her Edgewood gardeners, Johnson eventually identified about 10 native plant species that could be acquired from a commercial nursery in New Jersey.

“It’s called the Garden State for a reason,” Johnson said.

The Barrington Land Conservation Trust is also finding it difficult to find native plants for participants in its pollinator effort.

“Many local nurseries carry plants listed as native, but native to where? New England? The Midwest? Are they true natives or cultivars?” asked Cindy Pierce, one of the organizers of the Barrington project. “It can be daunting for a new gardener or even an experienced gardener new to natives.”

Pierce noted Blue Moon Farm Perennials, in South Kingstown, R.I., specializes in native plants, but the Barrington group is also working with the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society to acquire native plants. The Land Conservation Trust is also asking local nurseries to stock natives, and it plans to hold its own native plant sale in the fall.

The Barrington gardeners aren’t just focusing their efforts on planting natives in the tree lawn, however. They are instead encouraging their neighbors to take whatever steps they can to diversify their gardens with native plants.

“Whether it’s adding a few container plants, adding native plants to an existing garden, or creating a meadow,” Pierce said. “Eliminating the use of fertilizers and lawn chemicals is another important step everyone can take, along with reducing the size of your lawn, mowing less often and leaving the leaves in your garden. Every little bit helps.”

Assuming that interest in native plants and the Pollinator Pathways program continues to build, organizers in Barrington and Cranston hope additional communities will join and extend the corridors being built for pollinators. Those that add native plants to their gardens can add their properties to an online map of native plant gardens called Homegrown National Parks that author Tallamy has established.

“Even if you only have three feet of natives, you can get on the map and it hooks you up to a lot of resources,” Borstein said.

After the planting season, Borstein hopes to organize a neighborhood walk so residents can “see what’s possible.” She hopes such an event will lead to additional participants and further discussions about expanding the project.

“I don’t have anything formal planned, but I’d like to create some way that all of the other organizations in Rhode Island could communicate to share information,” Borstein said. “And I’d like to see it grow beyond pollinators and help people to understand the role of shrubs and trees as well. It will help gardeners understand more about the issues from a holistic point of view.”

Todd McLeish is a nature writer and ecoRI News contributor.

Todd McLeish: Invasive water plants imperil ponds

In less than seven years this Sacred Lotus patch has taken over nearly two acres of 12-acre Meshanticut Pond, in Cranston, R.I.

— R.I. Department of Environmental Management photo

From ecoRI News (ecori.0rg)

When a Cranston, R.I., resident planted a Sacred Lotus in the pond at Meshanticut State Park in memory of a family member in 2014, she didn’t realize that the plant was an aggressive invasive species. The lotus, which features enormous floating leaves that shade out native plants, quickly took over a large area of the Rhode Island pond.

Five years later, 75 volunteers spent 12 hours cutting it back, but they eradicated just 10 percent of the ever-expanding plant, which today covers 1.83 acres of the 12-acre pond.

It’s one of many examples of the challenges the state faces in trying to control and eliminate aquatic invasive species. More than 100 lakes and 27 river segments in Rhode Island are plagued with at least one species of invasive plant, according to the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM). These plants pose threats to healthy ecosystems, reduce recreational opportunities, and negatively impact the economy.

“Aquatic invasives are definitely a problem for water quality, but there aren’t a lot of resources dedicated to mapping them and trying to contain them,” said Kate McPherson, riverKeeper for Save The Bay. “The problem is they can show up in really pristine areas of the state for a variety of reasons, and a lot of the plants only need a couple of cells or a leaf to reproduce. They don’t need seeds. So unless you’re really diligent about scrubbing down your boat and other equipment after each use, it’s really hard to prevent their spread.”

In its 2020 fishing regulations, DEM prohibited the transport of invasive plants on any type of boat, motor, trailer, or fishing gear as a strategy to prevent the inadvertent movement of aquatic invasive species from one waterbody to another.

“It’s essentially an incentive for boaters or anglers to clean off their gear to make sure they don’t move any plants unintentionally,” said Katie DeGoosh of DEM’s Office of Water Resources. “It’s part of a national campaign known as Clean Drain Dry to remind anyone recreating on water how they should decontaminate their gear to avoid spreading invasives.”

DEM’s latest effort to combat aquatic invasive species is proposed regulations to ban their sale, purchase, importation, and distribution in the state. Rhode Island is the only state in the Northeast that has yet to regulate the sale of these plants.

The proposed regulations have the support of Save The Bay, the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, and the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society.

Those with aquatic plants in backyard water gardens aren’t the focus of the regulations because those residents aren’t selling the plants, DeGoosh said.

A mat of Water Chestnuts in Olney Pond at Lincoln Woods State Park limits the amount of light available to other aquatic plants, allowing it to quickly displace native species and decrease biodiversity. (DEM)

The proposed regulations list 48 species of aquatic invasive species whose sale would be prohibited. All but one — Sacred Lotus — are included on the Federal Noxious Weed List, are banned by other states in the region, were nominated by the Rhode Island Invasive Species Council or are included in the Rhode Island Aquatic Invasive Species Management Plan.

Among them are Carolina Fanwort, a problem species in numerous locations, such as Stump Pond in Smithfield; American Lotus, which covers 18 acres of Chapman Pond in Westerly; Brazilian Waterweed, which has invaded Hundred Acre Pond in South Kingstown; and common Water Hyacinth, an Amazonian species now found in the Pawcatuck River in Westerly.

Perhaps the worst of them is Variable Milfoil, which has been recorded in 69 lakes and ponds and 19 river segments in Rhode Island.

“Milfoil means a million tiny leaves,” said McPherson, who monitors local rivers for invasive species. “It looks like a submerged raccoon tail, and if you’ve been paddling in any pond in Rhode Island, you’ve probably seen it. A tiny little fragment can spread it.”

In many waterbodies, especially in urban communities, multiple species of aquatic invasives have colonized.

“They’re a problem because they can choke out native species and they may not be as good a food source for animals that eat aquatic plants,” McPherson said. “They’re also indicative of a water-quality problem. We’re seeing them more commonly in areas with too much phosphorous or nitrogen in the water. Areas with pollutants encourage these plants to grow.”

David Gregg, executive director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, also noted the impact of pollution in helping aquatic invasives take hold.

“People really care about their lakes, but most lakes in Rhode Island are man-made, shallow, and polluted by surrounding development — lawns, septics, road runoff — and so they grow invasive plants like nobody's business,” he said.

Like at Meshanticut Pond, once the plants become established in a waterbody, they are difficult to eradicate.

“It’s a cyclical problem,” McPherson said. “It’s super satisfying to go as a volunteer to rip it out, and super discouraging to go back a year later and find that it’s still there. If you don’t get all of the root system, it grows back.”

Natural History Survey staff documented the first occurrence of invasive water chestnut in the state in 2007 at Belleville Pond in North Kingstown. They led numerous volunteer efforts to manually remove it every year for a decade, and yet the plant remains. A similar endeavor to battle water chestnut at Chapman Pond in Westerly barely made a dent in the abundance of the plant.

“It’s a big problem,” McPherson said. “We need to get folks to think about how their activities can spread the plants and get them to think about aquatic invasives as a kind of contaminant.”

The proposed regulations, if approved, would be enforced via business inspections by DEM staff. Violators could be fined up to $500 per violation.

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: Frozen frogs are thawing out for spring but face death on the roads

Wood frog

— Photo by Brian Gratwicke

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic a yer ago coincided with the annual migration of frogs and salamanders to their breeding ponds, a trek that often results in mass mortalities as they cross roads trying to reach their preferred waterbody. The lockdown during the early stages of the pandemic last year gave a significant reprieve to amphibian populations, reducing roadway mortalities by as much as half, according to a New England researcher.

But this year, with traffic back to near normal levels, frogs and salamanders aren’t likely to fare as well. And wood frogs will likely be at the top of the list of roadkill victims.

In southern New England, wood frogs are one of the first signs of spring, according to herpetologist Mike Cavaliere, the Audubon Society of Rhode Island’s stewardship specialist. They are the first species to emerge from their winter hibernation, typically in mid to late March. And as soon as they awaken, he said, they hop to their breeding pools to seek a mate on the first night it rains.

“What’s particularly amazing about wood frogs is that they can produce a natural antifreeze that allows them to almost freeze completely solid in winter,” Cavaliere said. “This antifreeze is produced when the frogs start to feel ice crystals begin to form in late fall.”

Unique among frogs in the Northeast, the wood frog’s antifreeze is a chemical reaction between stored urine and glucose, which protects a frog’s cells and organs from freezing while allowing the rest of its body to freeze.

“Its brain shuts down, its heart stops, its lungs stop, everything stops for months. It’s like they’re in suspended animation,” Cavaliere said. “And once spring comes, they thaw out and the heart starts beating again. After about a day, they start hopping around, eating and mating right away. It’s an amazing feat of evolution that they’ve developed.”

Wood frogs are often joined by spring peepers and spotted salamanders in migrating to their breeding pools during rainy nights in March, but it’s the frogs that are killed in the greatest numbers.

“Road mortality is one of the great seemingly unassessed sources of pressure for amphibians,” said Greg LeClair, a graduate student at the University of Maine who coordinates The Big Night, an amphibian monitoring project to quantify the roadkill of frogs and salamanders during their spring migration. “We know that disease and climate are affecting amphibians, but road mortality has long been suspected to be a serious problem, though there is no data to quantify population declines.”

LeClair said that road mortality can be as high as 100 percent in some areas when traffic is high during the one night of the season that most migration takes place.

“The average is 20 percent of amphibians at any road crossing will get nailed by a car in a given year,” he said. “That’s devastating for some species.”

During The Big Night, volunteers at 300 sites around Maine typically find two living amphibians crossing the road for every one dead one. But last year, with far fewer vehicles on the road because of the pandemic, twice as many frogs and salamanders survived the journey. In fact, a study by the Road Ecology Center found that pandemic lockdowns last year spared millions of animals from roadway deaths.

“We had record survival, but we’ll never be able to replicate that data again,” said LeClair, noting the impossibility of experimentally reducing region-wide traffic levels like happened with the pandemic.

While last year’s reduction in road mortality probably resulted in a short-term increase in amphibian populations, LeClair said that doesn’t mean there will be more breeding activity this year, since it takes several years for amphibians to grow to adulthood and begin breeding.

“It will take a couple years to determine if amphibian populations benefitted from the pandemic. My suspicion is leaning toward no benefit,” he said. “Most amphibian populations are driven by juvenile survival more than adult survival, so impacts to juveniles have stronger impacts than impacts to adults. Dispersing juveniles last summer likely encountered normal-level traffic as they left the pool to find a territory.”

Whether wood frogs and other amphibians benefitted from the pandemic shutdowns, their increased survival rate last spring almost certainly benefitted other wildlife.

“Their eggs and tadpoles are a major food source for other animals in spring,” Cavaliere said. “It’s one of the first sources of protein available, so spotted turtles and other reptiles and amphibians will eat them, as will any other scavenger who’s hungry in spring and looking for protein.”

Those interested in helping scientists gather data about frog populations in Rhode Island should sign up to participate in FrogWatch through the Roger Williams Park Zoo. Online training for the program is available through March 31.

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish, an ecoRI News contributor, runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: A proposal for 'freedom lawns'

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Few people put much thought into the soil beneath their feet, but Loren Byrne does. A professor at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, R.I., Byrne is an expert on urban soil ecology, and he worries that humans are changing the structural integrity of soils in urban environments and limiting the ability of plants and animals to live in and nourish the earth.

“Soil is easily overlooked and taken for granted because it’s everywhere,” he said. “We walk all over it and think of it as dirt that we can manipulate at our will. But the secret of soil is what’s happening with soil organisms and what’s happening with their interactions below ground that help regulate our earth’s ecosystems.”

Byrne contributed a chapter about urban soils to a report, State of Knowledge of Soil Biodiversity, issued last year by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. He discussed how the ecology of the soil changes as it is compacted during construction, paved over, chemically treated for lawns, and dug up and carried away.

“The main takeaway is that urbanization can potentially harm biodiversity, but our biggest current threat is ignorance,” he said. “We don’t understand enough about soil biodiversity in urban environments, so we may not be able to manage it in ways to provide the benefits that are possible.”

Soil is the foundation for terrestrial life, according to Byrne. It’s the medium in which plants are grown and it regulates the nitrogen cycle, sequesters carbon, and manages the flow of water. He said soils are fascinating because they contain the full range of life, from single-celled bacteria and fungi to animals of all varieties.

“If you’re patient enough to get down on your hands and knees and pull up some soil, you’ll see mites, springtails, isopods, millipedes, centipedes, spiders, ants, beetles,” Byrne said. “Some of them have negative popular connotations, but ecologically, if we can see them as having value, then that will help us maintain more sustainable landscapes.

“Changing our perspectives of what these organisms are doing in the ecosystem is important. They perform beneficial functions, like decomposition. I tell my students that if it wasn’t for this whole suite of biodiversity in our soils, we’d literally be up to our necks in dead stuff.”

Although it may seem counterintuitive, Byrne said urban soils contain the full range of biodiversity that is found in natural soils, and some research shows that they contain more organisms and a greater diversity than agricultural soils.

“A lot of urban habitat types, like lawns and little forest patches, are perennial, so they don’t face the same level of annual disturbance as agricultural fields,” he said. “And they have more organic matter in them, so that allows the food web to become more complex. Urban soils are home to a lot of organisms.”

He noted, however, that there is also a massive volume of degraded soil in urban areas that is compacted, trampled, over-fertilized, and removed and replaced with lower quality soil.

“It’s a very interesting dichotomy,” Byrne said. “There are some high-quality soils and other locations that have been severely negatively impacted where we would want to somehow improve them.”

How to improve degraded soils is the topic of Byrne’s latest research. Decompacting the soil and remediating pollution are important steps, but the key is the addition of organic matter.

“There’s been a wide diversity of organic matter sources that have been investigated, from basic garden compost to sewage sludge to bio-char, which is a burned organic matter that, when added to soil, provides good surfaces for microbes to live on,” he said. “But you have to be very careful about what you’re using and in what contexts and the source, because not all organic matter is the same.

“A lot of research has shown that adding organic matter will help remediate the soils in various ways. Organic matter holds onto water, so it helps with water issues, for instance. But in locations that are already prone to water-logging, adding organic matter could be a bad thing. So context matters. You need to be familiar with site specific issues to come up with a good management plan.”

Byrne focuses a great deal of his research attention on lawns, which he calls a “human-created ecosystem.” While he noted that a lawn provides a nice place for a picnic and is better than pavement, he said installing a lawn is the least biodiverse way of improving urban landscapes.

“The goal with a lawn is often one grass species that’s bright green and isn’t growing or reproducing, which is the exact opposite of what life wants to do,” he said. “In the grand scheme of all life, a place becomes more diverse over time, it grows and reproduces, and humans are trying to stop all of that in a lawn.

“The problem isn’t so much the lawn itself as the monoculture, pesticide-managed lawn. A lot of what ecologists advocate is a more biodiverse lawn where we let the so-called weeds grow and let the grass grow a little taller. That’s good for the soil ecosystem because a higher variety of plants and no chemical pesticides will allow more soil organisms to thrive.”

To create a more sustainable urban landscape, Byrne advocates for what some have called “freedom lawns” — a mowed lawn that maintains a high diversity of grasses and weeds and good soils.

“If we can convince people that it’s more patriotic to shift to freedom lawns, it will be more sustainable,” he said. “And if we can shrink the area of lawn by creating more biodiverse habitat through shrubs and wildflowers, that’s another step toward sustainability and biodiversity.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

New camera might save Right Whales

Right Whale with her calf

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The beginning of the calving season for North Atlantic Right Whales, one of the rarest marine mammals, is looking promising with four newborn calves observed in December. But the outlook for the species, whose global population is estimated at only 360 individuals, remains grim. Between fishing-gear entanglements and collisions with ships, more whales have died in recent years than were born.

A new technology on the horizon may help to reduce one of those threats, however. A smart-camera system invented by a team of scientists and engineers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts is being tested in local waters and could be deployed on vessels traversing the East Coast to reduce the threat of ships striking Right Whales.

“The idea is simple,” said WHOI assistant scientist Daniel Zitterbart, who is leading the project. “We took a commercial thermal imaging camera, highly stabilized for roll and pitch, and a computer algorithm that looks at images and tries to tease out what’s a whale compared to what’s a wave or a bird or whatever.

“The key part is, if you’re in a large vessel and you know there’s a whale 300 yards in front of you, it’s probably too late for you to turn away from it. Our aim is to push the detection range as far as we can, which makes things difficult on a rocking boat. But getting the range we need to make a difference for the animal is the objective.”

A prototype of the smart-camera system was tested last summer on a research vessel in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, in Massachusetts Bay, about midway between Gloucester and Provincetown, where humpback whales congregate to feed each year. A similar land-based installation was also deployed at a busy shipping channel in British Columbia traversed by endangered southern resident Killer Whales. The initial tests were promising.

“If you’re talking about very large vessels like tankers or cargo vessels, they may not be maneuverable enough for the detection ranges we get, but for cruise vessels, ferries, and fishing vessels that are more maneuverable, it definitely can make a difference,” Zitterbart said.

A little larger than a half-gallon milk carton, the camera system must be installed at least 15 feet above the water line to be effective. Within seconds, it can detect the presence of whales a mile or more away and alert the captain in time for the vessel to slow down or change course.

Unlike human observers or spotter planes, which are occasionally used in the United States and Canada to watch for Right Whales and alert nearby ships, the camera system can spot whales in daylight and darkness with little effort.

James Miller, an ocean-engineering professor at the University of Rhode Island, invented a forward-looking sonar device about 20 years ago that could be used to detect whales, reefs, and other obstacles to navigation beneath the water’s surface. He commercialized the product by founding FarSounder Inc., a Warwick,R.I.-based company with clients around the world. The company’s sonar devices can scan up to 1,000 meters in front of a ship moving at speeds of up to 25 knots to detect underwater obstacles.

“Dr. Zitterbart's technology for detecting whales at the sea surface can be an important part of the solution for reducing ship strikes, one of the leading causes of death for large whales,” Miller said.

Zitterbart said sonar is a better detection method for sensing static objects beneath the surface, but he believes his thermal camera system is more effective at detecting moving objects such as whales that may only be noticed for a few seconds. Both technologies can be hampered by challenging environmental conditions.

The recipient of the 2019 Young Investigator Award from the U.S. Office of Naval Research for his work on whale detection, Zitterbart previously developed a thermal imaging system for protecting whales and other marine mammals from underwater noise produced by air guns used in seismic surveys.

Assuming that his tests are successful this year, Zitterbart plans to deploy his camera system on a number of vessels without his development team aboard to ensure that remote troubleshooting can be conducted effectively. Eventually, he hopes to find a company interested in commercializing the technology.

“Thermal imaging systems are a powerful new tool in real-time whale detection,” he told Ocean Insights. “Used alone or in conjunction with acoustic monitoring, this technology could significantly reduce the risk of vessel strikes.”

Todd McLeish is a Rhode Island resident and nature writer .

Todd McLeish: She's watching deer, earthworms and other threats to region's native plants

A Salt Marsh Pink flower. Hope Lesson is trying to propagate the rare native plant in Connecticut.

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Thanks to lessons taught by her grandparents, Hope Leeson has always been drawn to plants. Some of her oldest memories are of trees, especially their different shapes.

“I’ve always had this haunting sense of awareness of their forms,” said Leeson, a botanist, plant conservationist and botanical educator from South Kingstown, R.I., who has walked much of Rhode Island in search of wetlands and rare plants. “I was always interested by their shapes, and by other little things on the ground that also attracted my attention, like the incredible structure of inch-high plants, sedges and flowers. There are so many different unbelievable shapes and forms that plants take.”

Through more than 30 years of field experience, Leeson has developed an intimate knowledge of the Ocean State’s plant communities, and she has applied that knowledge to the protection of rare species, the sustainable collection of plant seeds and the propagation of native plants for habitat-restoration efforts. This work has given her unique insights into the changes taking place in the state’s natural areas and their impacts on native species.

“There’s a lot happening in the ground that we don’t see,” she said. “And there’s certainly a lot happening because of deer eating much of what’s on the ground. Both of those are influencing the next generation of plant communities.”

She noted that Rhode Island’s abundant deer primarily eat native plants, and they are so voracious that in many places few young plants have a chance to mature before they are eaten. And since deer avoid most invasive species, they are providing inroads for invasives to gain a foothold and spread widely.

“I also worry that we’re not really aware of the far-reaching impact of earthworms,” Leeson said of the eight species found in southern New England, all of which originated in Europe or Asia. “The plant communities we have are adapted to a slow cycling of nutrients, and earthworms really speed that up. They also take a lot of leaf litter and pull it down into the soil, which changes the whole nutrient cycle, in terms of what’s available to plants.

“So like deer, earthworms are opening up areas for nonnative species to come in, because those nonnatives come from areas that have earthworms and can take advantage of the opening that’s been created. We can’t control where earthworms go, and they’re really changing the chemistry of the soil.”

It’s not just soil chemistry that’s changing, Leeson said, but it’s also soil temperature. And that may be affecting the mycorrhizal relationship between plants and fungi that enables plants to acquire nutrients through their roots. If that relationship is disrupted, many plant communities could be impacted.

“I just see so many places where it appears like the forest is dying, particularly areas that are more urban,” she said. “It smells different, it looks different, it’s a big change, and how that comes out in the end, we don’t know. It may all be fine, but on our human scale it seems like a loss of something — or maybe there will be a gain in another hundred years.”

Leeson grew up in Providence and South Kingstown and earned an art degree at Brown University, where she took as many environmental courses as she could. After graduating, she spent a few years painting murals in people’s homes and creating decorative stenciling, before taking jobs as a naturalist on Prudence Island and at Goddard Memorial State Park in Warwick. That work led to jobs at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and several environmental consulting firms.

During one project, when the Narragansett Electric Co. proposed a new power line corridor from East Greenwich to Burrillville, R.I., she walked the entire 44 miles to locate any wetlands the route would cross.

In more recent years, she consulted with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Save The Bay, The Nature Conservancy and other agencies to document rare plant communities and invasive species. She also worked for more than 10 years as the botanist for the Rhode Island Natural History Survey.

“Not only does Hope like to dig into the academic understanding of plants, she values the study of native plants because they connect to so many of her other interests and areas of accomplishment, including gastronomy, environmental conservation, art, gardening, teaching, and social networking,” said David Gregg, director of the Natural History Survey. “Her multi-level connection to native plants is readily apparent when you spend time with her, and is an important reason, besides the interest inherent in the projects themselves, that volunteers have been so attracted to working with her on the Survey’s various Rhody Native activities.”

Leeson’s establishment of the Rhody Native program to propagate up to 100 species of native plants helped diversify habitats at wildlife refuges, salt marshes, and private and public gardens. Eventually, the program became so successful that she was receiving orders for thousands of plants, which was more than she could produce on her own. Without a commercial nursery willing to take it over, the program was discontinued.

SShe is now completing a project to grow a rare wildflower called Salt-Marsh Pink, which is limited to two sites in Rhode Island and one in Connecticut. The plants she is growing will be used to bolster the Connecticut population following a restoration of the marsh.

“We thought we might cross-pollinate plants from Connecticut with the Rhode Island populations to reduce the genetic bottleneck,” Leeson said. “But the Rhode Island populations are really small, and rabbits ate all of the seedpods before they were ripe, so I was unable to collect any seedpods. But the Connecticut seeds are sown, and they’re just resting for the winter.”

When she’s not working, Leeson enjoys riding horses, which she said can “eat up a couple hours every other day.” But she’s never far from plants, whether in her garden or in nearby forests.

“I’m drawn to places that are rocky, because that geography and geology is interesting to me,” she said. “And the coastal plain pond shores are endlessly fascinating to me because their geological life cycle is so interesting. When water levels are down, they have this explosion of plant species, many of them rare, and then there will be a decade when everything is underwater and you wait for 10 years before they all reveal themselves again.”

Leeson also enjoys foraging for food, including the tubers of evening primrose, which she roasts with carrots. She even occasionally cooks with invasive species — she makes pie from Japanese knotweed, pesto from garlic mustard, and enjoys the berries from autumn olive.

As she approaches retirement age, Leeson is teaching botany and plant ecology at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is especially looking forward to teaching a five-week course in January called “Winter Treewatching” and a spring semester class on the “Weeds of Providence.”

“That one will look at all of the areas around Providence that are vegetated by things that come in on their own,” Leeson said. “It’s getting people to think about how we don’t even notice these things, and yet they’re performing pretty important functions, from carbon sequestration and air filtration to providing food for insects and birds.”

Although she said that teaching online during the pandemic has been “weird,” she has been pleased to see so many people walking at Rhode Island’s parks and nature preserves.

“It’s really helping people to slow down and look around them more, at least I hope it is,” she said. “They seem to be noticing things they never noticed before, and I think that’s a really good thing.

“We’ve gotten so distanced from the natural world around us that there’s not an impetus to steward it or take care of it. There’s a sense that it will always be there and it doesn’t really matter, but it’s what sustains us all. We won’t exist without it.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: More sites found with threatened turtles

A Diamondback Terrapin

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

A pilot project using volunteers to scout for new populations of Rhode Island’s rarest turtle, the Diamondback Terrapin, turned up 15 new sites where the turtles have been confirmed. But despite the new populations, the biologist who led the project said the state’s terrapins are no less threatened than they were before the new populations were discovered.

Diamondback Terrapins are the only turtle in the region that live in salt marshes and brackish waters.

Herpetologist Scott Buchanan, a wildlife biologist at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, said that before 1990, when a population of these turtles was discovered in Barrington, “no one had seen a terrapin in Rhode Island in many years.” Additional populations were discovered elsewhere in the state in the past decade, and when Buchanan was hired in 2018 and began asking around, he heard a number of unconfirmed reports of the turtles being observed elsewhere in Rhode Island.

“That led me to think that they’re probably more widespread in the state than the narrative would lead us to believe,” he said.

So he examined maps to identify “reasonable places” where he could send volunteers on a regular basis to see if they could spot the terrapins.

Four volunteers each visited two to four sites twice a week from late May through mid-July, and an additional volunteer surveyed a dozen sites. During each visit they scanned the water with binoculars for three 5-minute periods and counted any turtle heads they observed.

The discovery of 15 new sites was a revelation to Buchanan.

“What it means is that they are much more widespread than we had thought,” he said. “It’s encouraging from a conservation standpoint, but at many of these sites, we have little or no information about how many turtles may be there, whether they are successfully breeding, or whether they are established populations. We don’t want to be overconfident or get too comfortable with the fact that there are multiple sites containing the species.”

Most of the newly discovered terrapin sites are in coves along mid and upper Narragansett Bay. They’re still mostly absent from the lower bay, according to Buchanan.

“What we’re seeing now is probably a shadow of their former distribution and abundance,” he said. “They’re out there, that’s excellent, but we know there’s lots of places they don’t occur. All the evidence suggests that they’re still absent from many places where they were historically present. And the types of abundances that we’re documenting are probably far less than historic abundances.”

Buchanan speculated that the newly discovered populations in the upper bay may be the result of dispersal from the Barrington population, which has grown to number in the hundreds because of extensive conservation efforts.

Despite the success of the survey project, Buchanan is still concerned for the state’s Diamondback Terrapins. Most terrapin eggs are consumed by what he calls “human-subsidized predators,” including coyotes, raccoons, skunks and dogs. Terrapins are also at risk of being illegally collected for the pet trade, which is why he prefers not to reveal the location of the newly discovered sites. They also face drowning in crab traps, injury from being struck by boats, and automobile strikes as females cross roads on their way to their nesting territories.

“The big threat, though, is sea-level rise and salt marsh decline,” he said. “They’re an obligate salt marsh species; if sea level rises and marshes disappear, they don’t have a chance. That’s something I’m especially worried about over the next 10, 20, 30 years along the Rhode Island coast. Salt marshes are critical as a source of food and a place where they overwinter and take shelter, especially the juveniles and hatchlings.

“This new information we have is very encouraging, but it doesn’t mean we should let our guard down. They’re still a species that warrants conservation, even without sea-level rise. We must remain vigilant.”

Having identified the location of additional terrapin populations, Buchanan hopes to prioritize those sites for future conservation efforts, modeled after the successful nest-protection and monitoring efforts in Barrington.

“Knowing where they are, there are lots of small steps you can do to improve their conservation,” he said. “Things like small-scale habitat management, create barriers to keep them off busy roads, public outreach to ensure boaters use caution, adapt local pot fishery management.”

The success of the pilot project to identify new Diamondback Terrapin populations has inspired Buchanan to double or triple the effort next summer at numerous additional locations. He also hopes to continue the project for many years to eventually be able to identify population trends at each site. He will be seeking additional volunteers this spring to survey coastal sites around the state in June and July. Those interested in volunteering should contact Buchanan at scott.buchanan@dem.ri.gov.

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Invasive little pet turtles

Red-Eared Sliders

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

They are the most popular pet turtle in the United States and available at pet shops around the world, but because Red-Eared Sliders live for about 30 years, they are often released where they don’t belong after pet owners tire of them. As a result, they are considered one of the world’s 100 most invasive species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Southern New England isn’t immune to the problems they cause.

“I hear the same story again and again,” said herpetologist Scott Buchanan, a wildlife biologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. “‘We bought this turtle for a few dollars when Johnny was 8, he had it for 10 years and now he’s going to college, so we put it in a local pond.’ That’s been the story for hundreds and thousands of kids in recent decades.”

Red-Eared Sliders are native to the Southeast and south-central United States and northern Mexico, where they are commonly found in a variety of ponds and wetlands. Buchanan said they are tolerant of human disturbance and tolerant of pollution, and they are dietary generalists, so they can live almost anywhere. And they do. They breed throughout much of Australia as a result of pets being released, and in Southeast Asia they are raised as an agricultural crop and have displaced numerous native species. In the Northeast, they live in the same habitat as Eastern Painted Turtles, one of the area’s most common species, but they grow about 50 percent larger. Numerous studies suggest that sliders outcompete native turtles for food, nesting, and basking sites.

Despite concerns about their impact on native turtle populations, red-eared sliders are still legal to buy in Rhode Island and most of the United States, though Buchanan said that in the Ocean State they may only be sold by a licensed pet dealer and can’t be transported across state lines. Those who buy a slider must keep it indoors and must never release it into the wild, including into a private pond.

“But people often aren’t aware of the regulations, or they don’t bother to look at them, or they just don’t follow them,” Buchanan said. “We see lots of evidence of sliders, especially in parts of the state where there are lots of people. The abundance of Red-Eared Sliders in Rhode Island is tied to human population density, which means mostly Providence and the surrounding communities. But I’ve also found them in Newport and Narragansett and elsewhere.”

Sliders are especially common in the ponds at Roger Williams Park, in Providence, and in the Blackstone River.

While conducting research for his doctorate at the University of Rhode Island from 2013 to 2016, Buchanan surveyed ponds throughout the state looking for spotted turtles, a species of conservation concern in the region. During his research, he also documented other turtle species, including many red-eared sliders.

“The good news was that while spotted turtles can occupy the same habitat as red-eared sliders, I found a greater probability of occupancy by spotted turtles at the opposite end of the human density spectrum as I found sliders,” he said. “Spotted turtles tend to occur where human population density is low, so at least at this moment in time, we would not expect red-eared sliders to be directly competing with populations of spotted turtles.”

Nonetheless, Buchanan advocates what he calls a “containment policy” to keep the sliders from expanding their range in the state.

“It’s mostly about public education,” he said. “We want to make sure people know not to release them in their local wetlands. If we found sliders in an important conservation area — Arcadia, for example — we might consider removing them, though we’re not doing that now.

“They’re well-established in Rhode Island now, so the thought of eradicating them does not seem like a feasible management solution. We just have to live with them, but we also have to try to minimize their spread and colonization of new wetlands.”

No other non-native turtle from the pet trade besides the Red-Eared Slider has been found to be a common sight in the wild in Rhode Island, though Buchanan said he recently had a report of a Russian tortoise — another popular pet — that was discovered wandering around Coventry.

For those who want to get rid of a pet Red-Eared Slider, Buchanan doesn’t offer any easy alternatives.

“You’ve got to be committed to housing that turtle for 30 or 40 years until it dies,” he said. “That’s why this is such a problematic issue. It’s easy to buy a teeny turtle for ten bucks and think it’s no big deal, but that animal is going to live for a long time. When you purchase it, you have to be responsible for it for the rest of the turtle’s life.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: Threats to Rhode Island's rare plants

Salt-marsh pink

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Only two populations of salt-marsh pink are left in Rhode Island, and they are at risk from sea-level rise.

David Gregg worries that not enough is being done to protect Rhode Island’s rare plants.

“There are a lot of plant species that we’re monitoring out of existence,” said Gregg, the executive director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey. “We check them every year, and there are often fewer of them each year. The best-case scenario is that they stay the same, but many populations are getting smaller and smaller.”

He believes that conservationists must be bolder during the climate crisis if native wild plants are going to survive in the coming decades. Rather than simply monitoring the status of rare plants in Rhode Island, he is advocating for the use of more active strategies to boost plant populations.

“There’s been a big debate among biologists about how active we should be in trying to save rare species,” Gregg said. “Are we going to end up gardening nature? Aren’t we bound to make faulty decisions? If we get involved in active management of rare species, aren’t we doomed to screw it up?”

With little left to lose in some cases, the Natural History Survey has chosen to partner with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and the Native Plant Trust — formerly the New England Wild Flower Society — on an effort to propagate select species of rare plants and transplant them into the wild to augment existing wild populations and establish new populations.

The “Rhode Island At-risk Plant Propagation Project” is an outgrowth of the Rhody Native program, which was established a decade ago to help commercial plant growers propagate native plants for retail sale. At its peak, the program was growing 50 different species, but eventually just one species became dominant, a salt marsh grass used in restoration projects.

“Rhody Native became a commodity growing project, and that’s not our business,” Gregg said. “Our strength is in rare species — learning to propagate them and experimenting with them.”

The Natural History Survey’s “Propagation Project” began last year with the selection of four plants to propagate to test the concept: salt-marsh pink; wild indigo; wild lupine; and several varieties of native milkweed. The lupine and indigo were selected in part because they are the food plant for a rare butterfly, the frosted elfin. Just two populations of salt-marsh pink are left in Rhode Island, and they are at risk from sea-level rise.

“Our populations of marsh pink have very few plants, and we’re worried about inbreeding,” Gregg said. “The idea is to take plants from a Connecticut restoration site, cross pollinate them with plants from Rhode Island to reduce inbreeding, and then return some to Connecticut and use the others to reinforce the Rhode Island populations.”

The big challenge with this kind of project is learning how to propagate the plants in a greenhouse setting.

“These aren’t domesticated plants we’re working with,” said Hope Leeson, a botanist for the Natural History Survey who led the Rhody Native program. “We have to imitate the environmental conditions the plants are adapted to — the temperature, humidity, soil, water, and other factors.”

Salt-marsh pink is a particularly challenging example. It’s an annual species that produces a large quantity of seeds in a good year, but the seeds are extremely small — Leeson described them as “dust-like” — and they don’t tolerate drying, so they can’t be stored over the winter.

“We collected seeds in October and had to sow them immediately,” she said. “In the wild, they grow in a band of vegetation along the top of a salt marsh, where it’s a moist sandy soil mixed with peat. Periodically it floods as the tide comes in and then drains. I’ve got to come up with a soil mixture that’s like the natural conditions to make the plant happy.”

Wild indigo, on the other hand, is very drought tolerant and doesn’t grow well in moist or humid conditions. Its seeds, like those of wild lupine, must be scarified before they will germinate.

“A lot of species in the pea family have a hard seed coat that keeps them from taking in water until conditions are right for germinating,” Leeson said. “In the wild, lupine grows in sandy, gravely soil, so the seeds are likely to get abraded by the sand over the winter, allowing it to take in water to trigger the process of coming out of dormancy.”

To get lupine and indigo seeds to germinate, Leeson must first scratch them with sandpaper to simulate the natural scarification process.

Leeson and volunteers from the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society are raising many of the target plants in greenhouses at the University of Rhode Island’s East Farm and at a private site in Portsmouth.

Gregg said the project is being undertaken on a shoestring budget to demonstrate it’s potential.

“We hope someone will realize that we have this unique capacity to do research propagation of rare plants, and maybe that will help us find some funders to support the project,” he said.

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: The decline of other N.E. pollinators

Rusty patched bumblebees, listed on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Endangered Species List, once occupied grasslands and tallgrass prairies of the Northeast and Upper Midwest, but most of these habitats have been lost or degraded.

— U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Most of the many news reports about the decline of bees and other pollinators focus on only one side of the story: the drop in honeybee numbers because of colony collapse disorder and its impact on food crops. Yet, as important as that issue is to human food security, it only affects one pollinator species, the European honeybee, a non-native species that is managed by commercial beekeepers.

The decline of native pollinators, of which there are thousands of species in North America that affect thousands of additional species of plants and animals, is largely ignored. Robert Gegear is trying to change that.

The assistant professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth has launched a citizen science program called the Beecology Project to learn more about the ecology of native pollinators, starting with bumblebees, to better understand why some species are doing so poorly while others remain common.

“The survival of native pollinators has a positive cascading effect on so many other species, both the wild plants they pollinate and the other wildlife using those plants for food, shelter, and nest sites,” Gegear said. “Collectively, those relationships are increasing ecosystem health. But as we start to remove pollinators, we start to affect all these other species.

“Certain pollinators are heading toward extinction, but an equal or greater number have not been affected and are increasing. In ecology, it’s about diversity — not how many individuals you see but how many species you see, since each species has a connection with a flowering plant that has a connection to other species.”

For example, Gegear noted that Bombus impatiens, the common eastern bumblebee, is abundant, expanding, and easy to attract to flower gardens, but many other bumblebee species that used to be common are declining rapidly. Why that is happening is unknown.

“It could be that whatever we’re doing to the environment to drive declines in many species of bumblebees is having a direct positive impact on Bombus impatiens,” he said. “We use a lot of non-native plants in our gardens, and Bombus impatiens loves non-native plants, but other bumblebees don’t like non-natives. That’s one possibility. Or impatiens could be more flexible in its use of nest site habitat. We may be removing habitat that supports species that are less flexible in their nesting requirements. We have evidence for both explanations.”

Among the species formerly common in southern New England and are now quite rare are the yellow-banded bumblebee, the yellow bumblebee, the half-black bumblebee and the rusty patched bumblebee. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recently added the rusty patched bumblebee to the Endangered Species List.

The populations of some of these rare species declined especially fast. When Gegear was conducting his doctoral research in the late 1990s, the yellow-banded bumblebee was so abundant that he considered it a pest. Five years later, however, and he couldn’t find it for miles around his research sites.

“The problem is that we don’t know enough about the natural history of most of these species,” he said. “We know virtually nothing about their nesting preferences, about their overwintering preferences, their floral preferences. They have those preferences for a reason, but if you look at plant lists for bumblebees, everything is equal for all species, and that’s not the case.”

Since little is known about which flowers the rare species prefer, many of the growing number of pollinator gardens being installed around the region aren’t benefitting the species most in need. Instead, they’re just helping the species that are already common.

“People want to help, and they have good intentions, but the science isn’t there to tell them what they should be planting,” Gegear said. “I’m trying to fill in those gaps and change the focus of pollinator research by taking more of an ecological approach.”

To do so, he needs large amounts of data. To collect that data, he has turned to the general public. He teamed with computer scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to develop a web-based app to enable anyone to take photos and videos of bumblebees they see, identify them to species, identify the flowers they are visiting, and submit to Gegear’s database.

Based on the data he has already received, new populations of the rare bumblebee species have been found that will enable him to establish new research sites to learn more about those species. Many participants in the program are even planting gardens with the flowers those rare species prefer to boost those bumblebee populations.

Female monarch butterfly.

From ecoRI News

It’s not just bumblebee preferences that are little known. The same is true of the floral preferences of other pollinators. Gegear plans to expand his app to include observations of butterflies and other types of bees. Eventually, he hopes to expand it further so it can be used to conserve pollinators across the country.

“I put a plant on my property last year that we learned one species prefers, and as soon as it came into bloom, the threatened species came in,” he said. “So this approach really does work.”

Gegear is seeking to recruit more Beecology Project volunteers from throughout the region.

“And if you don’t want to use the app, just take a 10-second video of any bumblebee you see and send it to me,” he said. “That’s just as good.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: First wild lizard found in Rhode Island!

Five-lined skink

— Photo by Kris Kelley

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Rhode Island’s herpetological community is bursting with excitement at the discovery of the first confirmed lizard sighting in the state. A five-lined skink (Plestiodon fasciatus) of uncertain origin was found in South County on April 22.

Emilie Holland, an environmental scientist with the Federal Highway Administration and president of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, made the discovery and immediately contacted other National History Survey board members with expertise in identifying lizards.

“I was just poking around when I saw the little guy,” she said. “I thought it was a salamander at first, and I grabbed it really fast. When I opened my hand, I thought it was going to be a mole salamander, but it didn’t move as fast as a mole salamander normally would.”

When University of Rhode Island herpetologist Nancy Karraker received a text and photo of the lizard from Holland, she was in the middle of a virtual meeting.

“My initial reaction was, how quickly can I get out of this meeting and go find Emily to see it,” Karraker said.

The five-lined skink is typically found throughout the Southeast and Midwest, where it’s quite common. Small numbers are also found in the Hudson Valley of New York and into western Connecticut and western Massachusetts. But with the exception of a few unconfirmed observations, they have never been recorded in Rhode Island.

Growing about 6 inches long with distinct brown and cream-colored stripes, the skinks have blue tails as juveniles, and adult males have a reddish throat. The one Holland found was a juvenile.

“The blue tail is a defense mechanism,” said herpetologist Lou Perrotti, director of conservation at Roger Williams Park Zoo. “A predator is going to attack the brightest piece of the animal, and the lizard can drop its tail to get away. It gives them a protection advantage.”

The big question is how it arrived in Rhode Island: Did it arrive naturally on its own, or was it brought to the area by humans, either intentionally or unintentionally? Since it was found near railroad tracks and a lumberyard, many possibilities are being considered.

“Skinks love rocky woodlands where there’s lots of fallen timber,” Perrotti said. “And they love railroad corridors because they’re typically lined with rocks that are great for thermoregulation. Lizards love to climb out on the rocks.

“Was it a stowaway on a train? Was it transported up here in lumber or mulch? We don’t know. We need to find more specimens. Is it possible there’s a population here? Absolutely. But unless you really look for them, they’re really hard to find.”

Scott Buchanan, a herpetologist with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, has contacted a colleague who studies Italian wall lizards that have dispersed up the Northeast rail corridor, but no skinks are known to have been found along the tracks.

Holland hopes it arrived in Rhode Island on its own.

“The child side of my brain says, ‘How cool would that be,’” she said. “But when I stop to think about it, the likelihood is that it somehow got imported here.”

Karraker agreed.

“It’s not a range extension in the sense that it marched its way east to Rhode Island,” she said. “My immediate thought is that it came in somebody’s mulch — or some eggs did — or in a load of wood. There are enough people like me and Lou and Scott and all my students who are constantly running around Rhode Island looking for stuff, rolling over logs. If they were broadly distributed in Rhode Island, we’d know about it.”

Another possibility is that the skink was released by someone who kept it as a pet.

“Pretty much every animal is in the pet trade, but I’ve spent time perusing Craig’s List and I had my students investigating pet shops this semester, and I don’t think this species turned up in anyone’s records,” Karraker said. “They’re not something that tames easily, they’re very sensitive to people being around, and they hide, so they don’t make a good pet.”

Because the skink probably survived here in the winter, it raises additional speculation. David Gregg, executive director of the Natural History Survey, wonders whether the changing climate may have played a role in its survival in the state.

“If further research shows this is a breeding population and not just a lone escapee, then however this particular population of skinks got to Rhode Island, they never could have survived here before but now they can,” he said.

But Karraker noted that some native populations of the skink in New York are nearly as far north as the Adirondack Mountains, where it’s often colder than Rhode Island, so she isn’t convinced climate change has played a role.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with climate,” she said. “Something got moved and the skink was in it, and Rhode Island isn’t a bad place to be. The skink detected that there weren’t any other lizards here to compete with, and it survived.”

The next step for the group of herpetologists is to search the area for additional specimens to determine how large the local population may be. Buchanan will be screening the first specimen for diseases and conducting a genetic analysis to determine from where it originated.

But for now, the skink lives in an aquarium at Karraker’s house, where she is feeding it termites.

“I didn’t want to release it,” she said. “That’s a decision for DEM to make, not me. So I’m just waiting to make the handoff to DEM to take charge and figure out what to do with it.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog

Todd McLeish: Pandemics threaten amphibians, too

Green frogs

— Photo by Todd McLeish

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

As frogs and salamanders emerge from winter hibernation and migrate to their breeding ponds, herpetologists throughout the region are paying close attention to the growing number of diseases threatening amphibians in the Northeast.

The most worrisome is an infectious fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, or chytrid, which has caused major die-offs of frog populations in the tropics and elsewhere and is blamed for numerous frog extinctions in Latin America.

According to University of Rhode Island herpetologist Nancy Karraker, chytrid grows on the skin of frogs, and when it’s found on their drink patch — a site on their belly where they absorb water into their bodies — the fungus makes it impossible for the frogs to regulate how much water they absorb, causing them to become desiccated and die.

“Chytrid has been found in multiple species of frogs in the Northeast, but we haven’t seen massive die-offs here,” said Karraker, a University of Rhode Island associate professor of natural resources science who has studied frogs around the world. “But that doesn’t mean that die-offs haven’t occurred, just that they haven’t been at the scale we’ve seen in South America. So we can’t say it’s not a problem here, and it certainly could become a serious problem.”

Some scientists believe that the disease originated in African clawed frogs, which were shipped around the world for use in human-pregnancy tests from the 1940s to the ’60s. Many of the frogs escaped from captivity and could easily have spread the disease to native frogs in many places. Other scientists believe the fungus was ubiquitous around the globe and that, initially, the only frogs that died were those with compromised immune systems.

“I don’t know where the greatest weight of support is for those ideas today,” Karraker said. “But maybe our frogs aren’t as susceptible because they’re not facing the kinds of stressors that may have impacted frogs in other places. Or it could be something to do with their natural history. We just don’t know, and that’s partly why I’m worried.”

In 2010, Antioch University New England graduate student Mandy Gaudreau, working in collaboration with Lou Perrotti, conservation director at Roger Williams Park Zoo, in Providence, swabbed 47 frogs and toads at 11 sites in Rhode Island and detected chytrid in 21 percent of the samples.

“What struck me about her results is that most of the ponds where she found chytrid were manmade ponds — farm ponds, retention ponds,” Perrotti said. “Why was it in those and not in the natural wetlands?”

He also wonders whether climate has an effect.=

“Frogs in Panama got wiped out. Costa Rica got wiped out. It seems like it’s worst at that certain temperature range,” Perrotti said. “Maybe our winters knock it back and keep it from becoming prevalent. Tropical frogs don’t have the seasonality that we have here.”

Chytrid, however, isn’t the only disease threatening amphibians and reptiles in the Northeast.

Scott Buchanan, a herpetologist at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, is particularly concerned about ranavirus, an infectious disease that has caused die-offs of reptiles, amphibians, and fish in 20 states, including box turtles in the Northeast.

In frogs and toads, it especially affects the tadpole stage, causing skin hemorrhages, erratic swimming, buoyancy problems, and the inability to right themselves in the water.

“We know it’s here, it’s in our environment, but if and when it becomes active is hard to predict,” he said.

Buchanan is also tracking a fungal disease in snakes, a herpes virus in turtles, and chytrid in salamanders.

“Salamander chytrid has had devastating effects on salamanders in Europe over the last five to ten years, and it’s considered an eventuality that it will be brought into the U.S. one way or another and run through our salamanders,” he said. “The eastern U.S. is a global hot spot of salamander diversity, and a lot of research is going on now to determine how virulent it is, are particular species susceptible, and what are their natural defenses.”

“What’s notable for us,” Karraker said, “is that it’s usually really hard to change the rules for importing animals for the pet trade, but in 2016, legislation was passed that prevented the import of 201 species of salamanders to prevent the introduction of the disease into the U.S. That’s a landmark bit of legislation to protect our native species.”

Buchanan said it’s up to biologists and others working in area wetlands to follow strict protocols to prevent the spread of the diseases, such as regularly disinfecting their boots, equipment, and tools as they move from site to site around the region.

“We have to be vigilant about potentially transferring diseases from one wetland to another,” he said. “Because we move from one wetland to the next throughout the day and throughout the season, there’s real potential that we could move it around with us, and we often go to the most important sites and monitor the most sensitive species.

“It’s something we take really seriously. We know how quickly things can change here, we know disease pandemics can happen quickly, move around quickly, and cause devastating impacts on populations. And if it doesn’t wipe them out completely, it can take decades for them to recover.”

Todd McLeish, an ecoRI News writer, also runs a wildlife blog.

Tadpoles

Todd McLeish: Beavers continue their long comeback

On this property owned by the Cumberland (R.I.) Land Trust, the organization installed plastic pipes and fencing to address the flooding problems beavers created. There is large beaver lodge in the background.

— Photo by Todd McLeish/ecoRI News)

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

CUMBERLAND, R.I. — At the Cumberland Land Trust’s nature preserve on Nate Whipple Highway, beavers created numerous dams on East Sneech Brook in the years after their arrival in 2014, flooding the property and forcing the organization to detour its hiking trail and build a boardwalk over the wettest areas.

Worse, the flooding killed many trees in the Atlantic white cedar swamp, a rare habitat found at just a few sites in Rhode Island.

It’s a sign that beavers are continuing their comeback in Rhode Island, after being extirpated from the region about 300 years ago.

“There’s a historic culvert on the property, and we noticed it was being plugged up with sticks, but we didn’t know how,” said Randy Tuomisto, president of the land trust. “So we removed the debris, but it subsequently got filled in again. That’s when we noticed small twigs were being cut, telltale signs of a beaver.”

When the white cedar trees began to die, the land trust took action to address the situation. They hired a Massachusetts beaver-control expert to advise them on how to install a series of water-flow devices — a combination of wire fencing and plastic pipes going through the beaver dam that tricks beavers into thinking their dam is still working but which allows the water to flow down the stream unhindered.

While Tuomisto said he believes there are six or eight beavers on the property, along with a 6-foot tall beaver lodge, flooding has been reduced considerably.

“Now they’ve moved down Sneech Brook to other areas in town, to Diamond Hill Reservoir and Abbot Run Valley Stream. And they’re aggressively on the Blackstone River,” he said. “If you take a trip on the Blackstone bike path from Manville to Valley Falls, you’ll see the destruction of all the trees that they felled.”

According to Charles Brown, a wildlife biologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, beavers were probably the first animal to disappear from the New England landscape after the arrival of European settlers. Their fur was in great demand by Native Americans and the new arrivals, and many beaver pelts were shipped to Europe as well. Brown speculates that the animals were extirpated from the area by the end of the 1600s

It took until 1976 for the first ones to return. That’s when a beaver lodge was discovered on the brook that leads into Carbuncle Pond in Coventry.

“They’ve been expanding ever since,” Brown said. “By 1982, my predecessor Charlie Allen did a float trip around Coventry and Foster and found several colonies within that watershed.”

Communities in western Rhode Island have been dealing with the inevitable flooding that beavers create for more than 30 years, but Brown said the animals have only recently arrived in the area of the lower Blackstone, Pawtuxet, and Moshassuck rivers, where municipal public works officials are now being called on to address flooding issues.

“Beavers have been entrenched in Burrillvillle and other parts of western Rhode Island for some time, and the towns there know how to deal with them. But they’re still finding new habitat and expanding elsewhere in the state,” Brown said. “It takes them a while to move around and get established in new areas. They were pioneering into the Cumberland and Lincoln area about 10 years ago, and now they’ve become a regular part of the landscape there.”

Brown had meetings with Cumberland officials to discuss how to address the flooding caused by beavers at Monastery and Diamond Hill State Park, and he often has similar meetings with officials in other communities. He offers counsel about beaver behavior and life cycle and offers advice on how to reduce the flooding using water-control structures and how to protect notable trees with perimeter fencing.

Sometimes Brown advises officials to consider hiring a trapper to capture the beavers during trapping season, which runs from Nov. 1 through mid-March. Rhode Island fur trappers typically harvest about 100 beavers each year, many of which are captured because of nuisance situations.

Despite their reputation for damming streams and flooding roadways, beavers play an important role in the environment by creating habitat upon which many other species depend, from river otters, mink, and muskrats to ducks, dragonflies, and amphibians.

“Great blue herons gravitate toward newly flooded areas with dead standing trees,” Brown said. “But beaver ponds aren’t perpetual. They come and they go. Beavers create a dynamic state of change that can benefit a lot of things.”

According to Ben Goldfarb, author of the award-winning 2018 book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter, beaver ponds also help to recharge aquifers, dissipate floods, filter pollutants, and ease the impact of wildfires. A 2011 report he highlighted estimated that restoring beavers to one river basin in Utah would provide annual benefits valued at tens of millions of dollars.

“Even acknowledging that beavers store water and sustain other creatures is insufficient,” Goldfarb wrote. “Because the truth is that beavers are nothing less than continental-scale forces of nature, in large part responsible for sculpting the land upon which we Americans built our towns and raised our food. Beavers shaped North America’s ecosystems, its human history, its geology. They whittled our world, and they could again — if, that is, we treat them as allies instead of adversaries.”

Tuomisto of the Cumberland Land Trust has a similar perspective.

“We want to keep the water level high enough so the lodge can sustain the beavers through the winter. We would rather live with beavers because they provide an ecological benefit in creating wetlands and wildlife habitat,” he said. “We understand the destruction they cause to neighbors and roadways, and we could have trapped them out. But we’re willing to take the bad with the good.”

A beaver slowly chops down a tree with his teeth

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Invasive Snake Worms Have Jumped Into Rhode Island

Salamander Survey Hopes to Find Conservation Success

DEM Finds Invasive Species in Two Lincoln Ponds

Declining Orchid Populations Need Forested Protection

New Study Finds Balloons Deadliest Trash for Seabirds

Timber Harvesting Project Planned for Arcadia

Fast-Spreading Lotus Takes Over Cranston Lake

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3 new industries for New England?

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Biochar

Herewith three products that might produce some economic and environmental benefits for New England—and the world. One is something called biochar, a charcoal that can increase soil fertility and resistance to some diseases affecting crops and reduce farm runoff into waterways. Perhaps most interesting is that it has been researched as a carbon-sequestration product to fight global warming.

And bioochar can be made from wood chips, as well as straw, husks, landscaping waste, manure and even sewage sludge. It’s being used around the world. New England, much of it being heavily forested, is a very good source of wood chips.

Threads plucked from a Saffron flower to be dried and used for various purposes

Then there’s the possibly highly lucrative potential of growing saffron (a flower that’s a member of the crocus family) in Rhode Island. As the wonderful local nature writer Todd McLeish writes in phys.org:

“Saffron is the world's most expensive spice, selling for about $5,000 per pound at wholesale rates, and 90 percent of the global saffron harvest comes from Iran. But University of Rhode Island agriculture researchers have found that Ocean State farms have the potential to get a share of the market as demand for saffron in the United States grows.’’ Saffron is also used for food coloring and fabric dye (think Buddhist monks’ robes}, and some have touted its uses against cancer, depression and age-related macular degeneration.

“The URI experimental saffron plot yielded 12 pounds of saffron per acre last year, compared to about 5 pounds per acre in {mostly arid} Iran in the second year of growth,’’ Mr. McLeish’s article said.

Another attraction: "It's a fall flowering plant and isn't harvested until late October, so it extends the season for farmers whose growing season is mostly over by now," Rahmatallah Gheshm, a URI postdoctoral researcher who moved to Rhode Island after being a vegetable seed producer and saffron grower in Iran, told Mr. McLeish.

To read the article, please hit this link.

The interior of a quahog shell

Then there’s Brendan Breen, who has figured out how to culture pearls in quahogs, something he learned how to do starting at an aquaculture class at the University of Rhode Island. By the way, reminder: Shellfish aquaculture cleans water. Given that Rhode Island is a major center of the jewelry business, this development is particularly good news.

The Newport Daily News ran a good story a while back on Mr. Breen’s efforts. Hit this link to read it.

Todd McLeish: Could a tough N.E. hard coral help save tropical corals?

Northern Star Coral is found in the waters along the Rhode Island coastline. In this photo, the northern star coral is attached to a rock and near green alga, commonly called sea lettuce, and red alga.

— ecoRI News photo

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The ongoing decline of tropical coral reefs around the world is causing a domino effect that could impact the quarter of marine life that depends on this ecosystem. Reefs are becoming bleached and dying as warming waters force corals to expel the algae that live in their tissues and produce sugars to provide food for the coral.

A Rhode Island scientist is co-leading a collaborative effort to determine if New England’s only hard coral species — a variety that can survive bleaching — could provide a solution to the coral-bleaching problem in the tropics.

Northern Star Coral is found in a range that extends from the Gulf of Mexico to Cape Cod.

“Some corals in Florida can have hundreds to thousands of individuals in one colony, and they can be 10 to 20 feet high. Here in Rhode Island, most of our coral colonies are about the size of a silver dollar. They don’t get big, mainly because they don’t grow during the winter,” said Koty Sharp, Roger Williams University associate professor of biology, marine biology and environmental science. “They’re also not super charismatic; they’re not as visually impressive. But under a microscope we see beautiful structures, tentacles, mouths, different colors.”

Sharp believes that the Northern Star Coral’s adaptability to life in both temperate and tropical waters may provide insight into how corals handle the stress of changing environmental conditions, which could ultimately help tropical corals be resilient to the climate crisis.

“Because the Northern Star Coral lives in this large latitudinal range, individuals of the same species experience really different temperature changes and really different environmental shifts throughout the year,” she said. “They’re exposed to different thermal regimes — drastic shifts up here and stable temperature conditions down south. That gives us the flexibility to learn more about how an individual’s history or experience of temperatures and water-quality conditions may influence the physiology of the organism and how that influences its resilience.”

Sharp and colleagues from throughout the species’ range are conducting a variety of experiments to learn about the symbiotic relationship between algae and Northern Star Coral, as well as investigations of its thermal resilience, tolerance for heavy metals, and how it responds to other threats. Sharp’s focus is on the bacteria that live in and on the coral.

“The peculiar thing about this species is that because it goes through winters where water temperatures drop to 2 degrees Celsius, they go through a period of dormancy in winter when they retract into their skeleton and shut up for the winter,” she said. “We don’t know much about what happens during that period of inactivity, but from our bacterial data, it looks like there is very little regulation of the surface microbiome of the coral in winter, and then in spring there is a reorganization of the microbiome.

“We’re focused on finding the processes that happen so they can have this spring awakening. Every New Englander can relate to this; what do we do to regroup and reboot? That’s the key to coral’s resilience to such extreme temperatures and conditions that are unfavorable to most coral species.”

Sharp and a team of Roger Williams University undergraduates are conducting several laboratory experiments designed to identify the factors that influence coral health and its relationship with its algal partners. They are also using DNA sequencing to identify the types of bacteria that live in the corals, culturing those bacteria, and determining what role each plays.

“We’re finding there are bacteria in and on the coral that we think are very important for defense against marine diseases,” Sharp said. “Some are actively inhibiting the growth of potential coral pathogens.’’

How the results of Sharp’s research can be transferred to helping tropical corals become resilient to warming temperatures is uncertain

“We’re hoping to learn more about how corals recover from disturbance, whether a thermal disturbance like a warming event or a winter event up here in New England,” Sharp said. “My lab is interested in what that recovery looks like from a microbial perspective. But it’s not necessarily the goal to apply microbes from New England to tropical reefs. What’s more broadly useful is identifying the mechanisms they use for recovery.

“If bacteria provide the ability to resist or recover from stress, then what’s the biochemistry of that success? It may be as simple as the production of certain chemicals that kill other pathogens. It may be that there are certain compounds the bacteria make in the springtime that support the growth of the coral host. We just don’t know a lot about the functional significance of associated bacteria, but we’re excited to learn more about the partnership and how it can be translated to corals in the tropics.”

Sharp is pleased with each of the small successes she and her students are achieving, like their recent ability to spawn corals in the lab and create the conditions the larval corals need to settle on a rock and start to grow. This will enable her to grow multiple generations of larval corals that her colleagues around the country can use in their own studies.

“It’s a New England coral that we can learn a lot from about coastal ecosystems in New England, but we also want to translate our findings to the tropics in new and powerful ways,” she said. “We need all the information we can get.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish, a frequent EcoRI News contributor runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: And now, invasive worms

Snake worm

Just hearing the name of one of Rhode Island’s newest invasive species is enough to make local residents queasy: snake worms.

Even though snake worms look similar to the region’s more common earthworms and they’re not much larger, their behavior easily identifies them. Not only do they slither through the grass like snakes, they also jump away if you try to pick them up. In their native Korea and Japan, they are called Asian jumping worms.

“That jumping is how they get away from predators,” said worm expert Josef Gorres, an associate professor of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont who formerly taught at the University of Rhode Island. “It scares them.”

It scares people, too.

“They can be a bit of a pest when you have a Fourth of July party and you have a new patio and they crawl around like snakes,” said Gorres, who has found the worms in his home garden in Vermont. “They make people squeamish.”

This invader has probably been in the United States for more than 50 years. The story told about their arrival involves a shipment of cherry trees from Japan that was sent to Washington, D.C., and the worms were in the soil around the tree roots. Whether that’s true, Gorres isn’t sure, but he believes the worms have probably been in Rhode Island for a decade or more. Residents are just now beginning to notice them.

A survey of URI master gardeners conducted by Gorres in 2015 found snake worms in Slater Park in Pawtucket and in gardens and mulch piles in Barrington, Jamestown, North Kingstown, South Kingstown and Richmond. Today, the worms are common at URI’s East Farm, where master gardeners maintain several gardens and greenhouses, and they have been reported at other scattered locations around the state as well.

Nan Quinlan, who coordinates the master gardeners’ vegetable demonstration garden at East Farm in Kingston, said the worms may have arrived there in deliveries of mulch, soil, or potted plants, or even on the tires and fenders of cars and trucks.

“There are so many possibilities here that I strongly hesitate to blame any one source,” she said. “What makes the most sense is that the Asian worms were already present in the soil at East Farm for a long time and found their way to areas like mulch piles and the compost pile we built and maintain inside the garden.”

Quinlan’s speculation that they may have come from deliveries of soil or potted plants aligns with Gorres’ understanding that they are commonly transported in plant material via the horticulture and nursery industry.

“Folks in horticulture should worry because the worms can negatively affect their stock of plants,” Gorres said. “The castings the worms produce are very granular, very loose, so if anything tries to grow in the castings, the roots will have a hard time getting a foothold. Plants need something more stable to hold onto. It makes the plant wilt and look like they’re experiencing drought symptoms.”

Snake worms can be a problem in forests as well. They consume the top layer of the soil and dead leaves — called the duff layer — where the seeds of plants germinate.

“Once that layer is gone, the plants don’t have a place to put their seeds where they will survive until the following year,” Gorres said. “You end up with a forest with fewer understory plants, and all that’s left are saplings of trees that deer will feed on. The end result is a lack of regeneration of the forest.”

This concern is also true of the other earthworms found in the Northeast, all of which are non-native and could be impacting forests in a similar way. Any native earthworms in the region were crushed by glaciers during the last ice age. Most of the worm species found in New England today arrived following European colonization of the area.

“We’re now experiencing the second wave of earthworm invasions,” Gorres said. “One of the things I’m especially worried about is that the loose castings will make the soil highly erodible. Castings from European worms stick together. The soil on a slope where snake worms are found might easily erode away.”

To reduce the likelihood of the spread of snake worms, Gorres suggested that consumers ask vendors selling plants, mulch, or soil whether the worms have been found in their products.

“They’ll probably say they haven’t been, but if they’re truthful they may say it’s the new normal, which it may be,” he said.

Gorres is studying several varieties of insect-killing fungi that may control the worms.

David Gregg, director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, cautioned that those investigating whether they have snake worms in their gardens shouldn’t confuse them with worm snakes, which are native to New England and may be Rhode Island’s rarest snake. Worm snakes grow only about 10 inches long and may look like a large scaly worm.

“Worm snakes = good, snake worms = bad,” he wrote in an email.

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Todd McLeish: Looking at sea life's sensitivity to underwater electric cables

Skates apparently move differently than they usually do near electromagnetic fields.

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Little is known about how marine life will respond to the electromagnetic fields emanating from the spiderweb of cables carrying electricity from the Block Island Wind Farm and the many other offshore wind-power installations planned for the East Coast. But a new series of studies by a team of oceanographers at the University of Rhode Island suggests that some organisms will definitely be impacted.

“The concern is that DC [direct] currents generate permanent electromagnetic fields, and we don’t really know how organisms will relate to them,” said John King, a professor at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography. “We know that some organisms, like sharks and skates, are sensitive to these things. So the question becomes, if you build offshore power facilities, will migratory organisms cross the cables or not. Will it affect eels that migrate to the Sargasso Sea or lobsters that have an onshore-offshore annual migration?”

To find out, King and postdoctoral research fellow Zoe Hutchison conducted a series of field experiments around the Cross Sound Cable that carries electricity from New Haven, Conn., to Long Island, N.Y. They attached acoustic tags to skates and lobsters and placed them in an enclosure around the cable. An array of hydrophones in the enclosure detected the animals’ movements. Additional animals were placed in a second enclosure farther from the cable to compare the results.

“We definitely saw effects in behavior in both lobsters and skates, though it was more dramatic in the skates,” said King, who serves on the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council’s Habitat Advisory Board for offshore wind development. “The skates liked to spend time in the areas that had the highest EMFs. Their swimming behavior was definitely altered as they approached the cable. We didn’t see any evidence that a single cable is a migratory barrier, but they could definitely detect it and reacted to it.”

“The skates moved slower around the cable but also moved more often and covered a longer distance,” Hutchison said. “They did a lot more turning, like an exploratory behavior, as if they were looking for food.”

Sharks and skates have a sensory ability to detect the electromagnetic fields (EMF) generated by the circulatory system of their prey, according to King, and they may also use it to find mates.

“They might think the cable indicates a food source, so they spent time around the cable thinking they’re going to get fed,” he said.

The experiment found that lobsters moved less freely around the cable, but the electromagnetic fields didn’t prevent them from crossing it.

“The lobster response was much more subtle than the skates,” Hutchison said. “They had an increased exploratory behavior, too, but it wasn’t as pronounced as the skates. We know that spiny lobsters in the Caribbean use the Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves and to figure out where to go, so we postulate that American lobsters may have a similar ability to detect magnetic fields.”

King and Hutchison will conduct a similar study with migratory eels this fall, to assess how they are affected by the cables. (They attempted it last year, but little electricity was traveling through the cable at the time.)

Rather than placing the eels in an enclosure around the cable like they did with the skates and lobsters, they will release tagged eels to see how they behave as they cross the cable on their way to the Sargasso Sea, where they spawn.

“Previous studies have shown that eels slow down and investigate every cable they cross,” King said. “One study found that when eels had to cross multiple cables, they slowed down every time. So we wonder if they have a whole bunch of cables to cross, does it slow them down enough that they never get to the Sargasso Sea.”

The researchers noted that just because the behavior of the animals they tested was affected by the cables, it doesn’t necessarily mean they were negatively impacted by them. They are, however, worried about the cumulative impacts of the electromagnetic fields from the numerous cables that will likely be installed for many offshore wind turbines in the future.

“There’s going to be hundreds or thousands of turbines off the East Coast, so it would be nice to understand these effects and how it translates into impacts before they get built,” King said. “Right now the government is pushing full speed ahead to get these things built, and I don’t think they really care that much about their impacts. The environmental reviews are being done really fast.”

King is also worried that the results of his studies are being downplayed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which funded the research, because of political pressure.

“They hired a consulting company to produce a public document about our studies, and they minimized EMF as a concern and misinterpreted our study,” he said. “We didn’t say that we saw something that needed to be addressed immediately, but we also didn’t say that what we saw is OK and not to worry about it.”

King believes more studies need to be done before any conclusions can be drawn about the effect of electromagnetic fields from power cables on marine life.

“From a marine spatial planning context, it probably makes sense to have cable corridors rather than randomly distribute the cables all over, and that would probably have different results than studies of just a single cable. So we still have some questions to answer.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.