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Archives Spring 2002

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Photo of seagull
Photo by Will Owens

Carolina

on the

Coast

by Brandee Hayhurst

The North Carolina coast brings together people with passions — for marine research, coastal preservation, serving the community and life on the water — in a way the traditional campus classroom cannot. Three graduate students in the Royster Society of Fellows — Eleanor Camann, Sarah Carr and Jonathan Grabowski — are taking advantage of this idyllic setting and studying at the UNC-Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences.

At the institute, students and faculty in biological, chemical, physical and geological oceanography regularly collaborate on research projects. “Marine sciences is inherently interdisciplinary,” said Carr, a second year master’s student and physical oceanographer. “One of the neatest things around here is it’s one of the major conglomerations of marine scientists.”

Located in Morehead City, the institute conveniently sits on the water and allows access to isolated coastal, near coastal, Gulf Stream and estuarine marine environments. The prime location also allows fellows to work with scientists from the Duke Marine Lab, the North Carolina State University and Cartaret Community College Center for Marine Sciences & Technology, the State of North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries and the National Marine Fisheries Service Southeastern Laboratory. Fellow marine sciences fans are sharing projects, information and even boats and All Terrain Vehicles.

After a hard day of research, the fellows harvest some extra perks. “I learned how to catch food,” said Grabowski, a doctoral student writing his dissertation in marine ecology. “I enjoy spending time on the water. It’s definitely a side benefit to this career.”

Graduate students have a symbiotic relationship with the community as well. Their research tells state and local organizations which housing developments are most susceptible to strong storms, or how to preserve commercial fishes.

“The community is interested in what we do,” said Camann, a doctoral student and coastal geologist. “Most of our information is free and open to the public.”

Camann, Carr and Grabowski work in different fields, but together they explore how the coast affects our lives and how our lives affect the coast. They are learning the value of a collaborative scientific community, firsthand experience in the field and a chance to add to a body of research. The Fountain invites you to read each of their stories below.

Weathering Storms

Eleanor “Ellie” Camann knows how hurricanes and big storms affect the coast of North Carolina and ultimately the lives of those who live there. A doctoral student in the Department of Geological Sciences, Camann is surveying Shackleford Banks, an eight-mile strip of the Cape Lookout National Seashore. “I’m hoping to find that you can use the dunes to predict how the area will be affected during storms,” Camann explains.

Shackleford Banks is a well-protected island where dunes transform slowly and last longer than those in highly populated areas on the coast. Despite the relative security, Shackleford Banks is a lesson on how a severe storm can dramatically affect people’s lives. A large hurricane in 1899 sent the island’s small fishing village sailing for the safety of the mainland. About 120 wild horses are the only residents left on the island today. “It’s something the whole society has to deal with,” Camann said.

Photo by Will Owens
Ellie Camann surveys Shackleford Banks, N.C.

Today the sea level continues to rise as more people are moving to the coast. This provides the opportunity for hurricanes and other “high-wind, high-wave” events to wreak even more havoc. “In an ideal world, I wish no one would build at the beach,” Camann admits. But her research will help beach lovers avoid building “in places that are really risky,” she said.

But as most coastal residents know, a large hurricane isn’t necessary to change the structure of the beach. “Every day I go out there, it’s different,” Camann said. For a long-term perspective, Camann examines U.S. Geological Survey data and aerial photos to see how the shoreline changed in the last several decades.

In turn, Camann will share her findings with the National Park Service. The park service does not have enough funding or workers to monitor the constantly changing, vast space of protected coastal areas.

“It’s nice to be able to help them out,” Camann said. Her affiliation with the National Park Service began when she spent a summer working on Cape Cod collecting fees at the beach. After Camann finished her bachelor’s degree in Foreign Service at Georgetown, the park service offered her the opportunity to educate the public about the coast as an interpretive ranger, and so her interest in marine geology began.

Camann worked as a DJ for a radio station in Rochester, New York, but couldn’t forget her experiences working for the park service. So after working for two years as a travel agent in Austin, Camann enrolled at the University of Texas-Austin for a second bachelor’s degree, this time in geology.

After graduating in Austin, Camann received a Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster, Jr. Fellowship and began her studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Camann looks forward to graduating so she can do what she truly loves: teaching. Camann teaches physical geology at the local Cartaret Community College. She also volunteers for a reading program at the local middle school.

Camann said many of her role models, including her father, have been teachers. “To teach a full class, the lectures and the labs, is a good experience,” Camann said. “Good teachers have had a big influence on me.”

Photo by Will Owens
Sarah Carr spends as many as 12 hours a day taking measurements from a boat or diving to maintain equipment.

Riding Waves

Sarah Carr puts the physical into physical oceanography. In the summers and falls, Carr spends as many as 12 hours a day taking measurements from a boat or diving to maintain equipment. Carr is a second-year master’s student in the Department of Marine Sciences and a Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Fellow. Along with another graduate student and adviser Rick Luettich, Carr is collaborating with Duke Marine Lab biologists to study the selective tidal stream transport of spawning blue crabs.

To keep pace with the living habits of blue crabs, Carr often stays on the boat overnight. “We’d work anywhere from about 10 at night until 10 the next morning,” she said.

Carr said other universities conduct similar studies, but not in such difficult field conditions with currents of three to four knots.

Selective tidal stream transport, in simple terms, describes how many marine animals rise up from the ocean floor to ride currents and get where they need to be. During the day, the migrating blue crabs remain relatively stationary, resting at the bottom of the ocean. During the night, the female crabs ascend when currents are favorable, ride out of the estuary, and spawn in the coastal ocean. Mapping the migration of blue crabs could help local organizations decide which coastal areas should be protected.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Carr
A scientist attaches an ultrasonic transmitter to a female blue crab for tracking.

Carr investigates this phenomenon with Conductivity Temperature & Depth (CTD) devices and Current Meters, which measure water qualities and tidal currents. Crabs can choose to ride different layers of the water column that travel at different speeds, she explains. Meanwhile, biologists attach a “pinger”— or ultrasonic transmitter — to the back of a female blue crab and throw it into the water. Carr and the other scientists then spend the night following the sound of “pings” in her lab’s 25-foot motorboat.

This collaboration between Carolina and Duke, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, has been going on since the mid-1990s. For physical oceanographers and biologists to work together is a fairly new concept, Carr explains. After graduation, Carr plans to continue working to “incorporate the biology into physical models.”

Carr made a roundabout trip to physical oceanography, but always had a dual interest in physical science and life on the water. “I got very interested in physical oceanography after learning how to sail,” she said. Carr was a deckhand on schooners in the Great Lakes and a watch leader on a training ship in New Zealand. With an ambassadorial scholarship from the Rotary Club, she received a second bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Carr’s first bachelor’s degree was in economics at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where she also took many geology classes.

“I enjoyed the spatial aspects of geology,” Carr said. “I enjoy that same aspect of physical oceanography.”

When Carr isn’t busy taking measurements in the field or analyzing data, she takes advantage of opportunities to connect with the community. In her spare time, Carr tutors a reading partner at the local Morehead Middle School and sails near the historic town of Beaufort with members of the Friends of North Carolina Maritime Museum Traditional Small Craft Association. The association is dedicated to maintaining sharpies, a traditional fishermen’s workboat.

“Beaufort likes to have workboats out there, so people can see what it looked like 100 years ago,” Carr said. “I like the fact that you are able to use the wind, this free commodity, to get where you want to go.”

Rebuilding Reefs

Jonathan Grabowski wants to benefit two natural enemies: the fish and the fisherman. To do this, Grabowski rebuilt some of North Carolina’s disappearing oyster reefs to see how marine organisms, including fish, move into and use the habitat.

Profiting adversaries is nothing new to him. “Fisheries are a really natural bridge between ecology and economics,” said Grabowski, a Paul Hardin Dissertation Fellow in the Royster Society of Fellows and doctoral student in the Ecology Curriculum.

The fishing industry has traditionally treated its catch as a “single species resource to exploit,” Grabowski explains. He is testing whether restoring oyster habitats will produce more fish and increase their value for commercial and recreational fishermen.

How could a little bivalve do so much? Living oysters build on top of a pile of dead oyster shells, creating reefs much like tropical coral do. Oyster reefs provide a home to shrimp, crabs, fish and other marine organisms. They also provide food needed by predators, filter and clean water and stabilize surrounding habitats.

Photo by Will Owens
Jonathan Grabowski at the docks behind the UNC-Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences.

The Neuse River was once full of immense reefs, but overharvesting diminished them dramatically. Since then, “The recovery has been impeded by a whole suite of things,” Grabowski said. “This includes degraded habitat quality, increased incidence of disease and low-oxygen stress, all off which negatively affect reproductive output.”

So Grabowski decided to help out in 1997 by building some oyster reefs of his own. With money from the state and a fellowship from the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, he and other scientists began tackling the immense task of dumping 25 tons of oyster shells in 12 locations. The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries assisted by providing the dead shell and barges to transport the shell to the field site. “In an ideal world we would have done a lot more,” Grabowski said. “But we couldn’t have done much without them.”

Building the first 12 oyster reefs, it turned out, had quite a learning curve. “It took us a solid month to do it, and it took a lot of help,” Grabowski said. In 2000, the scientists were able to build eight oyster reefs in two days.

For his experiments, Grabowski planted dead shell in three intertidal landscapes — in between sea grass beds and salt marsh, on mud flats, and next to salt marsh isolated from sea grass beds — to see how different landscapes affected marine organisms’ use of the reefs. “What’s going on in the oyster reef might depend totally on what’s next to it,” Grabowski explained. The hard work paid off when juvenile oysters and fish started moving in. Using simulated environments at the lab, Grabowski later investigated predator-prey interactions of the organisms that live in oyster reefs.

In his final year as a doctoral student, Grabowski is analyzing fish and invertebrate use of the reefs and the estimated value they add to the revenues of commercial fisheries. Grabowski has the help of his Paul Hardin Dissertation Fellowship to do just that.

“The fellowship has given me the opportunity to concentrate on writing my dissertation,” Grabowski said. “In addition, participating in the Royster Society of Fellows has broadened my perspective on graduate school at UNC. Collectively, these aspects of the fellowship leave me incredibly grateful for such a wonderful experience.”

In addition to a rewarding experience at the University and the institute, Grabowski said he enjoys collaborating with the Shellfish Rehabilitation Program and local fishing clubs on his dissertation. “I like the experience of working on fishery issues and interacting with the fishing community,” he said.

This summer, Grabowski looks forward to teaching a class in underwater research at Shoals Marine Lab in Maine. He was a teaching assistant for Carolina last year and also has experience in the icier waters of the world. Grabowski taught in Maine and conducted research in Alaska and in Antarctica at McMurdo Station.

Grabowski hopes to continue working in a place like the marine institute after graduation, where he can collaborate with a research community, teach small classes out in the field, and advise students. After all, it was a course with his adviser as an undergraduate at Duke University that inspired Grabowski to become a marine scientist. Grabowski said ‘barrier island ecology’ made him think, “This is exactly what I’m going to do.”

 

© 2002, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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