marine debris

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Goose Barnacles

While many animals die cruel deaths due to plastic in the marine environment, goose barnacles (Lepas spp.) thrive. In order to reach adulthood and leave their easily-eaten planktonic larval stage behind, goose barnacles have to cement themselves onto floating debris in the ocean. Floating debris used to be rare. Then goose barnacles depended on encounters with wood, pumice, coconuts, sea turtles or whales. Now discarded milk jugs, laundry detergent bottles and flip flops are readily available as rafts for goose barnacles. The more stuff floating in the ocean, the greater the chance of a goose barnacle making it past its larval salad days and to reproductive maturity.

Barnacles are crustaceans like crabs, shrimps and lobsters. Adults develop hard shells that enclose soft body parts. Feather-like appendages called cirri fan out from the shells and grab edible bits from the water. Some barnacles, the ones along the coast on rocks and dock pilings, are sedentary. Goose barnacles attach to floating substrates with their tough, orange stalks and travel on ocean currents. The ride ends when their raft washes ashore.

barnacle goose

You may think the goose barnacle got its name because it resembles a goose, but the story is better than that. In the 12th century, Gerald of Wales, the Archdeacon of Breton, claimed that certain geese did not hatch from eggs like other birds, but hatched from nests of barnacles attached to floating wood. Thus, these geese were considered seafood and could be eaten on fast days. Maybe it was a ploy, but in County Kerry, Ireland, Catholics ate goose on Fridays until the 18th century. Today we have a barnacle named after a goose and a goose named after a barnacle.

Gerald of Wales could have just eaten barnacles. It may not have occurred to him, but they are a delicacy in Spain and Portugal. Simmer goose barnacles in salt water, sauté in olive oil, add lemon, cream and scallions, and you have barnacles fit for a feast-day.

I got to the part of the cooking video where the sizzling barnacles were splashed with sherry before wondering how much plastic a bowl of today’s barnacles might contain. Barnacles are indiscriminate eaters. Their feathery legs pull in anything that’s the right size: zooplankton, detritus, plastic. Plastic that leaks into the ocean eventually fragments into tiny pieces that are too small for a barnacle to attach to but just the right size for a barnacle to eat. And they do eat these fragments. Some of this plastic is excreted, some sheds off as they molt and some plastic remains packaged in succulent flesh until it heads up the food chain in a tasty bowl of barnacles or as a meal for a fish.

barnacle raft

Does eating plastic harm goose barnacles? Based on frequent, personal observations of gaggles of goose barnacles on plastic trash that washes ashore, no. You may think an ocean with more goose barnacles is a good thing. It’s never that simple though. When barnacles cement themselves onto a plastic fishing buoy, they turn the slick, inhospitable buoy into a more livable habitat for other animals. The presence of goose barnacles enables other species, even those that normally stay in the shallow end of the ocean, to climb aboard the buoy and ride. With lots of barnacle-covered plastic traveling the seas, there’s more opportunity for species to travel to new parts of the world. A plastic trash raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was found with crabs from the west Pacific as well as species from the east Pacific. These animals would normally be separated by thousands of miles of ocean. More ocean plastic means more misplaced species that could become nuisance exotic species. If exotic species thrive, they can eat more, reproduce faster, outcompete local species and wreak havoc on on the ecosystem.

This is something to think about next time you’re at the beach and come across plastic trash weighed down with goose barnacles. Grab a bag from the BlueTube at the beach. Pick up plastic and throw it away. By depriving goose barnacles of a chance to settle down, you may may prevent an invasion of foreign crabs. Add your bags to the BlueTube so others can do the same. If your beach doesn’t have a BlueTube, sponsor one!

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Mr. Trash Wheel

Baltimore Harbor bustled with shipyards, canneries and steel manufacturing for most of its history. Heavy industry disappeared by the 1970’s, leaving behind a blighted waterfront with empty warehouses, parking lots and not much else. In the 1980’s Baltimore Harbor was redeveloped. Today it is home to restaurants, museums, shops and parks that attract 10 million visitors each year.

Baltimore Harbor was transformed into a thriving, beautiful destination, except after heavy rains. That’s when the detritus of modern, urban life washed into the Harbor. Plastic bottles, styrofoam containers and cigarette butts bobbed on the surface, giving the water a walkable appearance on bad days.

John Keller was director of Baltimore Maritime Museum at the time and would look out from his office on an old Coast Guard ship docked in the Harbor. After every rain, he would watch trash wash in, and then see the tourists react to the trash with disgust. It was an ugly problem, and Keller thought hard about solving it.

Baltimore City had skimmer boats that crisscrossed the Harbor and scooped up trash. These helped, but Keller knew that to make a noticeable difference trash would have to be captured where it was most concentrated. The trash did not come, as many believed, from careless boaters and visitors to the waterfront. It came from a much wider area. Jones Falls River is the largest tributary to Baltimore Harbor. It drains an area of 40 square miles of rural countryside, at it’s outer reaches, to heavily urbanized land closer to the Harbor. Keller had been to the mouth of Jones Falls River during a rainstorm and knew that this was the place to intercept trash.

In 2008, Keller installed a prototype trash wheel in the mouth of the Jones Falls River. A floating boom stretched across the river and funneled trash towards his invention. Water flow turned a paddle wheel, which was attached to a metal rake and a conveyor belt. The rake captured debris and deposited it on the slowly moving conveyor. The conveyor lifted the trash and emptied it into a dumpster on an adjacent barge. When full, the dumpster of trash was brought to a waste-to-energy plant and incinerated.

It worked. The harbor was visibly cleaner. However, the amount of trash that flowed down Jones Falls had been vastly underestimated. A bigger, stronger, faster version was needed, but this took money, which the City of Baltimore did not have. Adam Lindquist, director of the Healthy Harbor Initiative stepped in to help raise the funds. His organization’s goal is to make the Harbor swimmable and fishable by 2020, and the trash wheel would help.

A permanent trash wheel was installed in 2014. It works the same way the prototype did, but better. This trash wheel has solar panels to move the conveyor when water flow is sluggish. It can be operated remotely, which is nice in a storm. Perhaps the biggest improvement to the new trash wheel is its big pair of googly eyes. The googly eyes transformed the trash wheel into Mr. Trash Wheel, and he quickly became a media star. Now thousands of people from around the world follow Mr. Trash Wheel on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. There is even a live feed so fans can check Mr. Trash Wheel’s progress from afar.

A year ago, Mr. Trash Wheel was joined by a long-lashed female friend on Harris Creek, Professor Trash Wheel. Harris Creek is fed by storm drains. Plastic trash that slips through these drains is nabbed by Professor Trash Wheel before it enters the Harbor.

The trash wheel duo is making a huge, measurable improvement: 1.8 million pounds of trash have been removed since 2014. Keller and Lindquist say trash wheels are an immediate solution to an immediate situation. They are not, though, the answer to our ocean plastic problems. BlueTube is not the answer either, but like trash wheels, it helps right now. When we learn how to use plastic wisely, we can solve our ocean plastic problem. In the meantime, we do what we can. Grab a bag from the BlueTube at your beach. Pick up plastic. Throw it away. Add your clean, used bags so others can help too.

 

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In Support of Drinking Fountains

When Perrier introduced bottled water to the United States in the 1970’s, many people thought it was a joke. Why would anyone spend money on water when it flowed out of our taps for free? Perrier advertising claims it’s sexy, but who buys that? Apparently, plenty of people do. Today the average American drinks 39.3 gallons of bottled water per year. Sales of bottled water climbed 9% from 2014 to 2015 and this upward trajectory shows no signs of bottoming out. Chris Hogan, of the International Bottled Water Association, says that bottled water has an “undeniable appeal.” He doesn’t claim bottled water is sexy, but he does say it’s healthy, convenient, reliable, safe and has zero calories.

Yet our tap water is safe. We have strict national standards for contaminants in public drinking water thanks to the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. All consumers of publicly supplied water are mailed annual water quality reports so we know exactly what is in our water. Americans should not take clean, safe drinking water for granted. Compared to the rest of the world, America’s tap water is remarkably safe. One out of four people in the world doesn’t have a safe source of water. This one-fourth has to drink bottled water or risk coming down with a host of nasty diseases including diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and polio.

Tap water is healthy, and it also, of course it, has zero calories. Tap water used to be convenient and reliable too. We used to be able to find clean, working water fountains in public places. But as bottled water has become the norm, maintenance on water fountains is no longer a priority. Water fountains fall into disrepair and are removed rather than fixed. Today, municipalities and businesses often don’t install water fountains in new parks, public spaces and stadiums, and this is neither convenient nor safe.

In 2007, the University of Central Florida built a 45,000 seat football stadium without any drinking fountains. Why let fans drink for free when concessions can sell bottles of water for $3? The stadium was packed for its inaugural football game in September. It was 97 degrees, and the concessions ran out of bottled water. Eighteen people were rushed to the hospital with heat exhaustion, and many more were treated by medics in the stadium. It took a lot of angry fans and students, but now the UCF stadium has water fountains.

If public drinking fountains become clean, working and plentiful again, the advantages of bottled water over tap water will disappear. After all, the disadvantage of bottled water over top water is clear enough - the plastic bottles. Three hundred million people in the United States drink a bottle of water every day. Some of these bottles and caps are recycled, but the vast majority of plastic we discard (79%) piles up in our landfills and natural environments.

Empty bottles and caps everywhere, including on our beaches and in our oceans. What’s a beach lover to do? Bring along a reusable water bottle filled with good, clean tap water. Ask your town to make public water fountains a priority again. Pick up those discarded bottles and caps next time you’re at the beach and keep them out of the ocean. BlueTube can help.

 

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Say No to Straws!

There are so many things we do automatically every day. Brush our teeth, feed the dog, put cream into our coffee, and put a straw in our drink. Wait! Back up a minute. Our teeth need to be brushed, the dog needs to be fed, and coffee without cream is not acceptable. But the straw – that is a different story.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of restaurants instantly give out straws with their drinks. They either place them on the table or pop them into your drink wearing a paper hat from the remnants of the wrapper. You’ll use that straw for maybe 45 minutes and then it will be around for several hundred years. As consumers and citizens of Earth, we have to break the automaticity of straws.

There are several organizations that encourage us to lose this wasteful habit – Skip the Straw and The Last Plastic Straw, are a couple. They all have the same message – we don’t need plastic straws and they are harmful to the environment and the creatures in it.

Make a difference – commit to not using plastic straws. Tell your waiter or waitress – No thank you. If they put a wrapped straw on the table, tell them you won’t be using it and tell them why. Ask your favorite eateries to stop providing straws automatically. This small action from many people can make a huge difference in getting plastic straws off the Top 10 list of marine debris. We can do this.

 

Lori Wnek’s education about environmental issues started at a young age. Her mother was the environmental writer for the local paper in New Hampshire. She quickly embraced a respect for nature and all its inhabitants and an awareness about reducing humans’ impact on both. Lori lives a short walk to the Atlantic Ocean and firmly believes that small actions by individuals have the largest impact over time.

 

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Coquina

Coquina (Donax variabilis) is a beautiful clam common on the beaches in eastern United States and the Gulf of Mexico. The clam varies in color and can be found in different shades of pink, yellow, purple and blue. Some have sunburst patterns, and some don’t. You can find coquina in the swash zone — the intertidal section of beach where waves swash back and forth. There coquina live their lives eating algae and detritus. They have one straw-like siphon, which sucks in water with food, and a second siphon that spits out water minus the food. The clams have a muscular foot that digs into the sand and keeps its owner from being washed away. By raising its foot, coquina can ride the waves further up the beach or back towards the ocean, all the while staying in the swash zone where the eating is good.

That’s coquina the clam, but there’s also coquina the rock, and it’s not a complete coincidence that the clam and rock share the same name. Coquina clamshells plus the hard bits of other marine invertebrates that lived thousands of years ago form coquina rock. When coquina clams die, their shells sink to the bottom. These shells accumulated under water for thousands of years. During the last ice age, which ended around 20,000 years ago, sea level around the globe was almost 400’ lower than it is today. Layers of shell several feet thick were exposed to the air, covered with dirt and vegetation, and rained on. Rain forms a weak acid as it percolates through soil and vegetation. This acid dissolved some of the shells and worked like glue to cement shell fragments together and form the soft and crumbly coquina rock we find on the beach today.

Spaniards started building the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine in 1672 from coquina rock. They weren’t sure how coquina would compare to the harder rocks they were used to building with in their native Spain. The Castillo was bombarded by English cannonballs in 1702 and again in 1740. The soft coquina absorbed the blows, and the fort was merely dented rather than razed. Structures made of hard rock can shatter when barraged by cannonballs. Thus the Spanish held onto the fort and Florida until 1763 when the State was ceded to Britain by treaty, not by cannonball.

If you’re interested, pick up coquina clams at the beach for a closer look. You’ll see the colors, maybe the leg, and the beginnings of the material that so masterly dealt with British cannonballs. And if at the same time you see plastic, pick that up too. Grab a bag from the BlueTube at your beach, pick up plastic and throw it away. Coquina belongs. Plastic doesn’t.